The Place of Stories and Informal Conversations in the Social Sciences During Pandemics in Africa

Abstract

Pandemics have necessitated that social scientists conduct fieldwork differently. Pandemics profoundly impact individuals’ lives, warranting an in-depth study of the experiences, attitudes, and feelings as people imagine a new future. Stories and storytelling, when used as research tools and methods, can do more than convey scientific information. They can also evoke experiences, emotions and imaginations about pandemics and their possible futures. This paper defines stories and storytelling as the verbal telling of personal stories, a method that mostly calls for participant observation. Stories and storytelling in communicating social science and health research have primarily been delivered through podcasts and blogs. Few studies have examined the use of stories to inform research articles, particularly in social science research on public health issues. This article reviews the need to employ independent tools or integrate stories to address pandemics. This paper found that stories and storytelling often help individuals bring to the fore not only much-needed scientific information but also explore deeper issues in research, including feelings, attitudes, individual experiences, and imaginative futures.

Introduction

Pandemics have happened before in Africa and the world. COVID-19 and its implications for the world remind me of my younger days when individuals contracted pandemics such as the Spanish flu and polio. Infected individuals would be secluded from the community and designated a specific place to stay. Someone would be assigned the role of taking food and herbal medicine to the sick during the seclusion period. The food and medicine would be placed in a designated area for the infected person to pick up, so that the uninfected individual would not come into contact with the sick person. They had traditional regimens for cleansing themselves after taking the food and bringing back the utensils used by the ill person. If the ill person did not pick up their food for several days, they would suspect the person had died. Upon confirmation, certain rituals were performed to ensure the person was buried carefully, without posing any danger to the rest of the community. (An Informal conversation with Josiah*)

I remember during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when an uncle tried to reassure me that all would be well by telling me a story. This part of the story, narrated by my uncle, made me realise that, although the COVID-19 pandemic had severely affected the world, it was not unique, and that other pandemics had posed a threat to human survival. I gained a deeper appreciation for the role of stories, informal conversations, and narratives in the African context and globally. In this paper, I examine stories as narratives of hope and resilience, situating the COVID-19 phenomenon within the context of past events and their navigation, demonstrating that “nothing is new under the sun.” This paper argues that scientific research is essential for developing solutions, but integrating personal and collective stories into social science inquiry situates those solutions within historical, contemporary, and future contexts that reveal how people live and navigate challenges.

Examples of disciplines that have used storytelling as a research method include social work (Blythe et al., 2013; Lenette et al., 2013), issues of healthcare and healthcare delivery (Taylor, 2014), getting to understand marginalised communities (Bird et al., 2009) and the discipline of anthropology (McNamara, 2009), among others. In practice, storytelling as a research tool can take various formats. In recent years, digital storytelling, which comprises short stories, has become prominent in health research. There is also the aspect of storytelling through photovoice-photo collections that promote dialogue. The main concern of this paper is the need to move beyond the verbal recounting of personal stories through participant observation, thereby capturing the context and individual lived experiences.

Despite its emerging status, storytelling is essential for providing nuanced insights drawn from the personal experiences of specific individuals. Some of these personal insights may not be well captured by conventional qualitative empirical methods (McCall et al., 2019). Experiences and realities are constructed differently by different people. It is worth noting that stories do not reveal a single, discoverable truth, since truth is a matter of degree and perspective (Moezzi et al., 2017). Like established scientific methods, the storytelling research method offers distinctive ways to order experiences and construct reality. Therefore, using the two knowledge systems to complement and enhance each other may provide broader and more in-depth insights into an experience than using a single method (McCall et al., 2019).

Several methodologies have emerged that foreground embodied lived experiences through story – such as writing-as-a-method-of-enquiry (Richardson, 1994), autoethnography (Ellis, 2004), performance ethnography (Alexander, 2005) and collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Arts-based research (Jones & Leavy, 2014) provides a range of approaches to working with stories through visual, embodied, and literary imagery. On the whole, these methodologies involve telling, listening to, and writing stories to theoretically work through phenomena, truths, and understandings. This work argues for incorporating storying into social science research methods for the study of pandemics. Pandemics are not new, yet people experience them as novel and distinct each time they occur, evoking a range of emotions. Nevertheless, by drawing on stories of past pandemics, humanity can regain hope, calm, and resilience.

