The analysis of narratives

remember I said to you a a couple weeks ago now that the series of lectures are three from me and then two from Tracy were moving from a kind of more realist approach to a more constructivist approach well we kind of got halfway then with narrative and last week you saw how grand your theory involve lots of interpretive kind of approaches well that signature of narratives world but a lot more focus in narrative now on how language is being used and in particular in this case it's how stories are being told and how the language is used through a story to to tell someone what you think about something and what what your feelings and what your experiences are narrative it is a thing of storytelling perhaps I says I think they would do naturally all the time anyways nothing peculiar about it and we'll certainly have a look at some example that later on that how narratives crop up in in interviews and so on and have a look at some other to start with just a few general terms narrative story the way that social actors this is what the focus is on the way that those actors produce represent and contextualize their experience and their personal knowledge how they make sense of what happened that's why I leave I contextualized that they give sense to it I tell a story both to themselves by by telling us there and of course to other people who are listening to it and that story may also be something they've told many times that they repeated many times or it may be a version of something that repeated and told before so it'll be in some sense adapted to the particular context picture audience in which is being said an important points about that is to it's to to make sense of what's happened to them so it's it's often reflections on things in their own life that things that they done and so on and trying in some way to to put that into income kind of meaningful context for themselves and for you now of course in so doing they do a lot of other things and I'll be coming back to that later on some of the other functions of stories and the other things that are done when people are telling stories just a few other terminology issues and the narrative I've taken as being the wide general term and narrative is any kind of accounts whether it's the whole interview or some small part of interview in which some kind of story or or some kind of explanation of experience is given well as I take story to be restricted to a genre that has these elements in its these key elements not come back again later on to talk about what these mean these key elements but protagonists that is to say actors who do things in the story events things that happen to those actors or things the actors do and complications and consequences now there is a formalistic way of looking at narrative in this kind of way a story kind of approach and I use that term there working narratives come from well what he hinted at this that they come from point a straight forward into use well certainly we can do what's often called a narrative interview or a very open kind of interview which simply you say to somebody please tell me your story and then if it works well you sit back and listen for the next hour or so and they just tell you their story me you might contextualize a bit more about what particular aspect of their life I want them to talk about but you kind of give an indication the beginning of a narrative interview that that's what you want to do you're going to sit back and let them tell it as it is so this kind of interview is very much an example of a participant lead interview it's where you let the part of the interviewee instead determine what they're saying and what comes up and so on and much less intervention from you determining what issues come up and so on so whereas in I think of the last term I talked about an interview scheduled or or a prompt list in the sense work for an interview we have a list of topics you want to talk about narrative interview might not have any of that all much they simply were the top you know your experience in doing so answer and that's it and that's all they were talking about you can also get narratives out of biographies and even autobiographies biographies but you are somebody terribly about their life and that can be done all sorts of ways again rather like a narrative the narrative interview can generate just you know so one question beginning can generate the whole of the biography but you might come back with prompts about what happened next and you know who did what when and some reminders about things they missed out and so on or things they want to come back to and the orthography is simply the the the person you know doing it of their own life in fact you can use people's autobiography as a form of data in narrative approaches so he'll write their own life down in earlier autobiography you can use that unalloyed things are things like the life history interview which is well like a biographical interview and more often focuses on particular aspects of life for example there was a whole series of these done some decades ago now of people's experience of wartime Britain so the life history of what was life like in the war so that period and and the life history of you often accompanied by things like photographs to jog people's memory and so on and then they come out with with stories basically about what went on but you can even go to the extent of looking at things like personal letters diaries and so on if they're detailed enough to give you that kind of sense of telling stories it depends partly on what people write in their letters and in their Diaries if they tell stories fine but not everyone writes letters and diaries another way okay so a whole host of sources for for narrative data has to be said that most of the time for most research is doing narrative research it's the interviews that is that the main source and but but don't forget about the other sources as well just to mention some names of theorists here there are a whole load of these and lots of people working this area but these are ones you will probably come across in reading the the background literature Norman Denison in fact law America essays American the All American all three of American this Riesman Canadian anyway North American for the like that they all from North America Norman Denison actually quite well known for his work on triangulation is his that was done some some decades ago before I get interested in narrative accounts and so on and he talked about triangulation but in more recent years he's made much more interested in a very constructivist approach towards narrative and narrative analysis and Denison suggests that the we see that the narratives a story with a sequence of events things happening one after the other and those sequences all those events are all significant for the narrator and the audience Oh things are mentioned because