Qualitative Method: Narratives

Chandranshu Sinha
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Three conceptual breaks:

• The "orthodox consensus" of positivism which conceives the

social world as a collection of external facts and attempts to
eliminate bias and subjectivity;

• Post-positivist philosophy of science, which concedes that

objective observation of pure data is impossible but
nevertheless tries to establish criteria of "good" research
practice; and

• The interpretive turn, which rehabilitates subjectivity and

views data collection as a mutual construction of meaning.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

• The rise of qualitative research in psychology over the 20th

century.

• The turn of qualitative research was non-existent until the

1980s, when there was a sharp rise that intensified in the
1990s

• The term "qualitative research" refers to a variety of

approaches to enquiry in the health and social sciences that
address the meaning of verbal text in verbal rather than
numerical terms.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Fundamentally qualitative research is

• More subjective than quantitative research;

• More exploratory than confirmatory;

• More descriptive than explanatory;

• More interpretive than positivist (see Denzin & Lincoln,

1994)
 Five Qualitative Methods: Similar Yet Different!
.
Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design have many varieties of
methods and can be categorized into five groups:
1. Ethnography
2. Narrative
3. Phenomenology
4. Grounded Theory, and
5. Case Study.

• All the five methods generally use similar data collection

techniques (observation, interviews, and reviewing text).
• The differences between the methods can be a bit blurry.
• The purpose of the study differentiates them—something
similar with different types of usability tests.
 Five methods in Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design
Focus
. Sample Data Collection
Method
Size
Context or culture
Participant observation &
Ethnography (Roots in Cultural —
interviews
Anthropology)

Individual experience & Stories from individuals &

Narrative 1 to 2
sequence documents

People who have

Interviews (describing essence
Phenomenology experienced a 5 to 25
of an activity or event)
phenomenon

Interviews, then open and axial

Grounded Develop a theory
20 to 60 coding (provides an explanation
Theory grounded in field data
or theory behind an event)

Organization, entity, Interviews, documents, reports,

Case Study —
individual, or event observations
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Origins of Narratives :

• The word ‘narrative’ has its roots in the

• Sanskrit, (‘gna’ to know)

• Latin word (‘gnarus’ knowing)

• ‘narrat’ related, told

• ‘narrare’ to tell or
• ‘narrativus’ telling a story
Thus Narrative is a form of knowledge that catches two sides of
narrative telling as well as knowing (McQuillan, 2000)
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Origins of Narrative

• Can be traced in literary theory and semiology (study of meaning

making).

Social Sciences:

• Prominent role in social science (Geertz 1973).

• Most scholars point to the ubiquity of narratives and concur that all
forms of narrative share the fundamental interest in making sense of
experience, with interest in constructing and communicating meaning.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Usage of Narratives :
• It is looking over someone else’s shoulder, observing the text
they are reading and writing and if we go beyond and speculate
further then thinking and feeling Geertz’s (1973).

• Lyotard (1979) says… narrative tells about human projects and

their consequences, as they unfold over time.

• Fisher (1987) sees all humans essentially as storytellers who

have a natural capacity to recognize the coherence and fidelity
of the stories, they tell and experience.

• Jerome Bruner states (1990): 'The method of negotiating and

re-negotiating meanings by the mediation of narrative
interpretation is one of the crowning achievements of human
development…'.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
But

• How does one begin?

• How does the researcher breaks from the traps of objectivity,

logico-positivism?

What assumptions one must make or break to use narratives about

• Individual/Self

• Social and Psychological Reality

• Meaning Making
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Assumptions about Individual//Self

Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary critic and philosophical

anthropologist suggests that:

• Individuals represent themselves in greater complexity, as existing

on multiple planes, all in dialogue with each other.

• Self is relativistic and in this view, the individual is always in

process.

• Self can exist only in relationship to some other, whether that

other is another person, other parts of the self, or the individual’s
society, or his or her culture. (Josselson and Lieblich 1995).
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Assumptions about Social and Psychological Reality:
• Is always too contradictory and heteroglot to be fit into a
straightforward genre.
• Comprises of a relativistic rather than a dualistic universe
• Comprises of a universe of human beings always in process,
existing on multiple planes of present experience, poised in
complex relation to the past and to the future.

Assumptions about Meaning-making:

• Is not inherent in an act or experience, but is constructed
through social discourse.
• Is generated by the linkages the participants make between
aspects of life as lived and
• Has explicit linkages that the researcher makes between their
understanding and interpretation.
 Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
This empathic stance orients the researcher to other people’s
experience and meaning making, which is communicated through
narrative.

In brief, the researcher should understand narrative as:

• Modes of knowing; they are processes in process.
• Describes the road to the present and points the way to the
future.
• But the as-yet-unwritten future cannot be identical with the
emerging plot and so the narrative is revised.
• Contains the past in terms of the present and points to a future
that cannot be predicted, although it contains the elements out
of which the future will be created.
• Reveal the plurivocality that is easily suffocated under the
institutionalized versions of truth (see e.g., Boje 1995;
Kallinikos 1997; Fournier 1998).
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Within contemporary psychology…

• Jerome Bruner (1986) has most championed the legitimization of

what he calls “narrative modes of knowing.”

• This mode privileges the particulars of lived experience rather

than logical positivist constructs about variables and classes.

• It is an effort to approach the understandings of lives in context

rather than through a prefigured and narrowing lens.

