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.