Free Association Narrative Interview

Guided by the psychoanalytic principle of free association and designed to elicit narratives, the free associative narrative method employs open questions that encourage interviewees to remember specific events because these, unlike generalized answers, are replete with emotional meanings. The principle of free association, based on a psychoanalytic ontology emphasizing unconscious conflict and its management as the basis of psychic life and self-presentation, is that emotional significance, often unconscious, is contained in the links between one idea and the next as they are produced in a specific relationship to the listener. The method is particularly appropriate for exploring emotionally charged and identity-based issues as opposed to topics where only opinion, beliefs, or facts are sought.

Unconscious conflict produces anxiety. It follows that anxiety will feature more or less prominently in research relationships (interviews and data analysis), varying with the interview topic, the setting, and the interviewer's ability to contain anxiety. Unconscious defenses against anxiety will affect how interviewees remember and narrate events and their part in these. In contrast to most interview methods, the method therefore presumes unconsciously defended subjects in relationship (thus including researchers as well as researched). This account of subjectivity understands unconscious desires and defenses against anxiety as products of interviewees’ biographically unique psyches dynamically engaging with their social experiences (intersubjective, historical, and discursive). This psychosocial ontology resists simple explanation and reductive analysis.

Questions inviting specific accounts avoid emotionally drained generalizations and defensive rationalizations. Such questions are then followed up in a similar open fashion, echoing interviewees’ chosen ordering and phrasing. In this way, participants’ frames dominate rather than the researcher's. A second interview affords opportunity to listen to the record, notice patterns missed at the time, and devise a subsequent set of unique questions based on this first listening. Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson originally developed the method as an adaptation of the biographical interpretative method in the course of research into the relationships among gender, anxiety, and fear of crime. In a variety of subsequent applications, the key principles have been used to produce revised designs. For example, research questions exploring changes over time require a longitudinal design to accommodate the need to space a set of interviews over an extended period.

Based on the holistic principle of gestalt (that the whole is more meaningful than its parts), analysis involves keeping in mind the whole data set for a given individual when interpreting a part of it, in particular the associations that led up to it. However, rather than expect a coherent relationship between parts, the researcher remains alert to inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicts as well as changes in emotional tone and avoidances.

Following psychoanalytic epistemology, based on using one's subjectivity as an instrument of knowing, researchers learn to use their emotional responses to the interview and to subsequent data analysis. This [Page 360]ability is aided by detailed, reflexive fieldnotes that ideally are available for group analysis.