• Separates ‘narrative modes of knowing’ with ‘scientific modes of

knowing’
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Narrative analysis involves two narratives.
1. One of the primary narrator who has experienced a
phenomena/an event and
2. second of the researcher, who engages with it and attempts to
give ‘meaning’ given by the narrator.

In this sense, what the researcher presents is a ‘meta-narrative’ and

both use their ‘mental frames’ for this purpose.

An attempt needs to be made to understand:

• The ‘mental frames’ used by both in their narrations and
• Since narratives flow out of ‘situated cognitions’, they can only
be understood in terms of life-histories of the ‘narrating
actors/narrators’.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Although different authors are far from unanimous in their
definitions of narratives, most agree upon four things.

1. First, narratives are interpretations of sequential events.

• This usually requires some type of 'plot' to give meaningful
causal structure to the sequential events (Bruner 1990).
• It should be emphasized that while a narrative is composed
of a sequence of events that are given meaning by a plot,
not intrinsic to the events, but imposed on them by the
author.
• When telling the account, it is ultimately up to the narrator
to create such causal interpretations, the plausibility of
which will be judged by the recipients of that account.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Although different authors are far from unanimous in their

definitions of narratives, most agree upon four things.

2. Second, narratives assume the intentionality of human

action.
• Since narration is a complex social process, a form of
social action that embodies the relation between the
narrator and culture therefore narrative analysis has, in
fact, often concentrated on the subject positions in the
stories.
• A major contribution of narrative analysis is the study of
general social phenomena through a focus on their
embodiment in specific life stories (Protagonist, Victim,
Key Role, Adversary, Object of Action).
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Although different authors are far from unanimous in their
definitions of narratives, most agree upon four things.

3. Third, narratives are built on different kinds of discourses,

which are not infinite in number (Foucault 1973; McKinlay
and Starkey 1998).
• In fact most narratives include a multitude of discourses
and
• the issue is to reflectively decide on what aspects of
narrative data to respond to and
• it is important because the discourses construct subject
positions and attach identities to the actors.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes
Although different authors are far from unanimous in their definitions
of narratives, most agree upon four things.

4. Fourth, narratives and identity-building processes are

inextricably intertwined.
• This linkage is particularly strong in the autobiography type of
narrative, where the author and the central subject are often
seen as the same person.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

Contemporary or Classical Point of Departure to the

Narrative Analysis Approach for meaning making
Flexibility in data collection; Interactions in the language of
subsequent analysis and the researcher; makes context
interpretation obtains a more integral to research
realistic feel of the world. phenomena
The Classical narrative analysis More collaborative in nature;
is ‘post-hoc’ the narrator(s) help sought to
make sense of narratives.

The researcher places structure Understanding and

based on one sided narrative interpretation is more
analysis. grounded as both researcher
and researched involved in
meaning making.
Focus is on key actors while Focus also on ‘other’ voices
others’ voices are not taken. present along with key actors.
Narratives: Method To Understand Social & Psychological Processes

In brief,

• The ultimate aim of the narrative investigation of human life is the

interpretation of experience.
• But what is meant by the narrator and how it is interpreted by the
researcher becomes highly relative and contextual.
• Nevertheless the narrative approach to understanding brings the
researcher closer into the investigative processes than do
quantitative and statistical methods.
• Through narrative, we come in contact with our participants, as
people engaged in the process of interpreting themselves, within
the context in which life is lived.

• *Read Sinha (2016) ‘Subaltern Narratives of Organizational Change’ in Organization Studies in India. Editors: Tripathi, Rama Charan,
and Dwivedi, Rohit; pp 375-407; ISBN 9788125064244; Publisher: Orient Black Swan, New Delhi India.
Narratives of Forced Layoff or Job-Cut

• Place: St. Thomas University, New Brunswick

Maritime Canada
• Context: The Multicultural Canadian Context
• Problem: Forced Layoffs (Job Cut)
• Reality 1: The Challenge of Multiculturalism
• Reality 2: The Story of Mainstream Canadians
• Reality 3: The Story of Immigrants
• Focus: Researching Social-Psychological
Experiences of Forced Layoff or Job-Cut
• Specific: Victims’ Experience of Job Loss
• Study: Victims of Forced Layoffs: Narratives of
Mainstream White Population in Maritime
Canada or
In other words the study focused on Constructing Victim’s Social
& Psychological Experiences in the Multicultural Canadian
Context.
 Narratives of Job Loss

The study used Ricoeur’s (1983) approach to understand the

narratives which
• Used dominant forms of emplotment used by the victims of
lay-offs were examined by using narratives to make sense
of the changes unfolding in their lives.
• Organized past, present, and future together in the present
form providing a meaningful sense of sequence of events.
• Focused on ‘threefold present’ (Ricoeur, 1983) because it
reflects how these white Canadian mainstream victims
went through and made sense of social and psychological
experiences from past to present joblessness in a rational
way.
• The study also explores how people draw various culturally
appropriate social and psychological resources to deal with
as victims of job-loss.
 Ricoeur’s Method of Analyzing Narratives of Job Loss

Ricoeur’s (1983) analysis involves three narrative operations:

• Prefiguration: involving narration of events based on
practical experience.
• Configuration: of those events emplotted from social and
psychological experiences of job-loss.
• Refiguration: where the meaning is assigned to these
experiences as per the cultural diversity and contextual
realities of individual victims.

The study used narrative configurations which had

ramifications resonating at social and psychological levels.

The study used many different stories, but the plurality of

stories converged into one dominant narrative structure
manifesting victim’s social and psychological experiences.
Thank You