What is Narrative Analysis?
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What is narrative analysis in qualitative research?
Researchers use narrative analysis to understand how research participants construct story and narrative from their own personal experience. That means there is a dual layer of interpretation in narrative analysis. First the research participants interpret their own lives through narrative. Then the researcher interprets the construction of that narrative.
Narratives can be derived from journals, letters, conversations, autobiographies, transcripts of in-depth interviews, focus groups, or other types of narrative qualitative research and then used in narrative research.
This post is in part a summary of our interpretation of Catherine Kohler Riessman’s Narrative Analysis.
Examples of personal narratives
Personal narratives come in a variety of forms and can all be used in narrative research.
Topical stories
A restricted story about one specific moment in time with a plot, characters, and setting, but doesn’t encompass the entirety of a person’s life. Example: a research participant’s answer to a single interview question
Personal narrative
Personal narratives come from a long interview or a series of long narrative interviews that give an extended account of someone’s life. Example: a researcher conducting an in-depth interview, or a series of in-depth interviews with an individual over an extended period of time.
Entire life story
Constructed from a collection of interviews, observations, and documents about a person’s life. Example: a historian putting together the biography of someone’s life from past artifacts.
Capturing narrative data
While humans naturally create narratives and stories when interpreting their own lives, certain data collection methods are more conducive to understanding your research participants' sense of self narrative. Semi-structured interviews, for example, give the interviewee the space to go on narrative tangents and fully convey their internal narratives. Heavily structured interviews that follow a question answer format or written surveys, are less likely to capture narrative data.
Transcribing narrative data
As mentioned earlier, narrative analysis has dual layers of interpretation. Researchers should not take narrative interviews at face value because they are not just summarizing a research participant's self-narrative. Instead, researchers should actively interpret how the interviewee created that self-narrative. Thus narrative analysis emphasizes taking verbatim transcription of narrative interviews, where it is important to include pauses, filler words, and stray utterances like “um….”.
For more information on transcription options, please see our guide on how to transcribe interviews.
Coding in narrative analysis
There are many methods for coding narrative data. They range from deductive coding where you start with a list of codes, and inductive coding where you do not. You can also learn about many other ways to code in our Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data or take our Free Course on Qualitative Data Analysis.
What is narrative research
In addition to narrative analysis, you can also practice narrative research, which is a type of study that seeks to understand and encapsulate the human experience by using in depth methods to explore the meanings associated to people’s lived experiences. You can utilize narrative research design to learn about these concepts. Narrative analysis can be used in narrative research as well as other approaches such as grounded theory, action research, ethnology and more.
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Want to learn how to do narrative analysis? Submit your email to request our free narrative analysis guide with tips on how to get started with your own narrative analysis. You will get a narrative analysis in qualitative research PDF emailed to you.
Inductive method for narrative analysis
Learn about inductive narrative method:
It is common for inductive methods of narrative analysis to code much larger blocks of text than traditional coding methods. Narrative analysis differs from other qualitative analysis methods, in that it attempts to keep the individual narratives intact. In many coding methods, it is common to split up an interviewee’s narrative into smaller pieces and group them by theme with other interviewee’s statements. This breaks up the individual’s personal narrative.
Narrative analysis treats a complete story as the individual piece of datum that you are analyzing. So in the inductive method of narrative analysis, you should code the entire block of text for each of your research participants' stories. This section of text is called a “narrative block”
Entrance and Exit Talk
There are tricks to identifying narrative blocks in your research participants’ narrative interviews. Riesssman recommended looking for “entrance and exit talk”. Your participants may give you verbal hints when they begin and end a story.
A story may start with the phrases:
“There was this one time…”,
“Let me give you an example”,
and “I’ll always remember when…”
Likewise, you can detect the end of stories with exit talk such as:
“So that’s how that wrapped up…”
“That is a pretty classic example of…”
and “and that was the end of that.”
You can’t always depend on “entrance and exit talk”, as they will not always be used. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews are not screenplays. Narratives won’t always exist as nice neat narrative blocks. Participants may meander and go on tangents. But the narrative through-line may still exist. And using coding you group together a narrative that is spread across an interview.
Deductive method for narrative analysis
Learn about deductive narrative method:
There are many existing story structure frameworks. With a deductive method of narrative analysis, researchers can use a story structure framework and as their initial set of codes. This can be as simple as “Beginning”, “Middle” and “End”. In “Doing Narrative Research”, Patterson used the following codes for his narrative structure.
Abstract: The core thesis of the story, summary
Orientation: Time, place, situation, and characters
Complicating action: Sequence of events, plot
Evaluation: How the storyteller comments on meaning
Resolution: Outcome of the story
Coda: Story’s ending
At Delve, when we conduct narrative analysis we prefer the “Story Circle” for our initial set of codes:
You - A character is in a zone of comfort
Need - But they want something.
