Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM)

This methodology for conducting and analyzing biographic narrative interviews has been used in a variety of European research projects, either directly (e.g., Chamberlayne, Rustin, & Wengraf, 2002; Rosenthal, 1998) or in a modified version (e.g., FREE ASSOCIATION INTERVIEWING). Assuming that “narrative expression” is expressive both of conscious concerns and also of unconscious cultural, societal, and individual pre-suppositions and processes, it is psychoanalytic and sociobiographic in approach.

In each BNIM interview, there are three subsessions (Wengraf, 2001, chap. 6). In the first, the interviewer offers only a carefully constructed single narrative question (e.g., “Please tell me the story of your life, all the events and experiences that have been important to you personally, from wherever you want to begin up to now”).

In the second, sticking strictly to the sequence of topics raised and the words used, the interviewer asks for more narratives about them. A third subsession can follow in which nonnarrative questions can be posed.

The transcript thus obtained is then processed twice (Wengraf, 2001, Chap. 12). The strategy reconstructs the experiencing of the “interpreting and acting” subject as he or she interpreted events; lived his or her life; and, in the interview, told his or her story. This strategy requires the analysts to go forward through the events [Page 70]as did the subject: future-blind, moment by moment, not knowing what comes next or later.

First, a chronology of objective life events is identified. “Objective life events” are those that could be checked using official documents, such as records of school and employment and other organizations. Each item (e.g., “failed exams at age 16”), stripped of the subject's current interpretation, is then presented separately to a research panel, which is asked to consider how this event might have been experienced at the time, and, if that experiential hypothesis were true, what might be expected to occur next or later in the life (following hypotheses). After these are collected and recorded, the next life-event item is presented: Its implications for the previous experiential and following hypotheses are considered, and a new round of hypothesizing commences. A process of imaginative identification and critical understanding is sought, constantly to be corrected and refined by the emergence of future events as they are presented one-by-one.

The transcript is then processed into “segments.” A new segment is said to start when there is a change of speaker, of topic, or of the manner in which a topic is addressed. Again, each segment is presented in turn to a research panel that attempts to imagine how such interview events and actions might have been experienced at that moment of the interview, with subsequent correction and refinement by further segments.

In both series, separate structural hypotheses are sought, and only later are structural hypotheses developed relating the two. A similar future-blind procedure is also carried out for puzzling segments of the verbatim text (microanalysis). The question about the dynamics of the case can then be addressed: “Why did the people who lived their lives like this, tell their stories like that?”