Telling Tales: Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Qualitative Data Interpretation and Communication

Abstract

Academic journal articles often do not embody the rich accounts of long-term qualitative field work, while creative storytelling offers researchers an alternative way to reflect upon and communicate their findings. Digital storytelling is an emerging research methodology increasingly used to gather qualitative data but not so often to communicate results. As part of the ICT4COP research project, which investigates community policing and police-reform in post-conflict settings, we decided to try out digital storytelling to communicate some of the findings from the research. During the process, we observed that the digital storytelling methodology led researchers to approach their data differently. This article explores our adapted digital storytelling methodology. We draw similarities with ethnographic storytelling and highlight the digital storytelling methodology both as a means of dissemination, as well as an alternative approach to data interpretation for qualitative researchers.

Being Social Worker during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…In my case I chose the descriptive, narrative style, combined with thematic analysis, keeping the central themes of the research. Thus, the story below is told through the voice of the interviewees, the research subjects, in which the researcher's work boils down to combining the materials, organizing them in a sequence, where the researcher lets the described world speak for itself (Scârneci, 2007;Lenette, Cox & Brough, 2015;Davey & Benjaminsen, 2021).…”

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“…I present findings in a storytelling style by putting forward tales from the research field. Creating storytelling may make “research findings more readily interpreted, meaningful, and relevant” (Christensen, 2012, p. 240) and may provide a more nuanced description of the researcher's experience on the ground than traditional writing modes (Davey and Benjaminsen, 2021). Data gained from interviews and other means are woven into the narrative.…”

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“…Therefore, the importance of communication data storage platform has been increasing, and the design of communication data storage platform has also become a crucial content. The design and operation and maintenance difficulties of the communication data storage platform mainly include three points, firstly, the data volume is too large, which is a big challenge for the efficiency of data searching and calling; secondly, the requirements for the hardware and software that constitute the platform are extremely high, which leads to a high occupancy rate of system resources and may lead to the collapse of the platform if it is not careful; besides, the requirements for the data processing methods and skills are also high [1][2][3][4][5] . Therefore, in the current application, some communication data storage platforms will be affected by massive data and have difficulties in data retrieval, storage and scheduling; Moreover, the storage difficulty is large, which will bring a great burden to the platform, resulting in the communication data storage platform can not operate normally, and some communication data are lost, which reduces the security and practical application performance of the communication data storage.…”