Narratives and life story research stand in contrast to the sterile positivistic research paradigm. It is often criticised as a form of art rather than research, because it requires talent, intuition and field/clinical experience—it cannot be taught as clear methods and systems.
Narrative, may be defined as a discourse as a means to 'represent a connected succession of happenings' (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach & Zilber 1998:2)
Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber (1998:12) give two main independent dimensions (as well as middle points along both) for reading, interpreting and analysing life stories:
- Holistic versus categorical approaches—note the contrasting units of analysis: the story as a whole versus an utterance or sections abstracted from.
- Content versus form—the traditional dichotomy concerning literary reading of texts: the explicit account, e.g. what happened, why and who participated from the standpoint of the teller/narrator; versus the implicit content, e.g. the meaning of the story or parts thereof, what are the traits or motives of individuals or what a image the narrator uses symbolises? Other reading ignore the content and consider the form, e.g. the structure of the plot, sequence of events, the story's complexity and coherence, feelings possibly evoked by the story, the style and metaphors or words (such as passive or active voice) used. Exploration of the form is often done to explore deeper layers of a story below the obvious content.
They (1998:13) suggest that the two dimensions intersect to form a matrix of four cells—representing four modes, which are not always as clear in the reality of analysis and interpretation:
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HOLISTIC-CONTENT Focus on the content of the complete life story |
HOLISTIC-FORM Looking at the structure/plot of the complete life story—how the story develops |
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CATEGORICAL-CONTENT A content-analysis of the topics, utterances extracted, classified and grouped |
CATEGORICAL-FORM Focus on the discrete stylistic or linguistic characteristics of aspects of the story |
Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R. & Zilber, T. 1998. Narrative research—reading, analysis and interpretation. (Applied Social Research Methods Series Vol 47). Thousand Oaks: SAGE
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