they have some kind of meaning not just a happened of course they happened but they're mentioned as having happened because they have some sort of significance as an invented the narrator and something the rater wants to tell the audience about there was a reason why they mention it if you think about it if you tell the story of what happened to you even you know just a short period of your life you could spend month after month talking about it and but of course you haven't got that time you've got this now to say so you select things there are things that you pick out now what are those things and why'd you pick them out and that's what the narrative analyst is interested in why have you chosen those things why are you highlighting those sequences and those events and what does it mean to you the person and the audience or to whom you're speaking then it also points out that stories tend to have middles beginning the end and a logic to them I'll come back to this with some more examples of this in just a moment but stories start somewhere they note there is only a setting up of stories you know setting out the characters the place where things happened and so on and then there's a middle when things get going and events happen and so on and normally there's some kind of ending which can be upbeat or downbeat it can be a kind of lesson learned or whatever something that kind of unifies the the narrative and gives a logic to it as well now going on I'll talk about the logic of these things importantly he suggests narratives have a temporal causal sequence the whole point about telling a story is that one thing leads to another leads to another at least and that's what the person saying on the person tells the story they're telling you that that event lit for them that event led to that event and led to that thing and that lit them doing this and so on things happened in this kind of order and they were important they happened like that and happen to me and so on so there's a kind of causal sequence in in storm Catholic or Eastern who's written a nice little that short text for sage on on on narrative and now it Misha who I think probably one the originated this approach he wrote a lot about medical context and the telling of stories by patients and so on that's become a quite a large area of that narrative research they're looking at people who've suffered illnesses and traumas and disablement and so on talking about their experiences recently points out in one of her books that are actually even in straightforward research interviews people often break into stories and will actually look at one example that in exercise later on so looking at you know where people suddenly start to tell a story about something in when they're answering a more general question and again there's a natural inclination to do that for apps to tell stories we we like telling stories and we like to to hear things down that way okay well just do it to put a bit of context in a bit of structure out rather on on this I've gone to a book by lieblick and colleagues and who identify these four types of narrative and life history and they classify them by whether the focus is on the content or the form so is it is it the actual meaningful content of the narratives we're looking at or is it the structure the form if you like or the structure of the story or is it is it looking you the whole story or is it looking at parts and categorizing bits of the story so this is looking at the whole narrative in one one large chunk and this is looking at bits of it and how the thing might develop in in parts okay let's look at what those meaning so first of all let's look at the holistic content so this is number one and this looks at the complete life story it's holistic so it's the whole story of a person and and perhaps it's familiar from things like clinical studies the a patient I mean certainly to think of things like you know the classic psychiatric clay studies you know Freud ins and so on these are kind of holistic narratives we can use very familiar quality methods to identify key themes other words you can do the thematic analysis that we talked about last week and grounded theory and in previous weeks to do to look at it it's a it's a story in a large sense and we can look at somatic ideas within it say lebryk at home and we can look at things like transitions between themes that may be important part of the narrative that things go from one situation to another situation we can look at where that happens again now it is very often told chronologically that is the story starts in the past and gradually comes up to date in all day in chronological order and and so we can look for the way things change the transitions from that to that when that person change from being as soon as that to being as knows that had people often talk about it that way yeah before then I was doing this and then I change and did this or before that I was in this kind of person and now I'm this kind of person it's on so transitions can be often important and ideas to look for but we can also look for episodes this is you know given that it's a chronological sequence of things happening and episode can happen at some stage that doesn't necessarily fit in it can be in some way an outlier or unusual or uncommon for that person in their narrative and there might be some reason why it's there some some contrast is being given by the person that's why they're including that or they're surprised by it you know and they're surprised that they overcome it and change things despite the fact that it was it was different from all the other situations so particular ones need to contradict themes in terms of content looser evaluation by the narrator can be an interesting things to look at and even pay attention issues that are not mentioned I thought that came up I think we were talking about the the line by line coding that there were things that weren't mentioned somebody said that to me which were interesting that their it wasn't talked about and when someone's telling you a story if they leave something out you can pretty well assume that that's intentional you know they've got the chance to include that they want to but they hadn't included it so why haven't they included it it might just be they don't think it's that important but there might be other reasons too one's not intuitive things so you know your expectations of what should be in a story the story of a life for its own Paula I don't know you talk about you know to a young person about their that their educational experience in the country we expect to talk about things like school and college and so on and if they don't do that if they don't know about those things what what's going on why do they lift them out what what are they telling you by leaving things out of the story that you might expect to be in there now there's not there's nothing necessarily sinister