Go - They enter an unfamiliar situation,
Search - Adapt to it,
Find - Get what they wanted,
Take/Pay - Pay a heavy price for it,
Return - Then return to their familiar situation,
Change - Having changed.
When utilizing the deductive method, you may want to keep track of the existing framework in a codebook. See our guide on “How to Create a Qualitative Codebook”.
Hybrid Inductive and Deductive Narrative Analysis
As is common in other methods of qualitative analysis, combining inductive and deductive can be helpful. For narrative analysis, this involves first coding inductively the narrative blocks in your transcripts. Then within those narrative blocks, code deductively using a story structure framework. We will delve deeper into this in the following sections.
How to analyze data in a narrative interview
Narrative analysis, like many qual methods, takes a set of data like interviews and reduces it to abstract findings. The difference is that while many popular qualitative methods aim to reduce interviews to a set of core themes or findings, narrative analysis aims to reduce interviews to a set of core narratives.
A core narrative is a generalized narrative grounded in your research participants’ stories. This is not implying that all stories in your narrative study will be perfectly encapsulated by one core narrative. There will be outliers and nuance. And as in all qualitative analysis, embracing and communicating this is an important part of the process.
A step by step approach to narrative analysis and finding the core narratives
There is no one agreed-upon method of narrative analysis or narrative research method. There are many types of narrative research designs. That being said, we thought it would be helpful to provide a step-by-step narrative approach to at least one method of narrative analysis that will help you find core narratives in research.
Step 1: Code Narrative Blocks
Inductively code the narrative blocks you find in your interviews. You should code narrative blocks about similar “life events” with the same code.
For example, stories about how someone decided to have children could be coded as “Narratives about deciding to have children”.
Step 2: Group and Read By Live-Event
Read over all the narratives that you coded with the same “life event” code. As you do so, note their similarities and differences. This is the beginning of your analysis!
Step 3: Create Nested Story Structure Codes
For every “life event” code, create and nest codes based on your story structure framework of choice. For example:
Narratives about deciding to have children (this is your inductively created life-event code)
Abstract (these codes are based on story structure)
Orientation
Complicating action
Evaluation
Resolution
Coda
More generally put:
Life Event Code
Story Structure Code 1
Story Structure Code 2
...
Now break up your narrative blocks, by applying these story structure codes.
Step 4: Delve into the Story Structure
Now you can collate each life event by its story structure code. For example within “narratives about deciding to have children'', you can focus on “Orientation”. In all the stories about deciding to have children, you can compare and contrast how different research participants oriented their stories. The similarities and differences can be written down as you observe them. Differences can be further coded to help with later analysis. For example, if it was common for your participants to talk about their parent’s marital status, you may end up with the following code structure.
Deciding to have children
Abstract
Orientation
Parent divorce
Parents still together
etc...
Step 5: Compare Across Story Structure
As you break up your narrative blocks by story structure, do not lose sight of the overarching narrative. Switch between reading your narrative blocks as a whole, and diving into each individual story structure code. Pay attention to how story structure codes relate across a life event.
For example, participants who talked about their parents’ divorce, may construct meaning differently than those whose parents remained together. You may discover this finding by comparing “Orientation” with “Evaluation”.
Step 6: Tell the Core Narrative
At the end of these steps, you will have fully explored each narrative block. You will have a deep understanding of how your research participants self-narrate their lives. You will have observed how your participants' stories relate, but also how they diverge. And through the process, you may have a theory why these stories diverge.
For each life-event take the structure you used (in our example Patterson’s Abstract, Orientation, etc…) and write a core narrative that encapsulates the commonalities between your participants. If you have found fundamental differences within your research base, you can capture that nuance in a single core narrative. Alternatively, you can break a life event into two core narratives and compare them. In our example above we may write one core narrative from the perspective of participants whose parents divorced and another perspective of participants whose parents stayed together.
Now that you’ve learned about various models of narrative analysis, take the next step by seeing how to code the data that you collect from these methods. Check out our Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data or take our Free Online Course on Qualitative Data Analysis.
Try Delve, Narrative Analysis Software
Online software such as Delve can help streamline how you’re coding your qualitative coding. Try a free trial or watch a demo of the Delve.
References:
Riessman, Catherine Kohler. (©1993) Narrative analysis /Newbury Park, CA : Sage Publications,
Cite this blog post:
Delve, Ho, L., & Limpaecher, A. (2020b, September 15). What is Narrative Analysis? Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data. https://delvetool.com/blog/narrativeanalysis