Taking the Narrative Turn: The Value of Stories in Leisure Research

Storytelling is a genuinely human way of making meaning out of our lived experiences. With this mind, narrative inquiry – that is, doing research with firstperson accounts of experience – offers leisure researchers a meaningful way to produce knowledge that deepens and enlarges our understanding of leisure experiences. While our field is becoming increasingly comfortable with a variety of interpretive approaches to conducting research, it has largely ignored narrative as a method of inquiry. The purpose of this paper, is to provide a general orientation to narrative inquiry and underscore its relevance to leisure research. To achieve this aim, the author defines narrative and its elements, discusses the association between narrative explanation and meaning, outlines the aims of narrative inquiry, explains the fundamentals of conducting a narrative inquiry, and explains why it ought to appeal to researchers in leisure studies. In doing so, he encourages leisure researchers to take the “narrative turn” and add to a body literature that spans across so many academic fields.