According to Dahlstrom (2014), storytelling is intended to communicate science to non-expert audiences because it is more engaging than traditional, logical-scientific communication. As a means of communication, storytelling often articulates cause-and-effect relationships between events over time and centres on a specific character (Charon, 2001). Storytelling provides a degree of realism that may be less evident in other forms of scientific communication. Storytelling can draw on commonalities among the story, the storyteller, and the listener or reader. In a study on enhancing smoking cessation interventions among African-American smokers, the credibility of the teller’s story or experience can motivate and persuade individuals to engage in behavioural change and reduce resistance to the action implied by the message (Cherrington et al., 2015). Studies have examined the value of stories and storytelling for communicating with and influencing others, particularly in climate change and energy research (Moezzi et al., 2017). Among the reasons for choosing storytelling as a research tool, one of the most important is that it is a highly accessible modality that does not require specialised knowledge and skills to connect with or derive meaning from.

Beyond providing a lens through which to view life, stories help us question the causes of illness and understand the factors that give rise to certain cycles or patterns of sickness. During the smallpox crises between 1713 and 1893, just as had been experienced recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health measures focused on improving sanitary conditions, disinfection, setting up special smallpox hospitals, quarantine, isolation, and, for smallpox, even the victims’ clothes and beddings were burned (Phillips, 2012). Pandemics, just like individual illnesses, call for stories in form of illness narratives (Frank, 2013). These stories not only explore the gravity of the problem but also bring to the fore ways in which not only biomedicine was used to treat patients, but also other options of care beyond biomedicine sought to address the pandemic (Phillips, 2012). Stories of previous pandemics reveal not only the diseases and possible causes but also how people not only experienced but also navigated these challenges to survive. Incorporating such narratives into social science research on pandemics is important to provide contextual ways of caring. For example, as with previous pandemics, the need for isolation and disinfection remains constant, even before other measures are implemented. This could serve as a guide for scientists during future pandemics, helping them prevent disease spread while developing solutions.

According to Gwenneth Phillips and Bunda (2018), a story is a loose and open invitation to speak. It is an invitation for one to share life’s happenings in a free and informal manner, without any particular form. What matters in a story is the lively retelling of connections to people and places, providing a world accessible to all (Gwenneth Phillips & Bunda, 2018). As with the impromptu conversation I had with my uncle, all I needed to do was understand what was happening in our world at the time, given the severity of COVID-19. He accepted the invitation, noting the tension on my face, and opted not to provide any scientific explanations (though he is a scientist) or refer me to any writings; instead, he narrated a story. Thomas King (2003) points out the assumption that stories need to be written down, an assumption with which I disagree, coming from a culture (African culture) where stories were mainly delivered orally and not necessarily written down to convey the message. I therefore believe that stories can either be written or orally narrated to capture the experiences and perspectives of a particular phenomenon.

Stories reveal rich complexities, layered with symbolism in the metaphors and motifs they offer, which we unravel over time (Gwenneth Phillips & Bunda, 2018). They further note (Gwenneth Phillips & Bunda, 2018) that through stories, our imagination is stirred as we locate ourselves in the spaces being told to us, and the vicarious encounter affects our lives, leaving us in a state of wonder and awe. The stories that we encounter stay with us, and we muse over them, new insights unfurling over time. This paper, therefore, argues for the integration of personal and collective stories into social science inquiry, situating those solutions within historical, contemporary, and future contexts that reveal how people live and navigate challenges.

Methods and Conceptual Framework

Drawing on a session with my well learned uncle and a close family member who hail from East Africa, who recounted past pandemics and reflected on the current one. I weave their stories with narratives from blogs to argue for storytelling as a method in the social sciences. This paper identifies individual accounts—mainly from African contexts—that illuminate how people explain, understand, and navigate life’s challenges through storytelling. I examine stories that portray illness as narrative, while also identifying how stories were used to navigate different circumstances during the pandemic. I also resorted to some available excerpts from the book “Covid Stories from East Africa and Beyond: Lived Experiences and Forward-Looking Reflections edited by Kinyanjui et al. (2020). I selected this book, which focuses on stories from East Africa, to explore the region’s narratives about COVID-19 and to corroborate my uncle’s account. I also chose stories of hope, coping, and resilience, including those that capture what else —and how else — people are living their everyday lives.

