If social sciences and their surveys are to take their subjects' perception into account, if they are to integrate the sensitive and the instant aspects of their experiments without brutally subjecting them to the requirements of concept and learned rationality, they must take the way of narrative writing. In this paper which is an excerpt from an even more illustrative study, J.-F. Laé and N. Murard justify the use of narration and more particularly short-story writing : when "intensive" situations have to be described, when the spontaneous memory of individuals, their natural theories, their convictions, their ideals, etc., in fact, all that has to be taken seriously into account, have to be reconstructed, then story telling is the only way of representing the scene (or one of the scenes) in which these individuals restore the time of their existence by producing such statements.
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