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Squire, C. (2008) Approaches to Narrative Research - Coggle Diagram

- - - - All the social-scientific 'turns' endorse the creative and problem-solving possibilities of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approaches
      - Work on narrative seems to let us combine 'modern' interests in describing, interpreting and improving individual human experience
      - An address to narrative enables us to extend our analyses to multiple levels of research.
      - Stories often seem to function in narrative research as forms of politics,
    - - defined in ways that veer from temporal or causal ordering (Todorov, 1990)
      - to the making of human sense (Bruner, 1986)
      - and applied to speech, texts, visual materials, objects, performances, even ways of living
      - Research areas of Dispute
        
        the balance between the personal and cultural components of narrative
        
        whether or not narrative has a redemptive human function
        
        whether life events can be 'read off' from the structure and contents of stories and what is the possible and allowable extent of interpretation
        
        whether it makes sense to talk about stories' 'truth' and where such truth might lie
        
        whether there is always something 'outside' the story, defined in terms of emotions, or the unconscious, or political or material reality and to what extent storytelling can be an effective means of personal or political change
- - - - Narrative Theory
        
        Using Event Narrative Approach
        
        Labov's continued importance:
        
        Despite its assumption of fairly direct relationships between experience, cognition and representation, it turns our attention to language itself, not just what language ‘means'
        
        Labovian categories are a useful starting point for defining what 'stories' are, a contentious but essential procedure
        
        Moreover, personal event narratives do operate powerfully in people's talk as revisitings of certain key moments (Denzin, 1989), in which cognitive and emotional reliving is communicatively performed
        
        Labov's more recent work leaves behind narrative as personal sense-making, in favour of it operating as a kind of contemporary politics
        
        Labov has also argued that narrative is not only description but explanation, a theory of causality
        
        The complicating action and evaluations of a narrative lead, he says, to its most reportable event, and so constitute a theory of that event
        
        Labov sometimes turns detective to uncover objective evidence of narrative manipulation of events left out or misrepresented in a story
      - Restricts 'story' caregory
        
        Insistence event narratives told monologically in natural situations
        
        Written stories and narratives produced in other media are [seen as] separate communicative events entirely.
        
        through his definition of narrative clauses
        
        emphasis on the copresence of all narrative elements,
        
        Claims privileged place of personal event narrative
        
        because it replays, cognitively, an event that has become part of the speaker’s biography
        
        Narrative is thus 'a method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred'
    - - Abstract -Describes what story is about
      - Orientation - Sets the scene
      - Complicating Action - What happens next (which defines it as narrative)
      - Evaluation - Describe the human consequences. Tell you what the story means
      - Resolution - Gives an ending
      - Coda - Linking section that returns the story to the present.
      - Primarily spoken event narratives
      - We could, perhaps, argue that what constitutes a generalisable 'objective' narrative is more variable than Labov suggests, and can include emotion 'events’.
- - - - A broader definition of what counts as story than event-centred: Includes past, present and future, or defined by theme rather than structure, general states, imaginary or actual events, an entire narrative retelling or an event
      - May involve interviewing several people about the same phenomena, use of written material, and include social and cultural narratives surrounding the research materials
      - Impact on how a researcher analyses materials
        
        Can look at narratives of particular meaningful events
        
        Can look 'across' interviews to create a narrative
        
        Treat separate aspects of ‘personal narrative’ together across interviews, including related written and visual materials
    - - Jerome Bruner: Humans are, as a species, homo narrans, with an inborn tendency to tell and understand stories
      - Storytelling deeply social - not just because it involves hearers and tellers, but because it maintains sociality
      - Stories may not be able to resolve all aspects of experience within a story - particularly a view held by psychoanalysis - withholding information either consciously or unconsciously
    - - For Ricoeur and Bruner, narratives convey experience through reconstituting it, resulting in multiple and changeable storylines
      - Narratives can never be repeated exactly, since words never ‘mean’ the same thing twice, and stories are performed differently in different social contexts
      - The interest in reconstruction and co-construction leads some researchers to view any personal story as just one of many narratable ‘truths’.
      - Ricoeur distinguishes narrative from reason. Stories are (as for Labov) a form of imperfect, 'practical wisdom'. They convey and construct moralities, but [are culturally situated]. They are important sources of the ‘truths’ of a particular tradition, but they do not have the generality of theory
      - However, some researchers view narratives as representing, fairly transparently, the realities that lie ‘behind’ experience, can represent the psychic realities of the narrator - including unconscious elements
    - - For Bruner, stories universally involve the violation of normality and an attempt, at least, at its restoration, through human agency. Thus the experience-centred approach takes change and its attempted resolution as fundamental - it often becomes a project of improvement as well as understanding
      - Ricoeur suggests that by hearing a 'story not yet told,' the psychoanalyst offers the analysand the possibility of producing a better story, 'more bearable and more intelligible'
  - - - Numbers & Sampling
        
