Narrative Analysis

Narrative analysis refers to a family of analytic methods for interpreting texts that have in common a storied form. As in all families, there is conflict and disagreement among those holding different perspectives. Analysis of data is only one component of the broader field of narrative inquiry. Methods are case centered, and the cases that form the basis for analysis can be individuals, identity groups, communities, organizations, or even nations. Methods can be used to interpret different kinds of texts—oral, written, and visual.

The term narrative is illusive, carrying many meanings and used in a variety of ways by different scholars, often used synonymously with story. In the familiar everyday form, a speaker connects events to a sequence that is consequential for later action and for the meanings listeners are supposed to take away from the story. Events are perceived as important, selected, organized, connected, and evaluated as meaningful for a particular listener. The definition emphasizes the contextual nature of oral stories; they are told (indeed performed) with the active participation of an audience and are designed to accomplish particular aims. Oral stories are strategic, functional, and purposeful. Other forms of oral communication include chronicles, reports, arguments, and question and answer exchanges.

Among scholars working in the human sciences with personal (first-person) accounts for research purposes, the narrative unit can differ, and its form is often linked to a discipline. In anthropology and social history, narrative can refer to a life story that the researcher weaves from threads of interviews, observations, and documents. At the other end of the continuum lies the very restrictive definition of social linguistics. Here, narrative refers to a discrete unit of discourse, an extended answer by a research participant to a single question, topically centered and temporally organized. Resting in the middle on a continuum of working definitions is research in psychology and sociology. Here, personal narrative encompasses long sections of talk—extended accounts of lives in context that develop over the course of single or multiple interviews or therapeutic conversations. The diversity of working definitions underscores the absence of a single meaning or unit of analysis. The term is employed in the social sciences to refer to texts at several levels that overlap: stories told by research participants (stories, which are themselves interpretive), the interpretive account an investigator develops based on interviews and fieldwork observation (i.e., a story about stories), and even the interpretive narrative a reader constructs after engaging with the participant's and investigator's narratives. Analytic work with visual materials pushes the elusive boundaries of narrative definition further.

In my thinking over time about the burgeoning field of narrative research, I have grouped the various forms of analysis into a simple typology: thematic, structural, dialogic-performative, and visual narrative analysis. The thematic form interrogates what a story or group of stories is about, while the structural form attends to how a story is composed to communicate particular communicative aims. These two broad approaches are the building blocks of all narrative analysis; others draw on components of them and add [Page 540]other dimensions. The diaglogic or performative analysis interrogates how talk among speakers is interactively (i.e., dialogically) produced and performed as narrative; the investigator is actively present in the text. Finally, the visual narrative approach links words and images in a visual narrative analysis in which investigators interpret found images (in archives and other collections) and craft a narrative where the researcher is part of the image-making process. In all four analytic approaches, study is grounded in the particular: how a speaker or writer assembles and sequences events and uses language and/or visual images to communicate meaning, that is, to make particular points to an audience.

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