The stories were analysed through thematic analysis. Thematic analysis goes beyond the descriptive exercise, capturing the interpretive endeavour of qualitative data’s richness, complexity and depth (Ahmed et al., 2025). The data were first prepared and organised for analysis, with a focus on familiarisation and immersion in the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Codes were assigned to the dataset, with a focus on how people explain, understand, and navigate life’s challenges through storytelling. The codes were initially predetermined and descriptive. While being aware of my biases as a researcher, I frequently returned to the refined codes, merging similar ones and creating subcodes where necessary, in line with the concepts and ideas directly related to the paper’s objective. The coding process distilled complex datasets into analyzable units that subsequently informed theme development (Campbell et al., 2021). I developed a flexible codebook that incorporated new codes as they emerged and deleted or merged other codes as the analysis progressed. During the coding process, I identified patterns and sought themes. The theme development process entailed constructing a coherent narrative that addressed the research question and provided meaningful insights, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon (Campbell et al., 2021).

Two independent expert colleagues helped review the themes, and we resolved discrepancies through further discussion as I reviewed the data repeatedly to clarify the ideas presented. I also presented my findings at a seminar series where I obtained input from colleagues who were independent of the work but experts in the field. I reviewed colleagues' comments in line with the data I had received from the field and finalised the analysis in alignment with the objectives. Reviewing themes ensured that the data was accurately represented and told a coherent, meaningful story about the research question (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

The themes have been presented in the form of illness narratives as self-stories, stories of coping and hope, the place of stories in African society and during pandemics, and the call for nuanced information in social science research on pandemics. Method triangulation (Polit & Beck, 2012) was achieved by using multiple sources of stories, including personal encounters with relatives, narratives from relatives, and secondary sources, thereby helping to validate the data. Triangulation is employed as a qualitative research strategy to enhance validity by converging information from multiple sources (Carter et al., 2014). The methodological clarity afforded by thematic analysis strengthens the credibility of the findings (Braun & Clarke, 2024).

In the next section, I weave together the stories and discussions, drawing on Nyamjoh’s (2012) concept of conviviality —living together through mutual understanding and respect. This can be extended to the ways social science research methodologies can engage with stories as a complementary method for communicating research on pandemics. This is more so given that stories allow people to express feelings and imagine futures together, creating a sense of communal reflection. The results and discussion section foregrounds the themes of illness narratives as a form of self-story; stories of coping and hope; a review of the place of stories in African society and during pandemics; and, last but not least, the call for nuanced information in Social Science research on pandemics.

Results and Discussion

Illness Narratives as a Form of Self-Story

I stayed for 28 days at the treatment centre, where I was on treatment for 15 days, then a week of observation, and a final test after which I was discharged. It is a very difficult experience. It weighs you down over time. You cannot venture outside. You are not allowed to have visitors. You can only speak to family over the phone. Fortunately, we received psychosocial care. Otherwise, you could start to go crazy. However, I was not completely alone. Other patients and I would sit at our doors and chat to try to forget the loneliness and confinement (Yaffa, 26-year-old; https://www.afro.who.int/news/it-weighs-you-down-congo-covid-19-survivor-recounts).

Yaffa’s story reveals the challenges of the COVID-19 experience. The healing process she shows can weigh one down and requires psychosocial support. She continues to emphasise that patients can overcome loneliness by coming together to engage in conversations as a means of escaping isolation and confinement. Relationships are created and reconfigured despite the painful and challenging situations. Illness narratives are a form of self-story that overlap and are bounded by other forms of stories, such as spiritual autobiographies, stories of gender identity, and survivor stories of inflicted trauma (Frank, 2013). In addition to producing wreckage, stories provide resources for reclaiming oneself and the community to its normal functioning, with or without recovery (Frank, 2013). From Yaffa’s story, we see how COVID-19 patients reclaim themselves in the various positions the illness places them in, such as creating new relationships.

