Story completion: An exciting qualitative method

Welcome to our story completion resource and information pages! We are the Story Completion Research Group – a group of qualitative psychologists who are story completion enthusiasts. We use story completion in our own research, supervise students using story completion, teach story completion to students, give presentations about the story completion method at conferences, seminars and other events, and publish about the method. We are not the only ones excited by and using this method – others are using this method in a range of contexts.

Story completion offers qualitative researchers a way of generating data for qualitative research that is quite different to most common methods: most qualitative research involves generating first person accounts of experiences, views, practices and so on. With story completion, participants are invited to write a story in response to a story ‘stem’ or ‘cue’, a hypothetical scenario created by the researcher.

Story completion is both serious and fun! We’ve found students love learning about the story completion method in teaching and enjoy using it in projects – so we hope you’re inspired to include the story completion in your qualitative research methods teaching and supervision ‘toolkit’.

This site is designed for people who are using, or think they might want to use, story completion in qualitative research, or indeed in teaching and supervision. On this site, you will find a wide range of information about the use of story completion in qualitative research, including an introduction to the story completion method, and resources for using story completion in research and teaching about story completion.

If you are using, or considering using story completion, and have a question, please first look at our “frequently asked questions” – we develop these based on the type of questions we get regularly asked about story completion. Unfortunately, we simply don’t have time to answer in person many of the queries we get. We hope you find some useful answers there.