Adults' judgments of fictional story quality

Narratives are commonly used for research and clinical purposes, but the ecological validity of our analyses needs verification. Do our macrostructural and microstructural narrative analysis methods give us an accurate picture of what would generally be considered "story quality"? We addressed this question by using 39 untrained adult judges who were presented with sets of brief stories, each set constructed to vary on a single story aspect (story grammar elements, story grammar structural pattern, referring expressions, or connectives). Judges ranked the stories in each set from best to worst. Results indicate that judges were generally sensitive to story features commonly used in narrative analyses, including characters' thoughts and feelings, goal-directedness, adequacy of referent introductions, and connectedness of clauses. However, they failed to make distinctions between stories that differed in types of connectives or referring expressions and had mixed reactions to description in stories.