| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Narrative Analysis

Page history last edited by Michael Civis 11 years, 11 months ago

Narrative Analysis

Narrative Analysis is a fairly recent form of scholarship applied to a variety of academic fields, including social sciences, education, history, and the humanities. Narrative Analysis focuses primarily on the way in which people build and utilize narratives to interpret and make sense of the world around them.

 

Background

Narrative analysis developed as a discipline within the context of the broader field of qualitative research. It is not confined to any one specific field of scholarship, but is inherently interdisciplinary. It is often used as a tool for analysis in cognitive science, knowledge theory, organizational studies, sociology, education studies, and the humanities. It is particularly useful for reshaping qualitative inquiry of biographies, historical accounts, interviews, and generational trends, but can be utilized on any subject containing a narrative.

 

Underlying Assumptions

 

Narrative Analysis considers narratives to be social products that are constructed in the context of specific social, cultural, and historical locations. It does not view narratives as stories that convey facts, not is it particularly concerned with how “true” a story is. Rather, it views narratives as interpretive devices through which people represent their world to themselves and others.

Some definitions of narrative analysis expressed by experts are as follows:

“A coherent temporal progression of events that may be reordered for rhetorical purposes and that is typically located in some past time and place. A plotline that encompasses a beginning, a middle, and an end conveys a particular perspective and is designed for a particular audience who apprehend an shape its meaning.” (Ochs and Capps, 2001)

“A method in which researcher has brought out relationships not only between respondents and texts, but also between text and social reality.” (Franzosi, 1998)

“Storytelling, to put the argument simply, is what we do with our research materials, and what informants do with us. The story metaphor emphasizes that we create order, construct texts in particular contexts. The mechanical metaphor adopted from the natural sciences (increasingly questioned there) implies that we provide an objective description of forces in the world and we position ourselves outside to do so. Narrative analysis takes as its object of investigation the story itself.” (Riessman, 1993)

Narrative theory argues that:

•             People produce accounts of themselves that are “storied”, or in the form of stories/narratives.

•             The social world itself is “storied”. These stories disseminate in popular culture providing means people can use for personal identities and personal narratives.

•             Narrative is a key means through which people create an identity.

•             Most interview accounts are likely to be “storied”.

•             Narratives link the past to the present, however, there is no unbiased account of the past.

 

Objects of Study

 

The object of study is the narrative framework constructed through the joint efforts of an interviewer and respondent.  In the case of autobiographical or literary narratives, the author serves as both interviewer and respondent.

 

Methodology

Research focuses on role of narrative and usually adopts a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews rather than questionnaires. Typically the researcher contributes very little, acting primarily as a listener, however, all narratives are co-constructed, even if the audience is oneself or an imaginary other.

  • Structural Analysis Approach
    • This approach focuses on the framework of the story or the grammatical structure.
    • For example, a Fairy tale is structured not by the nature of its characters but by their specific function within the plot. The number of possible functions is typically small.
  • Sociology of Stories Approach
    • This approach focuses on the cultural, historical, and political context in which particular stories are told by whom and to whom.
    • An example would be “coming out stories”
  • Functional Approach
    • This approach focuses on the work and purpose particular stories serve in people’s lives.
    • Narratives allow us to reshape chaotic experiences into causal stories in order to make sense of them and render them safe.

 

 

Bibliography

          Ochs, E. & Capps, L. 2001. ‘Living narrative’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

          Riessman, C. K. 2008. ‘Narrative methods for the human sciences’. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

          Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. 1990. ‘Stories of Experience and narrative inquiry’. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2-14.

          Franzosi, R. 1998. ‘Narrative Analysis—Or Why (and How) Sociologists Should Be Interested In Narrative’. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 517-54.

 

 

References

 

1.            http://web.me.com/benwadham/QualitativeResearch/narrative_analysis.html

2.            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_inquiry

3.            http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/garson/PA765/narrativ.htm

4.            http://staff.bath.ac.uk/psscg/QM-Nar-lec.htm

5.            http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book225799

Further Reading

 

•             Labov, William; Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis

•             Riessman, Catherine Kohler; Narrative Analysis

 

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.