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86 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education premise that the whole can be understood by analyzing the details, and that individual parts are unintelligible without the broader context of the whole (Gadamer, 1960). The researcher can therefore only authentically explore the complexity of the whole and the part in the context of the phenomenon. The story and the narrative fragments that unfold during its creation, and ultimately the nuances and layers of the narrative, are as meaningful as the social and interpersonal relations that are revealed in the process. In hermeneutic research, both the details and the whole are important, as well as the truth of the multiplicity of interpretations. The constructivist approach can be considered valid for researching teaching-learning and also as a research paradigm for storytelling-based studies, especially in the case of DST. Each step of the storytelling process brings the creator closer and closer to (re)constructing his or her story and the group closer to the formation of a group narrative, ultimately leading to the creation of individual and group identity. All this reveals hidden information and new layers of meaning to the researcher involved in the process, as narratives change depending on the modalities attached to them. An oral experience becomes a written text which becomes audio material, culminating in the completion of the story as an audiovisual artifact through the addition of images. As shown above, it can be seen that the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and constructivist approaches cannot be separated, as group members and researchers are all involved in the construction of the narrative. This can be combined with an emerging approach in Anglo-Saxon education and research, the transformative approach, which is particularly relevant to DST. The transformative aspect of the approach can be observed at different levels. Hessler and Lambert (2017) argue that participants learn to look at and interpret the issues they discuss in the group in a different way by listening to others and critically reflecting on their own life events. However, the transformative nature of DST, through its dialogically collaborative and actively engaging methodology, has a personality-forming effect on participants, facilitators, and researchers. At the same time, digital stories can also trigger social transformation by being published and viral through social media, and by being used in university curricula or even in political decision-making. In this section, digital narratives and their related research methodological principles are examined. In the first part, research approaches in the humanities and social sciences are presented that consider narrative as a primary data source. This is followed by a presentation of studies on the effects of narrative structures. Community participatory research methods that go beyond the digital narrative artifact to create narratives are also discussed. Finally, research is presented which focuses on the skill-building effects of video games with branching structures based on interactor decisions.
