In this article, Christine Porter shares and reflects on her journey of developing and implementing case methods with the Food Dignity team. This is partly a traditional methods paper, which summarizes data gathering and analysis approaches, but Porter embeds that within an autoethnographic meta-methods paper — addressing the process of devising these methods while striving to meet ethical, epistemological, and emotional standards of rigor in the case study research. This “triple-e” rigor is what the author means by rigorous storytelling. Porter notes, "mentors, friends, students, and partners in Food Dignity generously tried to teach me how to do it and to do it with me. Here, I trace my journey of learning to try to collaboratively tell true and important stories about community-led work for food justice."

KEY FINDINGS

The body of work from the Food Dignity project has influenced thinking and feeling about rigorous storytelling approaches in several ways:

Committing even more deeply to the approach of collecting extensive data and using multiple inductive methods for analysis.
Being more explicit about how and why the case studies were chosen with these five community-based organizations (CBOs).
Feeling reassured about the rigor, relevance, and guiding ethics of the case study research methods and outcomes.
Asking narrower research questions of the data, including potentially asking some of the same questions posed in previous studies to examine the transferability of their conclusions.
Valuing having multiple authors from both community and university organizations to improve the utility, insight, accessibility, and accuracy of the project products.
Considering ethical and epistemological implications of how community leadership in Food Dignity has led to the prioritization of telling important and true stories about their work, specifically, vs. an academic tendency to center “the purpose of understanding a larger class of (similar) units".
- For example, the former demands more inductive listening and analysis, including in setting the boundaries of the case; the latter encourages more narrowly focused boundaries and analysis, potentially conscribed by a priori research questions, and presumes transferability.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH

Food insecurity, racism, and other forms of social oppression, frayed community ties, food system unsustainability, and gross economic inequity are wicked and systemic social problems in the U.S. They are literally life and death problems, killing people with proximate causes such as gunshots, addictions, cancers, and complications of type II diabetes. In this context, the most relevant use of the word rigor is with mortis, not about research methods. Resolving these problems drives the work of food justice CBOs, and they do it by building on the expertise, relationships, and other assets in their communities (see, for example, nearly every other paper in this issue).

However, the community-university relationships in Food Dignity were never equitable. In the search for greater equity, six strategies were used for traveling that path together in a good way (Porter, 2016):

Issuing subawards to each CBO and mostly paying these in advance, rather than arrears. This enabled the partnerships to form in the first place.
Investing financially and temporally in co-authorship with and first-person work by community-based co-investigators. Academics are otherwise the only ones who would be paid to do this work.
Investing heavily in spending in-person time together. This created and enacted our relationships and research collaborations.
Supporting a community-university liaison as a half-time position, who also worked as a co-investigator based at one of the five partnering CBOs. This was a way to slightly reduce the inequity between academic and community partners.
Engaging an external facilitators to host meetings.
Organizing a pre–team meeting community-partner-only retreat without academics in attendance. People with less negotiating power at any given table benefit from having in-group time to deepen personal relationships and establish shared group priorities and strategies to help increase their power.

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Food justice and food equity are as important as ever. In academic research, it is important to acknowledge the need for inclusive, rigorous, and equitable research methodology. Dr. Christine Porter at the University of Wyoming has established what she calls "triple-rigorous research." #foodjustice #foodequity Read @ JAFSCD for free: https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2018.08A.008. You can see Dr. Porter discuss triple-rigorous research at JAFSCD's YouTube channel.