Stimulated Recall Narratives as Story-Telling: An Analysis of Coaches’ Decision-Making Explanations

Stimulated recall (SR) is a family of research methods for eliciting retrospective accounts of cognitive activity related to behaviour at the time of an event or episode. Limitations are acknowledged but found to be tolerable in comparison to alternative methods. Nevertheless, the resultant narratives have rarely been treated as problematic in relation to their adequacy, plausibility, completeness and utility; questions remain about managing the participant’s response in terms of interacting, prompting and moving on, its relevance in relation to purpose, how to avoid secondary sense-making, and the basis on which to judge a helpful narrative. This paper examines the potential of treating the narrative as an explanation and invokes criteria of explanation and storytelling as a means to elicit and evaluate such narratives. A retrospective analysis of SR narratives by sport coaches is provided as an example of the application of storytelling criteria, highlighting causality-linkage, predicament, intention, case history and context as useful guides to evaluating such accounts. Particular attention is paid to the effect of the interviewer/questioner’s credibility and perceived knowledge on the nature and form of the participant’s response.