I ran some anecdote circles in a community a few weeks ago and found the way in which I asked the starting question could influence the responses without degrading quality - for instance we started with: Lets say I was HIV positive and I wanted to live here, tell me stories/experiences that would help me decide etc. We then got a whole host of issues related to HIV stigma, lack of HIV support, problems around government giving disability grants for HIV positive people etc. It was unintentional, but worked well. If i wanted to test the likelihood of xenophobic attacks I would have asked "lets say I am an Angolan and want to live here" and so on.

In your instance i would consider anecdote circles (which can provide mass narative anyway). I found that four or five people in an AC (plus facilitators) worked extremely well and therein lies a way to get around the power issues you talk about (i.e get 4-5 women who know each other together, get 4 men together [maybe even give them a beer or two] and so on - less than 4 does not work). You cannot get away from needing to build capacity to facilitate properly, however succesful AC's rely on following a set of very simple rules.

What what came out blew my mind - i have been reading through journal articles on qualitative research and one quality criteria i came across was 'believability' - what came out was true, but hardly believeable.

Thanks, Jonathan. Yes, anecdote circles could be useful. There is another method out there based on this notion called 'most significant change' (MSC) method. But I am rather taken by the notion of prompting questions that are more open-ended. The MSC method asks for stories about significant changes related to, for example, people's self-governance or sustainbility of changes. I need to reflect a bit more on what biases one is introducing into the anecdotes by asking an achievement-oriented prompting question (as for MSC) rather than an experiential one as in your examples, Jonathan. In the contexts I know (poor and remote rural areas), you still need to then figure out a less IT-whizzbang process for the recording of the narratives, which will eventually find its way into some growing database that is hopefully not (too) centralised in HQ somewhere.

I'm not sure that for MSC you are prompting for positive change - just significant change (positive or negative). Thus open ended questions are quite the order of the day.

MSC doesn't formally prompt for positive change. Although Rick Davies (who developed it) and others do report a strong tendency for positive changes to dominate. I was pondering on the consequence of asking for stories of change with reference to specific domains of intended transformation (such as sustainability of efforts or self-governance capacity). These changes would be reflections on achievements or the lack thereof of a project or programme. Which is quite different than a prompting question that is simply about a lived experience such as the one mentioned by Jonathan Carter. Basically, I'm just wondering about what the type of question does to the nature of the narratives that emerge.

re the IT whiz bang - use a voice recorder and do transcripts later - i recommend the Olympus range, i got one that is about 100 quid, works like an absolute charm.

re the phrasing of the question - remember the need for ambiguity, my guess is if you ask about self governance up front it won't work (people will game) - thats my experience - however you can start ambiguous and then when an issue arises, just nudge by asking 'are there other examples of that you can give?'...remembering you are always seeking examples, experiences...not opinions or perspectives.