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
Why is narrative research so
popular?
Apparent universality
Interdisciplin
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
Approaches to narrative analysis

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)
Norriss 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 aint 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 first semantic
approach

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 first pragmatic
research

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)