about leaving things out there may be good reasons why they left them out and but but nevertheless it is an interesting question to ask why does that narrative take that form Libra canal suggests various typical themes of people's whole life story and here are some of them they give the relational story in which the person is constantly referring to others you might you might actually go to the NV story you know I'm not like so-and-so I'm like this you know ladies sounds that I did this and that sort of thing well unlike my brother I did this etc etc here and you can see a contrast with somebody else who is set up as someone who achieved what I didn't achieve or someone who it was a wastrel and and I actually did things and so on but a contrast is maybe other people so the relational story often does it maybe not just one person I use several people in the story overall but that's how they are portraying themselves as different or similar to the others in the relational story so it'll be about belonging separateness and about you know being part of something being part of the family is a common one being part of the community and so on or separateness and being divorced from that being you know somehow taken away from it and you often get it's coming up here we're talking about that migration or people migrants people have moved from one place to another whether that's you know just simply within their own country or from one country or another we'll often talk about those kinds of things about not belonging or more belonging finding a new belonging finding separateness or not and so on as they moved you also get it here with closeness and remoteness the experience of moving and this can be just simply of things like you know occupational mobility moving one town to another and you get those kinds of issues coming up a very common core of the story is the vocation a lot of people define themselves and when they talk about themself to a lot about their occupation the job they do and they see its locations it's not just a job they're doing but a vocation and that becomes the central life theme for their their stories other things that come up obviously relations opposite sex or not as the case may be and you might say well why aren't they mentioning if they don't mention it and and why are they if they are mentioning issues similar issues come up another I mean is following the the psychology Zangler and the focus on early life again a common thing that people come up with here is the idea of I'm like I am now because of what happened to me in the past my childhood experiences have done this that the other or or my first marriage was sucks that I now AM service and so that kind of relationship back so that kind of and relating back to to the things that happened earlier on in the life that the linen pickup okay so that's number one that's this the content holistic let's go on to the form yeah you mentioned that within that holistic context you've got you can use different types of analysis so is this approach this narrative approach is that a certain way of looking at the data it's not it's not a type of analysis it is it is a bit about it's quite complicated it's interesting if you already picked up on that as a kind of ambiguity because for some people it is a form of analysis and you can use a very kind of discursive kind of approaches to analyzing data which pick up a lot of things that we bring up later on do with analytics or to do with narrative structure that come up as well so you can see it as a way of analyzing stories are different from coding and what those people tend to emphasize is the focus in on one person's story so they're looking at the individual and how they see the world rather than comparing across cases so what's common to grounded theory along with you talked about last week is the cross case comparison that's sort of trying to do this so some narrative analysts will say no you should be doing focusing on the one person even and and focusing pretty on the Khan discursive aspects of what they're doing but not everyone agree to that now there are other narrative theorists who are quite happy in fact as neatly cut out suggests hearing if you're doing that kind of of looking at that kind of narrative why can't you do a somatic analysis and look at the themes across a number of different people that you might interview and compare those things if I was going to use a few Matic analysis when I'm English kids were using the analysis I'd have to link them both together to say I'm using approach using the States if you want to yes you can I think you can do that I think you can essentially you know do a thematic analysis so you you know you're trying to get large themes that come up in across different cases but the same time pay attention so the narrative elements what's going on which might be small-scale narratives within the themes idea a narrative approach or it might be a larger narrative which itself has important themes of change and you know success and so on that have come out which we want to compare with other narratives and what's interesting I find when reading some of this stuff is suppose this might be controversial is that the people who do take a very individual stick version of narrative theories they look just one person's narrative and and and don't compare the other people's then all these things they shouldn't be comparing often actually do that talk about that person then compare that with somebody else's narrative compared with somebody else oh now once you start doing that seems to me that's a thematic approach you're comparing what they are doing with what they're doing and so on and a lot of the narrative books you read and contact see for example of talking about educational narrative narratives in schools and our teachers and so on does a lot of that comparative approach and looking at lots of different narratives and the different ways in which teachers and school children talk about that there are educational experience so it is a very almost in the end of thematic approach that was coming out but very much informed by the idea of the narrative and some of the stretch I'll talk about later on about you know the the the nature of the story itself till I come on to that bit I can't really illustrate it so just bear with me and I'll come on to those things if I hear it is already this is it this is the part of it and you can analyze stories complete life stories in these kinds of almost classic terms so this this almost comes from a special cassettes from from you know Greek and complete writings about in literature and these four major forms of story are often found in fact the first two I think probably tend to occur more often maybe number three as well as some extent and the last one is quite unusual but what one may mean by these things well first of all the romance is a story which is set up with a hero or