My uncle’s narrative and the conversation we exchanged about past pandemics changed my view of what pandemics mean to our society. I came to understand what pandemics meant to him and the society in which he lived, given the history he provided. I was therefore able to reconcile my perspective with his and with what our physical senses witnessed, and I concluded what pandemics are all about. Yaffa, on the other hand, also tells her own story of confinement and finding hope in the environment the illness has created. Nyamjoh (2012) argues that stories extend beyond the senses to encompass other ways of seeing and knowing. Historically, during pandemics, prevailing cultural norms and medical protocols often inhibited patients from congregating or engaging in supportive dialogue aimed at alleviating loneliness. In contrast, within the context of Yaffa, patients were encouraged to gather and participate in conversations that fostered hope and emotional connection. Stories provide views through systematic dialogue with participants in ways that are familiar to them and their culture (Nyamjoh, 2012).

Stories of Coping and Hope

The announcement of the lockdown, though understandable, felt shocking and apocalyptic in the moment. Despite learning it was only a partial lockdown, panic quickly spread through the supermarket, transforming it into a scene of chaos as people rushed to stockpile. People ran from the tills back to the store aisles, shoving anything and everything into their carts: frozen food, beans, ice cream, tissues, wooden brooms, salmon, feta cheese – everything was fair game. Anxious fathers who did not know their way around the store began to yell into their cell phones, seeking guidance, while mothers in the store began to push each other over to get to the essentials (Except for the story by Awour, Kinyanjui et al., 2020).

Awour’s story reveals her experiences with the introduction of curfews and their effects on every aspect of life, including areas often overlooked, such as scaffolding for grocery shopping at grocery stores. She draws her audience into the lives of those around her, immersing them in all that is happening. Locating father’s struggles with what they need to get for their families, and even for herself, as she tries to get all that she needs without thinking much about it. Awour’s narrative highlights public responses to pandemics, which ultimately affect individuals and society as a whole. The main challenge, however, is that the impromptu public ‘solutions’ to public health concerns rarely take into account the individual experiences first, but are geared towards safeguarding the public. We can learn from previous pandemic stories how these public health measures worked and what impact they had on individuals, to develop best practices for addressing public problems that greatly affect individual lives.

Nyamjoh (2012) notes that in anthropological research, stories and storytelling move the anthropologist-researcher away from the temptation to provide the researcher’s view of the problem and towards focusing on the research participant’s views. The challenge arises when anthropologists emphasise their methods of participant observation and overlook the fact that, beyond our observations, deeper issues can be revealed only through stories shared in a trusting environment (Nyamjoh, 2012). These stories may seem time-consuming and may not be comprehensible at the onset. However, the call is to humble ourselves as researchers and receive the story from the research participants’ perspective, marrying it with the findings from other methods.

Meseret also provides another dimension of life during the pandemic that stories highlight beyond the traditional methods of social science research. She exposes the everyday struggles that are often overlooked yet have profound implications for her life and those of others with similar stories.

“No more fear of going out”

As COVID-19 became a reality of daily life, my friend and I arranged safe playdates for our children, including bike rides and walks. After two and a half months, the children met and shared their lockdown experiences among other stories of interest to them such as what they had watched on Netflix. They, however, struggled to follow distancing rules and put their masks on at all times. Despite this, we felt reassured by our limited contact with others. Spending time outdoors helped ease our stress and restore a sense of calm (Excerpt by Meseret; Kinyanjui et al., 2020).

Meseret delves into the details of how pandemics affect even those “not affected.” She identifies the daily frustrations of not being a patient, but also the limitations and dynamics that accompany pandemics, including isolation and restricted movement. Such an encounter, like that of Meseret, illustrates how people navigate challenges (pandemics) affecting the world, whether directly as patients or indirectly through protocols and procedures that governments must implement to protect their populations. She goes beyond to express the fear of going out that they faced as individuals and the eventual relief when they no longer feared it. Going outside the home sphere was once considered normal but has now become sacred, given the pandemic and regulations aimed at preventing its spread. That said, the freedom to be out again was still with restrictions that made being out even more challenging. Restrictions such as social distancing had to be accommodated and appreciated in societies previously accustomed to complete freedom to interact with one another. For many, including Meseret and her daughter, walking became a source of stress relief amid the events unfolding worldwide.