        Event-centred narrative researchers gather corpuses of stories. Experience-centred narrative researchers are more likely to aim for a certain number of interviews
        
        Researchers studying life narratives, or aiming for fully biographical accounts tend to use small numbers of interviewees, sampled theoretically, often on an opportunistic and network basis, with little randomisation within this sampling frame
        
        Researchers who are interested less in biography, more in narrative themes and their experiential commonalities and differences across groups of individuals, tend to use larger interviewee numbers, and quota sampling and a degree of randomisation
      - Different definitional emphases again lead to divergent approaches. I shall concentrate on oral interview research, the commonest form
      - Researcher Involvement
        
        If you place the story within the person, you may simply ask for ‘their story,’ intervening as little as possible, ‘free association narrative interviewing’, concerned with narrators’ emotional sequencing of their stories
        
        If you assume that reality is to some degree separate from personal story, you may triangulate, asking interviewees about real events, or looking for evidence of them elsewhere
        
        If you are convinced of the importance of narratives’ co-construction, you will engage throughout in active narrative interviewing, an interaction that even may be understood as conversation or co-research
        
        If context is assumed to be a large aspect of research, you may be particularly alert to social and political contexts as they affect the ongoing interview.
        
        If you want to collect and study stories that are clearly about particular experiences, you may want to elicit them, with formulations like, ‘can you give me an example…’
        
        If, however, you see 'narrative' more broadly as the wider representational formation of which the interview is a part, you may not be concerned with gathering obvious 'stories.’ You might even see such a procedure as skewing the research
    - - The range of materials that can be incorporated into research… is a clear distinction from the event-centred research tradition-wide
      - Researchers who take a broad view of ‘narrative’, interested in narratives’ co- construction and the many levels of context that form them, may use a number of records - oral, written and visual texts, field notes, participants’ and own commentaries, alongside related cultural representations, and records of important realities in their own and their interviewees’ lives
      - Researchers who view narratives as relatively unmediated expressions of personal experience, tend to treat it separately from the personal story, and to pay most attention to obtaining reliable records of research participants’ narratives.
      - Researchers who are highly interested in context may also concentrate on personal stories, if these seem the most practical or effective means of researching particular issues.
  - - - Interview transcriptions are probably the dominant manifestation of empirical materials in narrative research.
      - Some highly detailed, others omit some speech elements (pauses, non-narrative clauses etc.)
      - Different transcription approaches also produce differences in interpretation.
    - - The simplest approach is to begin describing the stories in the interviews thematically, and from this, to develop and test theories that give a predictive explanation of the stories, moving back and forth between the interviews themselves and generalisations about them in a classic ‘hermeneutic circle,’
      - This approach may not seem at first to differ greatly from many other qualitative procedures, for instance a thematic content analysis or – in the case of the more bottom-up analyses - grounded theory
      - However, experience-centred narrative analysis is distinguished by its attention to the sequencing and progression of themes within interviews, their transformation and resolution. Thus, it foregrounds the specifically narrative aspects of texts’ meanings
      - Validity
        
        How, though, might we build a persuasive case for a particular interpretation? The usual qualitative procedures of amassing evidence, theory-building and theory-testing are undertaken
        
        Involves internal testing by the researcher, who continually checks their evolving interpretations against the materials and actively seeks out falsifying cases. Feedback from respondents themselves may also be a check on interpretations
        
        Presentation
        
        In the Labovian approach, small sections of text are sufficient- though Labov also moved towards using longer accounts
        
        Patterson (2008) presents interconnected stretches of 'narrative' and 'non-narrative' materials, showing how the latter are required to understand the former.
        
