Qualitative research in the educational sciences, with its plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches, emphasizes how social agents think of, perceive and feel the phenomena that they experience. At the intersection of the quantitative and comprehensive approaches, a narrative inquiry uses stories to understand lived experience through language. The resulting data is fixed in time, process and experience. Yet completing a story is governed by a set of constraints that make it into a test : putting the experience into words, assigning time and configuring the story, the narrative format that is a necessary condition of expression. This article specifies the dimensions of the test for the subjects who put their experience into language and configure it into a story, then to show the concrete effects seen on one possible form of this inquiry approach, that of micro-stories of hospitalized children in Brazil.