heroine the person normally the person telling story who faces a series of challenges those things happen to them which are challenging on route to their goal and eventual victory they overcome things and you get typical examples of this or people you have a serious illness and then talk about how they fault the illness notice that the choice of term here the fight against the owners that's a very common thing and you eventually overcome it succeed they get better and then now back into life again and there are measures of how that success and they got back to a job or they've now had children or whatever you know however they talk about the eventual victory is coming off and that's that's called the romance story if you like that's the story of a hero facing challenges overcoming and win anything yet then there's the comedy approach comedy story it doesn't mean a joke doesn't mean it's funny necessarily comedy essentially is where the goal is the restoration of social order and the hero has represents - over come the hazards that threaten that order so it's something wider than just the individual something that's going on which might be the person's family it might be the work situation they're in something like that but where their activities bring that that you know that that's social order back to an even keel is being threatened by something perhaps they're talking about the company they work for is being been taken over you know aggressive takeover bid by some other company and they are talk telling a story about how their activities within that try to you know adjust things within the company it may end up with you to take over but there'll be some kind of of reordering of things at the end of the story that comes out of that no sorry a victory hasn't seen as victory aside but rather a satisfactory solution for it for those involved the tragedy is almost the opposite of the romance here the the heroes defeated by the forces of evil and ostracize Isis from society but you had to retake that in a kind of metaphorical sense here the person's overcome by things this is the defeated person the person who's experienced this that in the other and they've been hard done by they never succeeded they haven't got the benefit so they should should come to them and so on and they end up maybe not being literally option ostracized thrown out of society necessarily but but sort of certainly much metaphorically so they're excluded in some way they don't get the benefits that are due to them or they ought to come to a citizen and so on so it's a tragic outcome and then finally there's the satire of cynical perspective on social hair hegemony the idea of a kind of almost setting yourself outside society and saying looking back on it and seeing the the ridiculous nature of of how people are and the kind of again emoni the the kind of general social norms which they are following and again a kind of outsider's view of how odd that might seem so different kind of story quite an unusual story I think in for many people as I say those common ones tend to be the romance and the comedy when past the tragedy as well now there can be other ways of doing this and you can talk about whether story ascends and descends and and whether it gets to ascending getting to better things or descending or regressing to getting it to worse things and a lot of stories tend to kind of regress to begin with then ascend and that's a typical format you know things get there something happens to me things get bad I have to struggle god it was awful and then I did so-and-so all then sounds that happened and sudden you're back onto a progressive advance and things are getting better and sometimes it's the opposite sometimes the stable kind of plot nothing nothing really happening it's just everything is fine and nothing terribly and you know either advancing or regressing in the story a lot of stories I've come across tend to be this kind of format types I tend to be a combination of advancing and regressing you could set a tragedy often is a story that starts out sorry not the tragedy the romance I mean it's a story that starts out with a dip from from a situation down to some kind of awful crisis and then a recovery from that usually a recovery is brought about by the person themselves something they did something they've done that that change things have brought them back to back to success ok so that's the second cat that's looking at the the whole story but looking at the formal structure of the story how that how the structure is is formed now come to the the categories that the parts of stories and talk about either the categorical content which is essentially a kind of contact analysis or even a thematic analysis very simple can be simply a matter of counting and crossed every rating if you're doing a numerically nothing terribly exciting about that and I'm not so much more about that number three number four talk much more about the again not the content but the structures how people are doing things and this is really getting onto the discursive approaches in narrative and analysis so looking at the discrete linguistic usages that style isms the characterizations and so on the metaphors used whether in the words of passive or active and so on and lieblick adele's suggests a whole range of these things that you can do you can only look at particular words and and do that or take a kind of more sort of discursive approach towards and how the words are being used the important point is to see in detail how people tell the story through the words and metaphors and similes and so on and they're using so you can resolve a look at adverbials adverbs and to see you know again what their being what use they're being made of in sorry what use is being made of them in the the story was I suddenly indicating unexpectedness events and so mental verbs and young people have done this gone through looking for any sexually people say I thought I understood I noticed and so on where they're talking about they're thinking about things are reflecting upon what they've experienced and they're going this this can be an expression of whether people are conscious and you know forcibly kind of emphasize the fact they're conscious of this symptom this is what happened at the time I knew it was happening kind of thing you can look at denotations of time and place as a intent to either distance event will bring it closer and in fact sometimes it you know it can be a bit about together but very often it's a way of distancing things and from from where we are now it was some time ago you give a date to it and time to it asan use of the tents is interesting I have to say most stories tend to be in the past tense when people are answering questions and interviews they often talk about things in the present tense you know I do this I am doing this now whatever it is present or or or just present tense and then they'll break