[2] Narrative inquiry uses field texts, such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos (and other artifacts), and life experience, as the units of analysis to research and understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.
[4] Narrative inquiry challenges the philosophy behind quantitative/grounded data-gathering and questions the idea of "objective" data; however, it has been criticized for not being "theoretical enough.
[8] Narrative case studies were used by Sigmund Freud in the field of psychology, and biographies were used in sociology in the early twentieth century.
Philosopher Andy Clark speculates that the ways in which minds deal with narrative (second-hand information) and memory (first-hand perception) are cognitively indistinguishable.
[citation needed] More recently, there has been a "narrative turn" in social science in response to the criticism against the paradigmatic methods of research.
[11] This narrative approach captures the emotion of the moment described, rendering the event active rather than passive, infused with the latent meaning being communicated by the teller.
[26] Story collecting as a form of narrative inquiry allows the research participants to put the data into their own words and reveal the latent "why" behind their assertions.