What is….narrative research?

Research Methods Festival, 2008

Corinne Squire
Centre for Narrative Research
University of East London
http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/index.htm
Why is narrative research so popular?
• Apparent universality
 Interdisciplinarity
 Bridges theory and practice: academic, yet accessible
 Said to mediate between modernism and postmodernism
 Offers different levels of analysis, from microstructure,
through
 content, to large-scale context
 Thought to enable relations between politics and research
 Pleasurable
Problems of narrative research
 Universalised expectations about narrative
 Reification of the narrative object
 Reduction of lives to narratives
 Diversity and incompatibility of approaches
 Lack of generalisability of findings
So: what is narrative research?
Narrative research in the social sciences focuses on:
• Material that symbolises temporal, spatial and/or
causal sequences, and that has particular
objects/subjects
• Significance of these sequences (intrapersonal,
interpersonal, social, cultural, political)
Narrative research in the social sciences studies
symbol sequences that are: oral, written, linguistic,
paralinguistic, visual, and behavioural
Narrative research in the social sciences involves:
• eliciting, finding or constructing narratives
• analysing narratives
• narrative analysis
Approaches to narrative
 Narrative syntax: Studying the structure of naturally-occurring personal
event narratives (Labov) defined by narrative clauses; studying the functional
structure of narratives (Propp)
 Narrative semantics: Studying the content of stories that express
experiences eg those that map the violation and restoration of canonicity (key/fatal
moments): Bruner; those that describe some or all of a biography (Rosenthal); those
that include unconscious elements (Hollway and Jefferson)
 Narrative pragmatics 1: Studying the co-constructed performance, across
conversational turns (Georgakopoulou) or interviews (Riessman, Phoenix) of
identity stories
 Narrative pragmatics 2: Studying the gathering-together of interpretive
communities through story genres (Plummer); studying the relations between
personal and cultural narratives (Malson)
Norris’s story (Labov, 1972)
a When I was in fourth grade -
no, it was in third grade-
b This boy he stole my glove.
c He took my glove
d and said that his father found it downtown on the ground
(And you fight him?)
e I told him that it was impossible for him to
find it downtown
‘cause all those people were walking by and
just his father was the one that found it?
f So he got all (mad).
g Then I fought him.
h I knocked him all out in the street.
i So he say he give.
j And I kept on hitting him.
k Then he started crying
l and ran home to his father.
m And the father told him
n that he ain’t find no glove
Problems with the syntactic approach
 Individual, thematic and cultural variations
(Patterson) in the material that put the universality of
(eg) event narratives in question
 Cognitive focus at the expense of language
 Significance of the analysis
Problems with the semantic approach
 Content focus at the expense of narrative sequence
 Content focus at the expense of language
 Assumptions about the relation between narrative,
experience and selfhood
 Therapeutic assumptions about ‘good’ narratives
(temporal sequencing; considering and resolving
conflict; expressing and reflecting on emotions;
reaching an ending)
 Elision with politics through emphasis on ‘giving
voice’
Problems of the first pragmatic
approach
 Assumptions about canonic interaction
patterns based on little relevant contemporary
sociolinguistic data
 Assumption of the containment of large
narrative patterns within small ones
Problems of the second pragmatic approach
 Need for supporting evidence
 Lack of generalisability of the genres
 Neglect of smaller-scale phenomena, such as
individual stories
 Aspects of personal and social experience that cannot
be narrated in all stories (Frosh)
Short narrative bibliography
 Andrews, A., Squire, C. and Tamboukou, M. (2008) Doing Narrative Research. London: Sage
 Andrews, A., Day Sclater, S., Squire, C. and Treacher, A. (2004) Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
 Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Elliott, J. (2005) Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, London, Sage.
 Freeman, M. ‘Identity and difference in narrative inquiry, Psychoanalytic narratives: Writing the self into contemporary
cultural phenomena’, Narrative Inquiry 11
 Frosh, S. (2002) After Words. London: Palgrave
 Georgakopoulou, A. (2007) Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
 Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview
Method, London, Sage.
 Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular Oxford: Basil Blackwell; also see his
website
 Malson, H. (2004) Fictional(ising) identity? Ontological assumptions and methodological productions of (‘anorexic’)
subjectivities. in M.Andrews, S.D.Sclater, C.Squire and A.Treacher (eds) Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
 Mishler, E. (1986) Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Patterson, W. (2002) (ed.) Strategic Narrative: new perspectives on the power of stories. Oxford: Lexington.
 Phoenix, A.(2008) Analysing narrative contexts. In M.Andrews, C.Squire and M.Tamboukou (eds) Doing Narrative
Research. London: Sage.
 Plummer, K. (2001) Documents of Life 2. London: Sage.
 Riessman, C. (2007) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. New York: Sage
 Ryan, M-L. (2004) Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
 Seale, C. (2000) ‘Resurrective practice and narrative’, in M.Andrews, S.D.Sclater, C.Squire and A.Treacher (eds) Uses of
Narrative. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Narrative Inquiry