ABSTRACT
As a prologue to this story about stories, it is important to briefly outline the philosophical foundations that underpin narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry typically falls within an interpretivist paradigm characterized by ontological relativism and epistemological social constructionism. A relativist perspective asserts that reality outside of the physical world, that is, psychosocial reality, is multiple, malleable and mind-dependent. Social constructionism proffers that knowledge is constructed through cultural auspices and relational interactions rather than something that is objectively observed, discovered or found (Burr, 2015). We are always intimately a part of any understanding we have of what counts as knowledge; there can be no theory-free knowledge (Smith & Deemer, 2000). These assumptions clash with those of the positivist paradigm of the natural sciences which is underpinned by ontological realism and the belief that, with sound methods, we can accurately and unbiasedly discover an objective reality (Angen, 2000).
