Critical Writing

The nugget for this week dealt with our reading in deMarrais and Lapan (2004) on the power of narrative. I had a hard time reading Dr. Johnson-Bailey's chapter for many reasons. 

First of which, although I was excited by the aspect of hearing how narrative could play a part in understanding study participants, the work quickly devolved into a critique of how no narrative can be truly representative of the selected participants because of the differences between the studied to the studier.

It seemed as though no matter who the studier might be, to Dr. Johnson-Bailey, there could be no valid analysis or study because of the many different variables that make up the studier's personality, perspectives etc. The second frustration I found was that by the end of the chapter, Dr. Johnson-Bailey wrote that it's the researchers task to walk as fine a line as possible and create a study that is as close as possible to be valid. 

She writes, "but then there are those fortuitous instances when all the margins are traversed, the inevitable biases contained, and the fortunate story, told well, reverberates universally" (p. 138). This tends to undermine everything she wrote in the chapter about how bias would inevitably be a part of the work and undermine it's usefulness. It's a very negative view of the potential research opportunities provided to researcher. 

Dr. Liang discussed how this is typical of most critiques, and that critiques are often much easier to write. Knowing this provided me a footnote of understanding to the entire article.