into the past tense restoring that reminds me when so and so happened past tense yep so and so did this and did that etc all past tense now and that's often a clue that story is being told and but people can use it more more to constructively as well as well and use the transition between the past how I was then and the present how I am now and that by being education that comes out from those changes and transition through first posting personal third-person voices it is it me doing it or is it you know being done to me or being done by them so and ideas a very agency in passive and active verbs and things that you know I achieve or is it things are done to me that we going on here okay I'll sit through this quite quickly I think because I mean I hope you're getting idea now that they come to focus on the small level of use of language breaking Chronicle flow another way of doing it and regressions leaps in time again it's sometimes interesting to look at when people don't tell the story straight when they diverge and you'll see mix some example of that later on when I think why they diversion what's important about not telling that story but going off this way instead it might just simply be the speaker's thought of it but it might be something else that's going on repetition clearly important what would repeat things they've all they want to remember them so therefore they must be important so repetition is quite an interesting clue about how important something years for somebody whether that's just simply answering questions or in telling a story in repeating parts of the story but the repetition itself does say something it there must be a reason why people repeating themselves and detail description again we've done we saw this actually in the the line by line coding what we thought might have been reluctance to talk about certain issues by getting into description something else avoiding the topic and detail description offering a way of doing that now how did all of this well again it's it's detailed looking at the text then you go through underlining the words you know finding where these things curr and then thinking about the munch you found them what's going on here and and so it's a it's a simple matter of a very close examination of the text not the kind of thing you can spend you know do with a large amount of text you tend to focus on small sections of text and do is kind of defined detailed analysis but it does give you an insight into you know how the person is using their time I want you to tell this story and what's behind that okay and turning to a different way of approaching this Riesman talks about the structure of narrative as a way of analyzing narratives and looking at partly as we have done already look at how the story is organized the the romance the tragedy the satire those kinds of things the upwards and downwards movement of the story looking at how the tale is developed in particular what the events are what actors coming to the scene as on what they do and how um where it begins and ends and why is ending and we do this to answer these kinds of questions to ask how people give shape to events how how do they understand the things that happen to them how do they portray them and so that gives you an idea of what they think about what it means to them how do they make a point why do they make a point why do they use that it suggests in making a point suggests there's something important in their narrative that needs to be brought out and of course how they package the narrative narrated events how they how they portray them how they describe them how they identify them and so on and of course their reactions to them I have articulate narratives for the audience a most important point here because narratives are not told to one person they're told to it yeah you don't tell the narratives yourself you tell the narrative to somebody else often a rehearsed narrative is what we'd be thing you've told before maybe not in in the particular form it takes and the detail it takes but elements of it would have been told before so they are almost like a repertoire of stories that we have to bring to them and we bring those out to indicate some of these other things okay I mentioned contacts already as being a doing a lot of work on educational stories but he uses this particular model to identify and then think about narratives and I don't recommend this in every case it's not something you can use all the time but it is an interesting model it does bring out some of the elements of what a narrative is like and it can be used way of pulling apart a narrative for some extent and it's based on labor American linguist who first proposed it looking at linguistic use and it has the six structure elements the it's saying basically a story starts with an abstract it then goes into an orientation phase followed by complication phase then valuation then resolved and possibly a coda at the end so it has six optional elements and the abstraction coda aren't always there and but the others tend to be let's look at what they've been mean and okay so and here's the fotomat the abstract the abstract is telling you what the story is about it's optional it may not be there in fact sometimes the the question from the interviewer is the abstract they tell you what it's about the personnel or just regnant the story is the answer but the abstract gives some kind of summary of the general point the story's going to be about you know that reminds me about the time when and so on and is is it is a common abstract but it can be well yes of course that doesn't always happen like that you can find cases where it serves a son so general statement that's what the abstract and then the person will go on to tell the story that illustrates that general position okay so the abstract is kind of almost a general summary of what the story is going to do then you have the orientation phase of the story where people will set up who's in it who the actors are who are the the people who are going to be present in the story are the cast if you like when it happened where it was happening and so on it's like when they'll often say well that happened to me when and so on the when indicating they're going to tell you when it happened or what perhaps where it happened as well and they'll usually tell you who was involved what kinds of people are in the story with them as well usually but not always so we set the thing up and it says we now got the cast we've got the scene you know think of it as a kind of fierce almost we've got the abstract which is that the title if you like we know what it's about we know what's happening on stage and who the actors are what they do well that's where the complication happens they start doing things and things get complicated something happens they do something in it and this the bones of the story it says they like maybe doing something like this