ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, the use of narratives in qualitative research has steadily increased. This growth can be primarily attributed to the accessibility of narratives to both researchers and consumers. Because stories are the familiar and are easily understood as the discourse used to frame our everyday lives, the method has universal appeal. Researchers are attracted to the seemingly uncomplicated nature of narrative methodology as a means of collecting data. Readers are drawn to narratives for the unobtrusively intimate format and the ease of understanding. Tappan and Brown (1991) concluded that narratives are the preferred way of communicating when we must tell “the way it really happened” (p. 174). They further posited that disclosures related in narratives are told with moral authority and are representative of the cognitive, affective, and conative dimensions of the experiences.