Through stories, the previous sequence of events is explained. Stories further narrate history to current generations and also provide a way for a particular society and its people to understand their environment. For example, Terry Tempest Williams, in trying to unravel the mystery of the family pattern of cancer, seeks some environmental causes of the cancer deaths of her family members (Williams, 1991). Williams (1991) finds her purpose for her voice by honouring her dead relations and struggling to preserve the natural heritage that was being destroyed by forces such as bombs exploding around her environs during the nuclear weapon testing in the West. These stories enable individuals to achieve stability in the face of chaos, provided they have had previous experience. The level of stability may not be achieved immediately, but listening to several accounts of past life experiences cultivates resilience among individuals experiencing moments of disarray amid the current pandemic.

The stories also bring a sense of togetherness when you realise that people in your ethnic group, your bloodline, and society are confident that the grievous moment in time has been addressed before and will be addressed now. This was my confidence at the peak of the pandemic, when my uncle recounted prior illnesses that had affected large populations and threatened the lives of many in society. Nevertheless, at the end of the story, I saw victory and a people resilient in the face of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the entire world, as it took some time for such a wave of disease to reach such a high magnitude. People who had never experienced a pandemic found COVID-19 very strange. However, through storytelling, we can understand that the event will eventually pass and become a story to be told to the next generations. Several scientific documents and papers have addressed the problem of pandemics. However, this paper argues for bringing these aspects to the fore through storytelling to address the past, present, and future issues that threaten health and healthcare within the social sciences.

The place of Stories in African Society and During Pandemics

In Africa, storytelling is among the oldest means of transmitting knowledge, culture, traditions, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. The rich African culture was shared through methods that went beyond narration to include performance. The performance aspect provided entertainment for the young kin, capturing their attention after a long, hard day of various activities. Verbina (2014) notes that oral African storytelling is considered participatory because it uses songs and dance to engage the audience. The audience’s participation encouraged instruction and learning in the traditional indigenous upbringing of a child, awakening a cultural consciousness crucial to cultural assimilation (Verbina, 2014). Africans used storytelling to preserve their history, traditional culture, and ritual ceremonies (Vambe, 2004).

Several authors (Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, 2023; Asante, 1987; Kouyate, 1989; Alidou, 2002; Chinyowa, 2000) have noted several functions of storytelling, which include mediating and transmitting knowledge and information across generations, conveying information to the younger generations about the culture, worldviews, morals and expectations, norms and values. Storytelling becomes analytically richer when situated in its specific social, historical, and spatial contexts. For anthropologists and other participant observers, contextualised narratives about pandemics reveal embodied practices, local meanings, and relational dynamics that other methods can miss. Using storytelling as a method requires the researcher to participate actively, not merely listen, by closely observing narrators’ emotions and performative behaviours. Active participant observation thus provides deeper, contextualised evidence for interpretation.

Storytelling entails an oral narration from participants to a researcher who has embedded themselves in the participants’ context. The researcher further builds participants’ trust by adhering to research ethics that ensure no harm to participants, among other ethical considerations. A conducive environment is cultivated over time by building rapport with participants, since storytelling entails narrating stories truthfully and attentively. Storytelling is also about asking daring questions and responding without fear. In the article “How Covid-19 Pandemic gave rise to new-age storytelling by Underwood-Lee (2000), Nayak noted that storytelling is not just about fairy tales and fables. It is about caring for people genuinely by allowing them time to narrate their experiences. It involves caring more, allowing people to be themselves, and trying to understand their environment and the issues they face.

In a podcast on the importance of storytelling during a pandemic, Emily Underwood-Lee (2000) examines why storytelling matters. She notes that stories are crucial to understanding and providing an account of the individual's illness experiences. Stories also show how people eventually understand their world amid a pandemic. Stories help provide an understanding of the journey to sickness and pandemics as people review and tell stories of where they were before the illness or pandemic and how it affected and changed their lives. They do this by helping us see how we got to where we are now and why that matters on a human level (Underwood-Lee, 2000). Stories not only help us experience the world around us, both before and during pandemics, but also prompt us to imagine the future we anticipate. Illness narratives and stories about pandemics provide researchers with a deeper understanding of participants' experiences by putting us in their shoes, ultimately fostering greater empathy. Stories are therefore important for guiding policymakers to meet the community's needs in line with their contexts (Walsh et al., 2023).

