Most qualitative research involves self-report – asking participants to share their thoughts, feelings, experiences and motivations in their own words (e.g. in an interview or focus group). In this short piece, we introduce a method that involves something radically different – fictional story writing where participants write a short story (of around – ideally – several hundred words) in response to a prompt created by the researcher. The method in question is known as story completion and has a long history in clinical assessment and quantitative research, where responses are scored using quantitative coding systems and the interest is in the meanings presumed to lie behind the stories and what these reveal about the psychology of the story writers.
More recently, however, it has flourished as a qualitative method, with the focus on the rich, narrative detail of the stories, rather than the hidden psychology of the story writers. In qualitative story completion research, instead of designing an interview or focus group guide, qualitative survey questions or solicited diary instructions to elicit self-report, the researcher crafts what is known as a ‘story stem’ or ‘story cue’ related to their topic of interest. The story stem is typically based on a hypothetical scenario, with a central character or protagonist, and sometimes secondary characters – such as in the example we use here from our research on perceptions of the disclosure of negative menopause symptoms in the workplace, where a woman discloses such symptoms to a manager.
Story stems typically require some kind of narrative tension or hook; for fans of the British soap opera EastEnders, this is like the ‘duff duff moment’ at the end of each episode, where drumbeats signal the ‘cliffhanger’ ending. The ‘duff duff moment’ is what guides and propels participants’ story writing. Let’s consider an example of a story stem from our research on menopause in the workplace. The protagonist in this stem is Julie, and the secondary character is her male or female manager. There were two versions of the story stem in our study – one where Julie decides to tell her male manager Mark about her symptoms and their impact, and one where she tells her female manager Ruth. The two versions of the stem are identical apart from the name of the manager and their gendered pronouns. This is the male manager version of the stem:
Julie is 52 years old and has been working in her current job for 12 years. For the last few months Julie has been feeling overwhelmed; most nights she struggles to sleep and at work she struggles to concentrate – her brain feels like it’s in a permanent fog. Julie feels anxious most of the time and no longer feels like herself. Julie didn’t used to be someone who struggled to get her work done but recently she has been working extra hours to try and keep up. Yesterday Julie had an appointment with her doctor who confirmed that these are all common symptoms of menopause but couldn’t say how long they might last. After the appointment Julie couldn’t help but wonder what the future of her work might look like. Julie decides that she needs to tell her manager that she is menopausal and explain the impact it is having on her work. Mark, her manager, is in the office today so she meets with him to discuss…
The ‘duff duff moment’ in this stem is Julie’s meeting with her manager to disclose her symptoms. The two versions of the stem, written by Kara in consultation with Gemma, Victoria and Vanessa, was given to research participants who were instructed to decide what happens next, writing a story of at least 300 words in length; they were also instructed not to spend too much time thinking about and preparing their story so we could access the meanings readily available to participants. This stem illustrates many of the characteristics and strengths of story completion as a qualitative method.
When combined with other methods such as interviews or focus groups, story completion can be used to explore participants’ lived experiences, but in contemporary qualitative research, it is primarily used as a standalone method to explore perceptions, understandings and discourses surrounding the topic of interest. In this type of research, story completion is assumed to tap into either how participants understand and perceive the world, and the social contexts that shape these understandings and perceptions (a ‘contextualist lens’), or the social discourses through which social phenomena are constituted and made meaningful (a ‘social constructionist lens’). The precise theorisation of what story completion gets at will depend on the researcher’s theoretical commitments and assumptions.
Story completion is argued to be particularly useful for exploring meaning-making around topics that are socially sensitive or taboo, such as menopause in the workplace, because the topic is addressed indirectly through story telling rather than participants being asked directly for their views. Third-person story completion especially – such as in this example where participants are asked to write about Julie and her manager from the perspective of an omniscient narrator – is thought to encourage a wide range of responses, including socially undesirable responses, because participants are less directly accountable for the views expressed (“it’s just a story”!). Although first-person completion is used – where participants are instructed to imagine themselves as the protagonist in the story – it is far less common in contemporary qualitative story completion research than third-person completion (see this example of first-person completion).
Story completion is also useful when participants may not have direct experience or knowledge of the topic of interest – as was the case in our perceptions of menopause in the workplace study. The stem can be written in a way – as it was here – that highlights pertinent information (such as the age menopause is experienced, the nature of negative menopause symptoms and their impact on Julie’s wellbeing and working life) that some or all participants may be unaware of but is essential context for exploring their views. The participants in this study were recruited through one workplace and were simply required to be aged 18 years or older; they didn’t need to have any prior knowledge or experience of menopause. Our interest was in general perceptions across the workforce rather than the perceptions of a particular group of employees such as women with lived experience of the menopause transition.
Story completion originated as a ‘projective technique’ in the first half of the 20th century. Projectives are clinical assessment tools designed to tap into unconscious thoughts and feelings, and circumvent barriers of awareness (people lacking conscious awareness of their thoughts and feelings) and barriers of admissibility (people not wanting to admit to certain thoughts and feelings because of shame or fear of the very real consequences of disclosing something taboo). Projectives such as deliberately ambiguous inkblots, pictures or story openings require people to ‘fill in the blanks’ of the stimulus, and in doing so project their unconscious thoughts and feelings onto the stimulus, and reveal these to the test taker.