        Riessman extracts from the interview ‘story’ smaller stories, usually of constellations of events
        
        In a life history or biographical analysis, the ‘story’ is much longer, and the data are often glossed and exemplified by extracts - This may lead to reader scepticism
        
        Detailed accounts of interpretive procedures and corroborating materials go some way towards offsetting such doubts.
    - - For Ricoeur, written and told stories are reconfigured in their readings or hearings: 'the process of composition, of configuration, is not completed in the text but in the reader’
      - Moreover, the tradition is, as we have seen, concerned with the possibilities of multiple interpretations, among which researchers' reflexive analyses of their own contributions sit easily.
      - narratively- oriented analysis is also usually more consistently concerned with reflexivity
    - - Narrative is intrinsically social to some extent for all experience-centred researchers. At the same time, narrative remains, in this tradition, a production of individualized subjectivities
      - This dualism is acted out in analysis, usually by paralleled top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top- down analyses, often comparing across many interviews, tend – except in the case of psychoanalytic accounts - to seem more socially oriented
  - - - Any hermeneutic project asserts some interpretive authority. Moreover, some researchers base their assumptions on well-specified, and therefore challengeable, psychoanalytic or narrative theories
      - However, others use nebulous criteria such as narrative 'openness' and 'reflexivity;' assert interpretive authority based on materials to which their readers have little access
    - - This research takes chronologically or psychically sequenced time as an unproblematic analytic category
      - Has some catching up to do with literary and cultural studies and social theory - who recognise the co-presence of futurity and past in the present, the reconstruction of the past by new ‘presents’, and the projection of the present into future imaginings
      - A focus on ‘time’ may also close off information about the unconscious and material realities, both of which may order stories outside time
    - - A related issue is that some experience-centred research criticizes partial, fragmented or contradictory narratives for their incoherent or incomplete representation of experience
    - - The experience-oriented approach suggests that experience is rooted in a subject that can claim some unity and agency: a ‘self’ which has and describes experiences. This position is sometimes asserted ‘against’ postmodernism’s alleged preoccupations with an entirely fragmented and socially determined subject. Other approaches take more complicated approach to subjectivity
    - - A focus on unproblematic experience tends to reduce the significance of language in narrative research, subordinating it to experience itself. Even if language is seen as reconstructing experience and not as a direct translation of it, language’s patterns effects are often uninteresting to experience-centred researchers.
    - - complexities of language and subjectivities. It may seem as if there is no place to stop the interpreting, and no way of judge between interpretations, all of which may be ‘truthful’ in their own contexts
- - - - Analysing story genres
        
        Problems of the culturally-oriented approach
        
        Advantages
        
        The advantages of putting the experience-centred approach in a broader cultural context are that this context may make it less prescriptive, less controlled by temporal progression; less focused on coherence; more aware of language; more likely to understand selves in non-essentialist ways, and more able to break out of hermeneutic reflexivity with its social referents
        
        A focus on ‘genre’ allows us to understand narratives as contextual cultural genres that are always in contest, compromising between redemptive closure and unrepresentable openness
        
        None of the advantages actually "solved" - does not necessarily avoid relativism, guarantee political engagement or provide a clear concept of the relationship between narrative representations and their effects
        
        may just mean operating with two incommensurable theories of the speaking subject: the agentic, storytelling subject of the experience-focused tradition, at odds with the fragmented disunited ‘postmodern
        
        It is difficult to say anything definitive about narrative genres, given the multiplicity and incompleteness just described
        
        some critics also accuse culturally-oriented approaches of losing sight of the individual stories on which experience-centred research rests
        
        A partial solution to such questions is to borrow from literary and cultural theory a notion of the unconscious that sees it as constitutive of cultural representations, infiltrating even the most conventional of them.
        
        An an assumption that cultural and personal narratives are interconnected - personal stories shaped by genres created culturally - relates interpretive communities to communities of action
        
        Many cultural narratives, rather than just one, will inflect personal narratives
      - explicit attention to the interview context and to the wider discourses within which this ‘context’ is situated, a procedure that tends to place them, too, in the field of ‘contextual’
      - Stories operate within interpretive communities of speakers and hearers that are political as well as cultural actors, to build collective identities that can lead, albeit slowly and discontinuously, to cultural shifts in representation and to political change
    - - Research focused on micro-levels of context, (‘small’ stories) against the so-called ‘big’ stories of more experiential, biographically-oriented research
      - need to pay more attention to the micro-linguistic and social structure of the everyday, small narrative phenomena that occur naturally between people
      - unfolding, anticipated, imaginary, habitual and events as well as past, singular ‘events’; they may also involve repeated content or themes spread out across representations
      - crucially, co-constructed between speakers and hearers, rather than emerging as a biographical expression
      - The emphasis on ‘small stories’ tends to prioritise ‘event’ over experience, and socially-oriented over individually-oriented narrative research