Tonight, I watched another Delve video: “Narrative Analysis Explained in Simple Terms.” This one focused on narrative analysis, defined as “the process that researchers use to understand how research participants construct story and narrative from their own experiences.” The narrator noted that there is a “dual layer of interpretation” in narrative analysis because the research participants (“storytellers”) interpret their own lives through narrative and the researcher interprets the construction of that narrative. The video compared thematic analysis and narrative analysis. In thematic analysis you “break up transcripts into quotes and compare them to develop core themes” but you may destroy the narratives told by participants. In narrative analysis, transcripts are broken into narrative blocks and compared to develop core narratives. A core narrative was defined as a generalized narrative grounded in your research participants’ stories. The steps of narrative analysis are data collection, transcription, three types of narratives, and analysis. Data sources can be journals, letters, conversations, autobiographies… The video described three types of narratives: topical story, personal narrative, and entire life story. The topical story is restricted to one time point and narrative. Personal narrative can be an interview or series of interviews. An entire life story can be a historian putting together a life story. The video noted that after transcribing, it is important to analyze verbatim transcripts. Coding can be performed through inductive or deductive methods of analysis. The inductive method of narrative analysis breaks up the transcripts by narrative, compares and contrasts them, and develops core narratives. Semi-structured interviews may have narrative lines that can be identified. The deductive method of narrative analysis starts with story structure frameworks. A simple story structure framework is the beginning, middle, and end. The story circle is more complicated. The doing narrative analysis framework includes abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, coda, and evaluation. The last part of the video included strategies for narrative analysis. The video narrator recommended starting with inductive analysis and reading through the transcript to break it up by stories. Stories are then compared across research participants. The narrator mentioned this approach often works to come up with core narratives if the data set is relatively small. For larger data sets, they recommend bringing in the deductive method, reading the stories you inductively coded, and then, and then coding them by your story structure of choice.
