“THICK” NARRATIVES: MINING IMPLICIT, OBLIQUE, AND DEEPER UNDERSTANDINGS IN VIDEOTAPED RESEARCH DATA

We report upon our adoption of Clifford Geertz’s thick description and Jerome Bruner’s narrative approach, which served as an analytic frameworks for analyzing, representing, and disseminating over 60 hours of documentary research footage. Over a seven-year period, we invited 20 international scholars in the field of the social sciences and humanities to document their philosophies on videotape. Although these 20 scholars work across diverse fields and in different locations around the world, their cultural and academic experiences and their unique philosophies may be viewed as coalescing into a single, interdisciplinary research community within the wider field of qualitative research. Through the course of narrative analysis, postmodern themes such as poverty, social inequality, classism, oppression, and colonization emerged from the videotaped dialogues. Our work may serve as an effective model for other researchers seeking to employ qualitative research methods in the analysis, representation, and dissemination of videotaped data.