Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences

I recently attended a workshop on narrative research methods run by Catherine Kohler Riessman, the author of this important new text. The workshop was well attended by postgraduate students, academics and researchers from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds. Some attendees were very new to narrative research, and their questions to Riessman revealed commonly held assumptions about what constitutes “research” as well as the inevitable anxieties that arise when exploring hitherto unfamiliar approaches. This book will appeal to those attendees, and others, new to the narrative field. It presents a broad but thorough overview of the range of narrative research methods used in the “human sciences” and has been “purposely crafted for beginning investigators” (p. 17). However, the book will also appeal to experienced researchers who have been in the narrative paddock for a much longer time. It is not only an introduction (perhaps even enticement) to narrative research, but it is also an expertly crafted survey of approaches to narrative analysis, and a timely reminder of the important contribution narrative methods make to understanding the social world.

Narrative research encompasses a wide range of methodological and analytical practices, and is used by researchers with different substantive interests and disciplinary trainings. What links this diversity is a curiosity in the social origins, enactments, and consequences of stories and story telling. Narrative researchers generally work within the interpretive paradigm: an approach to research that positions people as active subjects (rather than objects) in a social world where “reality” is “accomplished” or “constructed” through the everyday practices of meaning making. Thus, understanding the social world requires researchers to explore the meanings (and perhaps motives) people bring to their everyday experiences, as well to develop an understanding or explanation of where those meanings come from, and how they shape “reality”. As a tradition in the human sciences, interpretivism counters posivitism, the social “science” paradigm devoted to discovering “universal laws” by objectively “measuring” human behaviour (supposedly) untainted by human consciousness.

One site of everyday meaning‐making is the stories we tell. Narrative researchers explore these stories, interrogate their content and form, ask questions about why we tell them, and consider their effects, both for the “types of people” we become in telling our stories, and the “type of world” we locate ourselves within. Not only do people tell stories, but also stories are told by groups, organisations, and even nation‐states. Narrative researchers are interested in all types and locations of stories, from the seemingly individual (personal narratives) to widely shared public stories (meta‐narratives). Analysing narratives might also include situating stories within their wider social and historical context, and critically questioning which stories can be told, and heard, and which stories can not.

As Riessman notes, there is a variety of approaches to analysing narrative spanning a broad spectrum of methodological and epistemological domains. Shared by all narrative analysts however, is an understanding of narrative as a particular form of story telling. Narratives are stories comprised of contingent actions located in sequence, or as Riessman notes, narratives are “how a speaker or writer assembles and sequences events and uses language and/or visual images to communicate meaning … to an audience” (p. 11). Because narrative researchers see stories as social products, produced within specific social contexts, stories do not come from “inside” ourselves. Rather, stories are “out there” – in “society” – and used by story tellers to communicate meaning to their audience.

Narrative researchers collect stories, and transform them into “data” to analyse. In Chapter 2, “Constructing narratives for inquiry”, Riessman provides an excellent account of how, as researchers, we co‐construct the stories we research. Most narrative researchers collect narratives through interviews (although this is not the only method), and unlike other interview approaches, narrative researchers often seek extended accounts. Throughout the process of collection (inviting participation; arranging the interview; asking questions) and interpretation (listening, transcribing, analysing) the researcher is “present”; as an audience, but more importantly, as a “translator”. Using exemplars from her own work, Riessman illustrates how different transcribing techniques produce different narratives, and discusses some of the ethical and methodological implications of transforming speech into transcripts. Riessman's discussion here is an excellent account of the situated nature of interview‐based research, and deserves to be widely read by not only narrative researchers, but also those employing interview methods more generally.

Riessman begins and ends the book with chapters that place narrative analysis in its broader research context. In Chapter 1, “Looking back, looking forward”, she traces the history of the “narrative turn”, and outlines the development of the narrative research tradition. In Chapter 7, “Truths and cautions”, she discusses issues of validity, research ethics and research practice, and reminds us that research is always a reflexive practice. Along with chapter two (discussed above), these chapters effectively “bookend” the four central chapters, each dedicated to differing approaches to narrative analysis.

Thematic, structural, performative and visual analyses of narratives are thus discussed separately, but in chapters which follow a similar structure. In each chapter, the key aspects of the analytic approach are set briefly in the context of its historical and philosophical origins, and then exemplars are offered to show “how” researchers have “done” that particular type of narrative analysis. There are many advantages to this chapter structure. It is a helpful pedagogical tool, reminding readers that narrative analysis requires researchers to bring to their work considerable theoretical knowledge (from their research area) as well as methodological competence (in terms of knowing “how” and “why” analysis might be done in a particular way). Secondly, it enables readers to compare and contrast techniques within each analytical approach, and to think about the issues frequently and expertly raised by Riessman through application to “real” research data. In addition, the exemplars are all thoroughly engaging, and drawn from across the social or “human sciences”. Finally, it enables comparison across approaches, and illustrates more generally the strengths and weaknesses of different types of narrative analysis, as well as how different approaches can be combined. Using this chapter structure, Riessman introduces us to thematic analysis (focusing on what is told); structural analysis (how it is told); performative analysis (how narratives make possible “types” of people); and visual analysis (how image‐makers “tell” stories as well as how images evoke stories of our own).

In every chapter, Riessman uses extensive endnotes, to complement her exposition and to refer readers to relevant sources and additional exemplars. In themselves, the endnotes are excellent, and demonstrate Riessman's undoubted expertise in narrative approaches. However, their location did prove irritating at times, especially in the many sections of the text that were compelling to read, but required some fumbling to find the related notes clumped at the end of the book. But this criticism is really one of book design. In terms of content and interest, Narrative Approaches in the Human Sciences is a “must‐read” for those new to narrative research, and will no doubt become “a classic” as an introduction to the field.