It’s rare for qualitative researchers to use story completion in this way (an ‘essentialist psychological truths and inner worlds lens’). Instead, they are mainly interested in the potential of story completion to access dominant meanings, assumptions and social norms. Deliberate ambiguity in the story stem – not a significant feature of the menopause in the workplace stem, although certain details were left unspecified (e.g. Julie’s job role) – is argued to tap into normative sense making. For example, not specifying the protagonist’s gender (through using gender-neutral character names and pronouns), age or sexuality can reveal participants’ dominant or normative assumptions about the likely characteristics of people in particular scenarios.
Another distinctive feature of qualitative story completion is the potential for comparative designs; something highly unusual in ‘Big Q’ qualitative research, where most contemporary qualitative story completion research is located, and where the use of open-ended, relatively unstructured and participant-responsive data generation doesn’t provide the structure necessary for comparison. Big Q qualitative research combines the use of qualitative techniques for generating and analysing qualitative data with research values and philosophies distinctive to the qualitative tradition (e.g. interpretivism or naturalistic enquiry). A useful way of characterising such research is as ‘artfully interpretative’, recognising multiple meanings and subjective realities and the central role of the researcher in generating and interpreting data. Big Q is distinct from small q or ‘scientifically descriptive’ qualitative research, which aligns with scientific research values and where quantification and comparison are accepted.
When story completion is used in comparative designs, stems are identical apart from the features related to the focus of the comparison. In the menopause in the workplace study, this was the gender of the manager. We sought to compare perceptions of disclosure to a male versus female manager, and gender is a common theme in comparative designs to date (e.g. comparing perceptions and constructions of female versus male in infidelity, sexual refusal and weight loss motivations, although other comparisons are possible (e.g. perceptions of working-class versus middle-class chronic pain patients or young women with anorexia versus bulimia. The aim of comparative designs is to explore how the element of interest shapes perceptions. In our study, the responses suggested that female and male managers were perceived differently, with male managers presented as less likely to understand and provide appropriate support to Julie as a menopausal employee.
One of the exciting things about story completion is its unpredictability – sometimes differences in perceptions are strongly evident, and sometimes not, but both the presence and absence of differences are informative. Story completion can also be used to compare the perceptions and constructions of different groups of participants – gender is a common focus of such comparisons in existing research, although other groups have been compared (e.g. psychology students and therapists, and university students and the urban poor.
Qualitative researchers tend to approach the analysis of story completion data in a similar way to the analysis of self-report data such as that from interviews, focus groups, qualitative surveys and solicited diaries, focusing on the development of recurrent and important themes and patterns across the data. This type of analysis has been dubbed a ‘horizontal’ approach. Some form of thematic analysis (such as reflexive thematic analysis) is common.
In our perceptions of menopause in the workplace study, we developed themes across the data such as ‘the burden of menopause’, which captured the idea that menopause is a burden in the workplace, and a burden for everyone, not just those experiencing symptoms. Story completion researchers have also used thematic analysis to develop patterning in relation to particular story elements such as the depiction of the protagonist and the story resolutions or endings. Braun and Clarke proposed an analytic approach unique to story completion called ‘story mapping’, where the focus is on patterning in how the stories are temporarily structured and organised, the main story events and the (moral) resolution of the story. Their research on male body hair depilation provides an example of this technique. The advantage of story mapping and other ‘vertical’ approaches to analysis is that they retain something of the storied character of the data rather than pulling them apart and flattening them out into themes.
Various other approaches have been used to analyse story completion data in the burgeoning qualitative story completion literature including narrative analysis – an obvious choice perhaps for narrative data! – discourse analysis, poetic enquiry and rhizomatic data analysis.
Interest in story completion as a qualitative method continues to grow – researchers are using it in new ways, experimenting, in the broadest sense, with new modes for presenting and completing the stem, and new combinations of story completion with other data generation methods (we combined story completion with the vignette technique in our perceptions of menopause in the workplace study to develop a new technique we call the ‘story question and continuation method’), new analytic approaches (such as rhizomatic and narrative analysis and poetic enquiry) and introducing story completion to different disciplines and research fields. We invite and encourage researchers in the field of work and employment to consider adding story completion to their methodological toolkit.
Victoria Clarke is an Associate Professor in Qualitative and Critical Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She is a co-founder and member of the Story Completion Research Group, an international network of qualitative researchers interested in using, developing and promoting story completion as a qualitative method.
Kara Daly earned an MSc in Occupational Psychology from the University of the West of England, Bristol, in 2022. She received the 2023 Division of Occupational Psychology Student Award for her dissertation, which used story completion and vignette techniques, supervised by Gemma Pike with input from Vanessa Beck and Victoria Clarke.
Gemma Pike is a Senior Lecturer in Occupational Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and a practitioner Occupational Psychologist. She specialises in workplace wellbeing and uses a range of innovative qualitative research methods, including story completion, vignette techniques and photo‑elicitation. She supervises MSc and doctoral research in psychology, applying story completion to work and organisational studies.
Vanessa Beck is Professor in Employment Studies at the University of Bristol Business School. Her research focuses on individuals on the margins of the labour market, including those experiencing unemployment or underemployment and older workers, especially those who transition through menopause while in employment.
Image credit: Etienne Girardet via Unsplash
