Strategist and qualitative researcher Farrah Bostic joins 100 Stories for a conversation about listening, human judgment, data, artificial intelligence, persuasion, and everything that can disappear when we reduce human experience to a transcript.

Farrah listens to people for a living.

For more than two decades, she has worked inside qualitative research, sitting with people in their homes and communities and helping organizations understand not simply what people say, but what those experiences might actually mean.

One of the clearest examples comes from a research project where the transcript suggested people were uncertain about an idea.

The room told another story.

People were smiling, laughing, touching the materials, and interacting with each other. Farrah told the client that reading the transcript alone would lead them toward the wrong conclusion.

That opens a much larger question:

How much of meaning exists outside language?

We talk about body language, emotion, environment, culture, power, status, and the interpretation the researcher brings into every listening experience.

Farrah also challenges the idea that data is neutral.

Every questionnaire begins with a question. Every question reflects some assumption about what matters. And every research project begins with at least a tentative story about what the researcher expects to find.

Narrative enters before the first answer is ever collected.

Then we turn to AI.

Farrah uses AI tools in her research and finds them useful for searching and summarizing large volumes of material. But she argues that they tend to privilege consensus over outliers and can miss the emotional, embodied, historical, and relational context that gives an experience its deeper meaning.

That matters because the unusual answer may be the beginning of something new.

We also explore cultural stories about generations, why narratives can survive evidence that contradicts them, and what separates data-driven decision-making from human judgment.

Near the end, Farrah offers a simple warning about stories:

We can get stuck in them.

A story can have been true and still not be the only story available to us now.

The question I’m leaving with:

What disappears when we confuse the words someone said with the meaning of their experience?

More about Farrah Bostic: https://thedifferenceengine.co/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/