Narrative Interviewing

Encouraging Narration

When the interview is viewed as a conversation—a discourse between speakers—rules of everyday conversation apply: turn taking; relevancy; and entrance and exit talk to transition into, and return from, a story world. One story can lead to another; as narrator and questioner/listener negotiate spaces for these extended turns, it helps to explore associations and meanings that might connect several stories. If we want to learn about experience in all its complexity, details count: specific incidents, not general evaluations of experience. Narrative accounts require longer turns at talk than are typical in “natural” conversation, certainly in mainstream research practice.

Opening up the research interview to extended narration by a research participant requires investigators to give up some control. Although we have particular experiential paths we want to cover, narrative interviewing means following participants down their trails. Genuine discoveries about a phenomenon can come from power sharing in interviews.

Narratives can emerge at the most unexpected times, even in answer to fixed-response (yes/no) questions (Riessman, 2002). But certain kinds of open-ended questions are more likely than others to provide narrative opportunities. Compare “When did X happen?” which requests a discrete piece of [Page 710]information, with “Tell me what happened … and then what happened?” which asks for an extended account of some past time. Some investigators, after introductions, invite a participant to tell their story—how an illness began, for example. But experience always exceeds its description and narrativization; events may be fleetingly summarized and given little significance. Only with further questioning can participants recall the details, turning points, and other shifts in cognition, emotion, and action. In my own research on disruptions in the expected life course, such as divorce, I have posed the question: “Can you remember a particular time when …?” I might probe further: “What happened that makes you remember that particular moment in your marriage?” Cortazzi and colleagues (Cortazzi, Jin, Wall, & Cavendish, 2001), studying the education of health professionals, asked: “Have you had a breakthrough in your learning recently?” “Oh yes” typically followed, and then a long narrative with an outpouring of emotion and metaphor about a breakthrough—“a clap of thunder,” as one student said.

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