2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this methods paper, the development and utility of composite narratives will be explored. Composite narratives, which involve combining aspects of multiple interviews into a single narrative, are a relatively modern methodology used in the qualitative research literature for several purposes: to do justice to complex accounts while maintaining participant anonymity, summarize data in a more engaging personal form and retain the human face of the data, illustrate specific aspects of the research findings, enhance the transferability of research findings by invoking empathy, illuminate collective experiences, and enhance research impact by providing findings in a manner more accessible to those outside of academia. Composite narratives leverage the power of storytelling, which has shown to be effective in studies of neurology and psychology; i.e., since humans often think and process information in narrative structures, the information conveyed in story form can be imprinted more easily on readers’ minds or existing schema.
Engineering education researchers have increasingly begun using narrative research methods. Recently, researchers have begun exploring composite narratives as an approach to enable more complex and nuanced understandings of engineering education while mitigating potential issues around the confidentiality of participants. Because this is a relatively new methodology in higher education more broadly and in engineering education specifically, more examples of how to construct and utilize composite narratives in both research and practice are needed. This paper will share how we created a composite narrative from interviews we collected for our work so that others can adapt this methodology for their research projects. The paper will also discuss ways we modified and enhanced these narratives to connect research to practice and impact engineering students. This approach involved developing probing questions to stimulate thinking, learning, and discussion in academic and industrial educational settings.
We developed the composite narratives featured in this paper from fifteen semi-structured critical incident interviews with engineering managers about their perceptions of adaptability. The critical incidents shared were combined to develop seven composite narratives reflecting real-life situations to which engineers must adapt in the workplace. These scenarios, grounded in the data, were taken directly to the engineering classroom for discussion with students on how they would respond and adapt to the presented story.
In this paper, we detail our process of creating one composite narrative from the broader study and its associated probing questions for research dissemination in educational settings. We present this detailed account of how one composite narrative was constructed to demonstrate the quality and trustworthiness of the composite narrative methodology and assist in its replication by other scholars. Further, we discuss the benefits and limitations of this methodology, highlighting the parts of the data brought into focus using this method and how that contrasts with an inductive-deductive approach to qualitative coding also taken in this research project.