Pandemics such as COVID-19 have shaped history, which must be adequately understood and documented, including through narratives, as they change how we view the world and relate to one another. Judith Zaruches, quoted in Frank (2013), notes that stories are used to repair the damage done by illness, providing a sense of where one is in life, the journey through the sickness, and the eventual destination. Zaruches in Frank (2013) uses the metaphor of losing her map and destination, suggesting that illness is a shipwreck. Zaruches further states that storytelling is a repair work on the wreck. Stories provide a way to redraw maps and find new destinations (Frank, 2013). Stories are therefore seen not only as providing narrative wreckage but also as resources for reclaiming individuals from their wreckage. Their literal and immediate nature also provides a real-time sense of what is happening to the ill person or communities affected by pandemics. Frank (2013) further notes that illness often calls for stories, whether the sick person wants to tell the story or not.

The growing trend toward using stories and storytelling as research tools to gather data to inform others or to provide interventions for public health issues is limited (McCall et al., 2019; Williams-Brown et al., 2002). The limitation arises because evidence of its use is limited. Storytelling has been used to provide insight into public knowledge, attitudes and behaviour (McCall et al., 2019; Williams-Brown et al., 2002). This is only one dimension of using stories and storytelling. The other dimension is to go deeper into providing thick descriptions through individual stories that can inform public health strategies. Individual stories provide participants with safe spaces to engage with the researcher and reflect on the details of their experiences and feelings, as shown in the narratives provided in this manuscript. Stories communicate scientific information and reveal people’s inner worlds—how they navigate uncertainty, imagine futures, and cope with crises. This echoes Nyamnjoh’s (2012) call to move beyond surface-level analyses and to embrace storytelling as a medium through which Africans make sense of their worlds.

The Call for Nuanced Information in Social Science Research on Pandemics

During pandemics, stories, as narrated by my uncle Josiah, have helped us understand the past, cope with the present, and imagine the future. Stories remind us that we can persevere despite the challenges of our day-to-day lives. Stories have shown how people can be resilient and stand together in the fight against pandemics. Reynolds and Quinn (2008) point out that an open, empathetic communication style that engenders public trust is the most effective during a crisis. Even as the government and health officials continue their various forms of communication to galvanise the population around the positive actions to take and the harmful actions to refrain from (Reynolds & Quinn, 2008), there is a place for community involvement and engagement in communication, which helps build trust. An essential part of community resilience during pandemics is the building of trust through empathy, caring, competence and expertise, honesty and openness, and dedication and commitment (Reynolds & Quinn, 2008).

Best practices have been forged when individuals, through stories, remind one another of what they did in the past to avert further infections and deaths, even as we continually reinvent the wheel toward more modern ways of addressing present crises. Stories continue to motivate and encourage individuals to think creatively and solve contemporary problems. Since stories and storytelling engage the audience, individuals can further explore the events described and propose improved ways to address societal problems. Dahlstrom (2014) noted that research storytelling increases engagement among non-expert audiences. In addition, Niemand (2018) notes that storytelling can be more convincing to audiences than data alone, while facilitating retention of data (Graesser et al., 1980).

Storytelling enables people to develop community-based solutions and provide contextual answers to their problems. During the pandemic, family relations and bonds that had been severed were restored, and those that remained intact were further strengthened (Nyabundi, 2023). During lockdown periods, when individuals had one another for encouragement, companionship, and support, many narratives were used to strengthen kinship. I remember one day, one of my relatives called me to narrate her experience with sick relatives in the community. She exuded the financial and moral support she had received from other kin through their encouragement. Nonetheless, Akin, in her narrative below, still hoped for the day when the pandemic would be over. Despite strengthening family relations, the burden of caring for family members at home, particularly for women, was not easy. From Akin’s narrative, the call for help keeps resounding even physically for the women who carried the burden of care for ill family members.

