Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Qualitative Research

Introduction: This paper draws upon both visual and textual data from the author’s research on personal meaning-making in university (organizational) crisis management. While much crisis management literature is based upon single case studies, this research sought to better understand crisis leadership across organizations and roles through the lens of deep narratives.

Goals and Methods: In this study, narrative interviewing (Riessman, 2008) and arts-based data collection (Tracy & Redden, 2015) were employed to elicit stories from participants regarding deeply traumatic experiences of death crises. The author’s approach to this study created space for participants to share their individual stories through a semi-structured narrative interview, then engagement with a reflective drawing exercise, followed by a second semi-structured interview. The author used emergent and inductive analysis of themes which then resulted in the production of transcription poetry (Glesne, 1997) to accompany the images submitted by participants. The reflective drawing exercise, the creation of a metaphoric drawing in response to a specific prompt helped participants deepen their exploration of the topic ahead of the second interview. As participant-researcher, the author similarly participated in the reflective drawing exercise and explored their own experiences managing death crises on campus.

Results: Following the presentation of the poems, prose, and images, three methodological themes emerged: (1) narrative interviewing opened space for participants to process traumatic events, (2) using poetic transcription to narrate, rather than alight, trauma narratives deepened the emotional intensity of the narratives, and (3) participants were resistant to engaging in reflective image-making.

Conclusions: While participants struggled with the arts-based approach, the image-making exercise contributed to participants’ story-sharing and created an emotional and dynamic interplay between text and image. The participants’ and the author’s explorations together elucidate the role of trauma in crisis response, while contributing to the methodological literature on the challenges of arts-based research.