first and then they change to this and common things that crop up here are turning points crises and problems you know turning point is they're doing this and then this happened and they did this instead a crisis I tried this it didn't work so we had to do this instead and then we did this or a problem we tried all of that and then we got a problem and then we have to try and deal with that we weren't very successful we did this and so on so various ways in which situation gets complicated and the people responds to that in some way turning points is a very common one where people experience something and as a result of having done or fail to do something they suddenly realize they've got to do things differently you're going to become a different person I've got to have this kind of change of of life and then having done that the person normally evaluated what so what what's the point of the story what's its showing and and there needs to be some content it's some some comment rather about that point and then the result what finally happened the outcome you know did we all go home and live effort happy ever after or or what so it meant that you know now we do it this way or oh god yes that they all got sacked and we took at night now management new management structure and that's much much better than it was and so on so the kind of evaluation end result together and then the coder might come at the end to kind of bring things back to the present time and it it might be a you know so that's the story of so and so or yeah you can see now why I still feel so angry about sensor or now now you can understand why so and so did this that that country that brings it back to the present time and in destroyed not again not always in optional section let's see I think I've got an example of that one of these and the abstract is actually the interviewers questions or a question rather so your family kids came back here and then dave says note that both working and tells a story about the family basically our daughter was overseas watching Brisbane son just worked the prison they're both up here and then he has the complication do girl I can see coming is they're both going to want to settle up here after their sorry the difficulty I can see is that no home care government in Queensland so even if we wanted to move closer to the kids that is that it is simply not going to be possible unless there's some I mean my wife is going to need help eventually and it's just not going to be possible although Queensland is vastly definitely better than here we came here because our children are already booked up in schools up here so they were already booked in and our daughter was in the second year and so I've had so also he had a university and I wanted somewhere I could do a bit of study so there's this complication you can see what he's doing he's telling the story about how he's now got this kind of conflict between what's good for the kids now what's good for the kids later on and where they want to be themselves and then he says so this town has worked out well usually moved there because it was good for him at that stage and then he says but it looks like we're stuck in New South Wales NSW we can't head off we can't move anywhere else now he's stuck and then the coda you really do read horror stories about Queensland the lowest funding visibility of any state in Australia doesn't say a lot so obviously he's a bit upset about where he is now and wanting to move it's a kind of way of seeing into kind of what he's telling what the story is that that give you some insight I think into to what he's feeling about the situation and the conflicts that are coming up and with dealing with his children so now we've looked at a lot of the analytics perspectives about how narrative is instructed we've looked at the language that's used and the actual structure in terms of parts of a narrative I want to my attention now to the functions of narratives the functions of telling stories what you know why do people do it when they're trying to do when they're telling stories and there is a variety of forms and functions if you like of stories first of those perhaps look at is the role of lacan planning when people tell your story they're trying to emphasize that balance between the luck they had or maybe the bad luck they had and the degree to which they're planning that their actions made a difference and of course the look at this in terms of the effects of events on their life so they're telling you that part of the function of telling a story to tell you to what degree they are where they are now because of luck or maybe bad luck or the degree to which they are where they are now because they planned it that way they worked towards it they strived hard to get there and so on so the story is telling you about that that balance of lack or bad luck in planning and maybe to some extent telling you how much they have achieved by their actions in getting where they are now another quite different role of our function of stories rather than being told about people I'm sorry being told by people about themselves this is a toll often a tale often told about other people a cautionary tale about accidents and disasters in order to illustrate what kind of things one ought to do in that sense then it's the morality tale don't do this because if you do this happens or do it this way because that way you'll avoid this happening and some so forth or I remember the time when so-and-so tried doing that and they ended up as a disaster and so on so it's a way of bringing experience from the past into the present as a way of thing of helping people decide what to guide in their actions of course one very common why this happens is in telling stories to children and either telling children children about other children that have done things wrongly and come a cropper or perhaps the parent telling a child about what they did that was wrong when they were a child and therefore is not to be repeated now okay a morality tale if you like in the story told have that moral effect on the listener and the audience that overlaps to some extent with the third function of stories that of passing on a cultural heritage or an organizational culture because in part these can be morality tales as well and there's been a variety of different research uses of this research into different areas of organizational culture for example widespread use of atrocity stories and morality fables in occupational settings and organizational settings has been noted so people in their work will use these stories to tell others about things that have happened and they can do it for a variety of functions variety of reasons either to help others learn how to do things in their new job or perhaps to to warn people about the nature or the character of certain people in the in the organization certain managers or certain colleagues who are to be