I cannot tell you how much the family has grown tighter by the day. The kind of encouragement I have received, and the social, moral, and financial support, have been incredible. However, I hope this pandemic will soon be a thing of the past since the number of people who need support, especially financially, and healthcare to be provided at home, is now not easy to manage. Healthcare is mainly given at home, with the heavy burden falling on women. Women are now getting overwhelmed; who will help us stand for our family members? (An Informal conversation by Akin, a close family relation).

The conversation continued with many unanswered questions. All we could continually do was look back at some of the battles we had won and narrate how we went through them. The stories we remembered of past victories encouraged us to believe that, although the problem today is different, we can still win. Ganz (2009) notes that sharing individual stories builds relationships and leads to a collective identity. Stories and storytelling often emerge from seeking answers to a problem. Stories support reflection (Boase, 2013; Goodson, 2013) and connection (Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001; Elkins, 2018; Fuertes, 2012; Ganz, 2010). Just as theories are used to explain, understand, and predict phenomena, stories inspire individuals to understand their own feelings and experiences, provoke action toward a better society, and, ultimately, open our eyes to the imagined future.

Integrating stories and storytelling into research could enable scientists to be creative and envision a future free of pandemics. Andrade (2025), in his personal journey through the art of storytelling in science, notes that storytelling provides clarity, engagement, and logic to science, thereby making research more relevant and impactful. The scientific imagination, therefore, prompts action to create a better future and a better society. According to Nyamjoh (2012), African contexts need to embrace their own ways of articulating issues and finding solutions to problems through the decolonisation of research practices. Nyamnjoh (2012) critiques the dominance of Western paradigms in anthropology and advocates integrating African epistemologies, often grounded in oral traditions. This paper seeks to promote careful integration of conventional scientific methods when necessary, while prioritising local, indigenous ways of knowing and sharing knowledge—the ways of the people—to access their realities and identify appropriate solutions to problems.

Crises such as COVID-19 and other pandemics are breeding grounds for stories as people seek to understand their world. During crises, people tell tales of past crises, and pandemics yet to come, and, more profoundly, they also narrate stories of the unfolding crises in the here and now (Essebo, 2022). Storytelling often weaves together personal life experiences while serving as a form of communication. As communication tools, stories not only convey information but also provide coping mechanisms (Malinowski, 1954). Stories have potentially influenced societies by changing events, beliefs, practices, and even material culture. This has been achieved through sense-making processes and by creating shared convictions and desires (Arlow, 1961). Tismaneanu (1998), therefore, appreciates the function of stories as imagination rather than description. This imaginative function makes them highly practical provocations for change, as they guide small, everyday decisions and practices toward alignment with their narrative sense (Essebo, 2022).

Arthur Frank (2010), in his book “Let Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology, notes that stories inform human life by providing a temporal and spatial orientation to life. Stories can bring order amid chaos by providing coherence, intention, and boundaries to life situations. However, Frank (2010) states that, since stories impart a sense of self and purpose, breathing life into individuals and groups, they not only produce hope but also bring forth fear and anxiety. This calls people back to focus on reality even as they interact with narratives and stories that may offer explanations for life’s situations.

Conclusion, Limitations and Recommendations

This paper underscores the value of integrating the emerging qualitative research method of storytelling into social science inquiry, situating these approaches within historical, contemporary, and future contexts to illuminate how people live and navigate challenges. Storytelling has been dismissed as a research method for lacking substantial validation, despite its value and appropriateness for gathering nuanced information on public experiences, attitudes, and behaviour. Stories and storytelling can nevertheless provide robust knowledge necessary for communication, advocacy, and policy formulation. Stories provide rich information, allowing participants to engage with the researcher in a free environment. The participants can engage with the researcher through their narratives and express themselves, in words and beyond, through the performance of their feelings and experiences. The researcher, grounded in the participants’ context, can be fully involved through stories and storytelling even through observation. Therefore, using participant observation and encounters in stories and storytelling, the researcher could gain rich data for future practical interventions.

The current paper, however, used impromptu stories provided to the author during informal conversations about the then-COVID-19 pandemic, and further incorporated stories on the COVID-19 pandemic documented in books (secondary data) to examine how storytelling can be helpful in social science research. Further studies could examine the integration of stories into participant observation and other social science methods, and as a form of ethnography. This would benefit social science research by providing a more holistic account of the events in a person’s life during pandemics.