Narrative Research

Narrative research aims to explore and conceptualize human experience as it is represented in textual form. Aiming for an in-depth exploration of the meanings people assign to their experiences, narrative researchers work with small samples of participants to obtain rich and free-ranging discourse. The emphasis is on storied experience. Generally, this takes the form of interviewing people around the topic of interest, but it might also involve the analysis of written documents. Narrative research as a mode of inquiry is used by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, which include anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, economics, education, history, linguistics, medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, and sociology. It encompasses a range of research approaches including ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, narratology, action research, and literary analysis, ...