avoided because this happened in the past or this is to be done with them or they're a good person to go to because they did this in the past and so on so a whole set of atrocity stories things that went wrong that were done badly or came out wrongly and morality fables are the good and the bad and as to what people have done in the past that helped people learn about that occupation and that organization one common area for this is medical settings and the particular form they take here is our fables of incompetence about you know what this or that doctor or this or that nurse or this or that therapist did that was good or bad very often bad they did this it was wrong and you shouldn't do that you know don't do things in this way because I remember when so-and-so did that and he or she tried it and it just didn't work and it ended up with patients being injured or perhaps even dying and so on so quite strong warnings about incompetence and how to avoid it for those either learning their medical or their their room that their nursing therapy therapy training all those who are going into practice now and therefore again in a sense overlapping with the organizational settings learning about how things are done in their organization and again a third example of this is urals culture of school children the whole urban legends of the myths kind of area that that's created again the game by school children the tales they tell each other sometimes repeating ones that have been around 20-30 years before sometimes entirely new stories picked up in a variety of ways from other settings sometimes made up by the children themselves but passed on as a kind of oral culture quite separate from the culture of their pay and the teachers and so on another set of functions of narratives and stories is to help people order their careers and memories into a set of chronic was a narrative chronicles marked by key happenings so you know when you are something about their life and ask them to tell you about who they are in their life and what identity they have and so on they will use stories structured in these kind of periods or phases to tell you what they've done and those key happenings will be the the the breaking points or the the stopping points between the different chronicles or tales and they can take a variety of forms it can be they move somewhere else or they left that job or you know they split up with their partner something like that can be a key happening or it might be some kind of a turning point or some kind of epiphany in their story where suddenly they realize something happens to them and they realize they've got to do something about this or they realize that they're going down the wrong direction they got to change things something of that kind so the stories are often in in parts and in in sections with these kinds of key happenings marking these important points throughout the the story and of course for the people telling that story that's a way they can emphasize how they want to be seen by the audience by the listeners and so on and to some extent recalls how they want to see themselves is portrayed through their stories another function is the way of coming to terms with particularly sensitive or traumatic times or events I've already mentioned that you know splitting up the part of the divorce story and but it can be a violent story it can be some other kind of traumatic event and particularly illnesses are a very common example of this where people try to come to terms with things that they've experienced and perhaps a very bad accident or perhaps some kind of terminal illness they're not going to have to come to terms with because they're going so I'm going to die those kind of events people will basically construct stories around what's happened here and it may refer back some of the points I mentioned earlier about things like you know who's responsible what role lack has in this and so on things they may have done that would have changed things so it happened now and so on that either were or were thought depending how they want to portray it so they're bringing these variety of elements to try to show how they're feeling about the particular events the traumas that they're experiencing and so on a course above all and I've said this one once or twice already the story is a way of structuring to oneself one of the ideas of who one is your own idea of self and self identity this can be quite a lot of psychological view and and stories can imitate life and present an inner reality to the outside world so so in that sense you know through rehearsing these stories and telling - to an audience and to others and you're actually constructing your own identity as you do that and they shape your identity and you could say in the extreme sense we know or discover ourselves and we feel ourselves to others by the stories we tell so sorry is not just a matter of relating some kind of objective happenings to others in this sense they can be very much a subjective idea which is done not only for the benefit of others but for the benefit of oneself to try to construct Who I am what kind of person I am and and that's done through narrating the events and accounts of one's life or these significant aspects of one's life yet further functions include things like justifying relationships again this is I suppose this overlaps with identity who I am after to some extent might actually tell you you know why I'm justified in this particular relationship it might be an emotional relationship it might be some kind of work relationship and the story will will help justify why that's going on so you can say another functional story is to to justify one's actions to to explain to others why you really had no choice about doing this or why it was the best thing to do or something of that kind and of course when you start to generalize that idea you come to this is this point here that that the funk the stories show how the actor frames and make sense or particular set of experiences and the most general sense I've mentioned some these already like the the traumatic events one happening to oneself or or the the accidents and the the and the morality tales that happen are in occupational settings so about you know so to generalize we can say that that the story kind of makes sense of experiences at measuring success overcoming adversity good and bad practice that one has in one's work or one's life and explanations of success or failure more than most generally can be done here looking a bit more detail at last point the sex and the moral tales tales although very often very personal can also be a kind of collective reminder of what not to do and how not to be on perhaps sometimes how to be so very often negative but sometimes positive as well so what I mean by this is not just that there's something that individuals have where others on the individual share a story that gets told