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What is NarraFirma?
NarraFirma is a web application for running Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) projects from start to finish. PNI is a Participatory Action Research method in which groups of people share stories of personal experience, then interpret those stories together to make collective sense of complex situations. NarraFirma does not gather stories for you; it structures the work around them.
In practice, the tool acts as three things at once:
- A checklist. It asks you questions, recommends approaches based on the conditions you describe, and offers activities and just-in-time advice as you move through a project.
- A journal. It helps you keep a record of decisions and observations as the project unfolds.
- A project workspace. It supports the full arc of a PNI project, from planning through story collection, sensemaking and follow-through.
Who it is for
NarraFirma suits facilitators, researchers, community organizers and internal change teams who want to run a PNI process themselves rather than commission one. The example projects on the site show the range: a community market listening to customers, managers uncovering why staff felt overworked, two merging companies working out how their cultures could combine, and a police force overturning assumptions about theft. In each case the point was to surface lived experience that surveys and metrics tend to miss, and to turn it into decisions the group could act on.
What to weigh
PNI is participatory by design, so it demands real involvement from the people whose stories you are collecting, not just their data. That makes it strong for contested or poorly understood issues and slower than a conventional survey. If you need a quick read on a simple question, this is heavier than necessary.
Next step
NarraFirma is the natural starting point: read the project stories to see whether one resembles your situation, then look at the PNI Practicum if you want guided, project-based practice before running your own. The method itself is documented in Cynthia Kurtz's book Working with Stories, which is worth reading before you commit to a project.
How do I use NarraFirma to run a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project from start to finish?
NarraFirma is built to walk you through a Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) project as a guided workflow rather than a blank database. The site describes it as a web application that supports PNI "from start to finish," and frames its value in three ways: as a checklist (questions, recommendations, decision activities, just-in-time advice), as a journal (keeping a record of what you did and why), and as a toolkit for carrying out your own project.
A practical sequence
- Define the purpose and audience. Decide who will tell stories, who will interpret them, and what decisions the results should inform. The site's own examples show how broad this can be: a community market listening to customers, managers uncovering overload, two merging companies comparing cultures, and a police force re-examining assumptions about theft.
- Design the story collection. Choose what you ask, how you ask it, and how many stories you need. PNI centers on ordinary people sharing ordinary stories of personal experience, so prompts should invite lived detail rather than opinions or abstractions.
- Collect stories. Run the elicitation with the group you identified, using the guidance the application provides as you go.
- Work with the stories. PNI's core claim is that the people who told the stories should also interpret them, so plan sessions where participants read, group, and discuss the material together rather than handing it to an outside analyst.
- Interpret and act. Turn the patterns into insights the group can use, and record what changed in your thinking along the way.
- Document the project. Use the journal function to capture decisions, so the process is repeatable and explainable to stakeholders.
What NarraFirma is and isn't
| It is | It isn't |
|---|---|
| A guided application for running PNI projects | A general-purpose survey or statistics package |
| A structured record of your process | A substitute for facilitation skill |
| A method-specific toolkit tied to PNI | A tool for any qualitative research approach |
Where to go next
If you want the underlying method rather than the software, the site points to Cynthia Kurtz's book Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization, and notes that she offers support, training, and consulting. The site also lists online, project-based PNI Practicum courses, which are the most direct way to learn the method by running a real project. Start with the book or a practicum if you have never facilitated a PNI project; use the application directly if you already understand the method and mainly need structure and record-keeping.
What is Participatory Narrative Inquiry and how does it differ from other participatory research methods?
Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) is a form of participatory action research in which a group of people share stories of their own personal experience, then work with those stories collectively to understand each other and make sense of a complex situation. Its distinguishing emphasis is on values, beliefs, feelings and perspectives as they appear in lived experience, rather than on extracting variables or testing a hypothesis. The method is documented in the Working with Stories book series by Cynthia Kurtz, who also co-wrote NarraFirma, the web application designed to support PNI projects from start to finish (NarraFirma).
What makes PNI distinctive
- The data are ordinary stories, told by ordinary people. Participants are not asked to represent a group or to produce a polished account; they share everyday experience.
- Interpretation is collective. The same people who told the stories help make sense of them, so the insight stays usable by the group rather than being delivered as an external report.
- The subject matter is subjective experience. PNI deliberately works with values, beliefs and feelings, which many participatory methods treat as context rather than as the core material.
- The output is understanding plus action. The point is to discover insights a community or organization can act on.
How it differs from other participatory approaches
| Dimension | PNI | Typical participatory workshop or focus group | Typical survey or structured interview |
|---|---|---|---|
| What participants provide | Personal experience stories | Opinions and reactions to prompts | Answers to fixed questions |
| Who analyses | Participants, with facilitation | Facilitator or researcher, sometimes with participants | Analyst, off-site |
| Main strength | Reaches tacit values and complexity | Fast, focused, easy to schedule | Comparable across large samples |
| Main trade-off | Slower, requires skilled facilitation and willing participants | Can stay at the level of stated opinion | Can miss what people cannot articulate in advance |
A practical way to decide: if you already know what questions to ask and need breadth, use a survey. If you need depth on a contested or emotionally loaded issue and want the group itself to own the findings, PNI is the better fit. The trade-off is time and facilitation skill.