and retold by others about third parties and so on or even told by one person and picked up by others and repeated as stories about then that in sighs these these moral aspects and these these guidelines to to action and so on a common theme of these kind of stories is overcoming difficulties and achievement success so the the what not to do and and how not to be comes along with some kind of achievement at the end so no matter you know all these kind of things went wrong but there was some kind of success at the end so a typical format for these will be some kind of challenge existing the adversity of dealing with that and the various aspects of how the person overcame those challenges eventually dealing them to some kind of success as I mentioned I think earlier on a key issue in these stories often is some kind of turning point or some kind of Epiphany some kind of recognition that things are now going to be different either because the objective situation has changed the the actors in the story have changed maybe they've gone gone somewhere else and they're longer acting or because the the teller the narrator has realized that something is is happening that that something about themselves they recognize and they decide from that point onward to do something different and of course as a social scientist analyzing these stories you can use these stories as a starting point for further explanation in the analysis that having got some idea about you know what the person thinks or what the perhaps the culture is in the organization or wholly the group you're you're investigating the setting you're investigating you can use the stories told there are starting points before that further explanation at further an exploration rather so that you can use them and say well okay you told me the story about so-and-so so does that mean so-and-so what do you do if and has that changed and so a whole lot of questions can come out of that for further investigation in in qualitative analysis one further function which is quite important one as well tickly in organizational context is the narrative as a chronicle it's a form of autobiography people telling stories about themselves and this often has particular forms it is the how it happened or how I came to be where I am today story and people organize their lives through this story make sense of them to themselves and of course and to others one important issue here is the notion of career the idea of having a career and which can be an Occupational career or it can be other social roles like being a parent or being a patient or possibly even being a child children telling stories about themselves and the idea here is that there's some core aspect of of that person which is the career they're following they are a parent or they are a teacher or they are a nurse these are very common areas where stories get told and and people's whole sense of who they are is centered around that career and less so further for certain other careers but you might think I mean even in in commerce things like the entrepreneur the story they were telling out themselves would be very much this kind of career store how it happened how I came to be where I am today and I didn't need to tell you more about her and that come the nature of entrepreneurial stories that they often end up with you know how I got to where I am today kind of a form hat now to finish these comments about stories by telling my attention to a few criticisms of narrative I talk very much about the positive so far the ways in which narrative narratives and stories are used by people and to structure event to understand things to interpret the world and of course to come to understand both themselves and to portray themselves to others and give themselves certain identities and so on but they don't always work that well and sometimes they can be a bit misleading and a couple of critiques and from the literature here the first of those comes from Barry who questions the motivation for stories why are people telling you the story and in many cases he says what may look like an attempt - look competent is simply a cover and particularly the illness narratives are coping and people may be telling you they coach in an attempt to try to portray themselves as competent rather than just coping so giving some kind of ideological expression - - to how things are rather than how they deeply feel themselves they may feel obliged to give some kind of account in which they appear competent even though they don't feel like that at all so the stories they tell are not just simply and in an externalization of some internal feeling or internal concept but may be deeply influenced by the settings in which people are working and if that's in a setting where expectations are that they should be able to cope then they may tell the story that makes it look that way even if they don't feel it themselves the second prison might want to look at comes from work by M Rhodes and brown in in organizations and they looked at the the use of narratives as reflecting particular political ideologies in their organizations for example you might find you know narratives from management differ from managed narratives given by workers all the unions and so on or maybe you know different parts of the company and different departments or or international and parts of the company compared with with national parts and have different kind of ideologies about what they're doing in the stories they tell reflect those different ideologies which is very interesting and tells you a lot about how those ideologies are working and the kinds of ways that people think about what they're doing but sometimes say Rhodes and brown we need to offer as I said here reasons causes and accounts and to make judgments about what's going on we're evaluating some some program in that organization for example we may be less interested in the kind of stories that people are telling or more interesting about what's actually happening and what causes those things to happen and so on and so we have to take some kind of much more objective idea about the the activities and that the stories in that sense are less useful to us and in what we're trying to find out about so narratives then can be very useful in revealing things about what's going on but they have their limitations at least in these respects and we have to be careful about the degree to which stories being passed off as something which they're not and in the case of surrealist narratives we have to be careful about they're reflecting different ideologies rather than real differences in the way that companies operate

Channel: Graham R Gibbs

Views: 61,408

Rating: 4.9435897 out of 5

Keywords: Qualitative Data Analysis, Narrative analysis, Qualitative Research (Literature Subject), Data Analysis (Media Genre)

Id: ZJbnPKJmrpY

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 21 2015