Concrete uses
The published examples on the site show the range: a community market board listening to customers to keep the market viable; managers discovering that overwork persisted because everyone assumed everyone else should do more; two companies sharing stories after a merger to find out how their cultures could work together; and a police force overturning long-standing assumptions about when, where and why people steal. In each case the value came from hearing experience that a questionnaire would not have surfaced.
A useful next step
If you want to try PNI, start by reading Working with Stories to understand the method, then look at how NarraFirma structures a project — it acts as a checklist, a journal and a source of just-in-time guidance as you move through the phases, and it is aimed at people running their own PNI project rather than at researchers commissioning one. For training and consulting, the site notes that Cynthia Kurtz offers support directly.
Are there training courses or consulting support available for learning to practice PNI with NarraFirma?
Yes. NarraFirma is built around a method its creators also teach and support directly: the site offers PNI Practicum Courses (described as online, project-based PNI practice) and states that co-creator Cynthia Kurtz, who wrote Working with Stories, offers support, training, and consulting. So you can learn PNI either through structured coursework or by hiring guidance for a live project.
Which route fits you
- Self-directed learner: Start with the book Working with Stories to understand Participatory Narrative Inquiry, then use NarraFirma's built-in guidance — checklists, questions, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, decision-making activities, and just-in-time advice — to run a small practice project.
- Practitioner who wants feedback: The PNI Practicum is the natural fit if you want to practice on a real project with structure rather than reading alone.
- Organization with a pressing question: Consulting makes most sense when you have a specific situation to explore — the site's examples include community market planning, work-life balance, merging cultures, and theft prevention — and you want experienced help designing and interpreting it.
A practical next step
Pick one small, real question in your community or organization, then decide whether you want to learn by doing alone or with instruction. If you can name the group, the question, and roughly how much time participants can give, you'll be able to tell whether a course or consulting engagement is worth it. For background on PNI before committing, see NarraFirma and Cynthia Kurtz's related work.
What kinds of real-world problems have organizations solved using PNI projects?
PNI projects tend to get used where a group needs to understand why people behave as they do, not just count how many do it. The examples on the NarraFirma site show four recurring problem types:
- Keeping something alive that's failing — a community market's board listened to customers' stories to keep the market going.
- Hidden workload imbalance — managers found their people were overworked because everyone assumed everyone else should be doing more. That's a belief problem, not a staffing spreadsheet problem.
- Post-merger culture clash — a large company acquired a small one, and people from both sides shared stories to work out how the two cultures could coexist.
- Overturning operational assumptions — a police force used stories to challenge long-standing beliefs about when, where and why people steal.
The pattern worth noticing: in each case the organisation thought it knew the problem, and the stories reframed it. The work-life balance example is the clearest — the issue wasn't capacity, it was a shared misperception that only surfaced when people described their actual experience.
If you're weighing whether this fits your situation, ask one question: do the people affected by the problem hold knowledge that isn't captured in your existing data? If yes, a PNI approach is plausible. If the problem is purely logistical, it probably isn't the right tool.
Participatory Narrative Inquiry is described as a form of Participatory Action Research in which groups share and interpret stories of personal experience to make collective sense of complex issues — so it suits messy, values-laden, multi-perspective problems rather than clean technical ones. The method and its background are documented in the Working with Stories book series by Cynthia Kurtz, who also co-wrote the NarraFirma software with Paul Fernhout.
Next step: pick your candidate problem and test it against the four examples above. If it resembles the work-life balance or merger cases — where different groups hold different assumptions — you're in the method's sweet spot. If it resembles a scheduling or supply problem, look elsewhere first.
For related practice in group sense-making, NarraFirma is the tool described here; the underlying action-research tradition is covered by Participatory Action Research and the story-based evaluation community around story-based evaluation.
Can I install and self-host NarraFirma, and what are the requirements?
Yes. NarraFirma is presented as a web application you can install yourself, and the site's navigation includes an Installation section alongside GitHub and WordPress links. That combination points to a self-hosted deployment rather than a purely hosted service.
What the page supports
- It is a web application for carrying out Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) projects, so self-hosting means running a web app on your own server rather than only using someone else's.
- Installation guidance exists as a first-class part of the site, and a GitHub presence suggests the code is available to download and deploy.
- A WordPress link suggests an integration or companion path for people already running WordPress sites.
Practical setup considerations
Because the page evidence does not list server versions, database engines or PHP/Node requirements, treat those as things to confirm from the official installation instructions before you commit. In practice, a self-hosted web app of this kind usually needs a web server, a database, and a runtime environment, plus a way to keep the installation updated.
A realistic scenario: a community organisation wants to run story-gathering workshops without sending participant stories to a third-party platform. Self-hosting gives them control over where sensitive narratives live, but it also means someone on their side handles backups, upgrades and access management.
If you want a lower-effort route, WordPress may be attractive when that is already your publishing platform. If you need full control over data location and customisation, install from the GitHub source. Start by reading the Installation page at NarraFirma and checking the repository requirements before provisioning a server.
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