Tom

This is a great 'cut out and keep' response to an excellent question.  I was
going to suggest a much shorter and more pragmatic answer, which is that
narrative is a technique that allows the construction and affirmation of the
self.  Hence, the research subject is not simply one who is observed by the
researcher, but is a self that is constructed in the dialogue of the
telling.  Hence, as the story unfolds, the narrator becomes a hero, a
victim, a clown, and so on, and the researcher gains an understanding of who
the person "is" who is telling the story.  It isn't usually that facile, but
I hope you get the drift!

Arthur Frank writes well on this.  Try:

Frank A. Just listening: narrative and deep illness. Families, Systems and
Health 1998;16:197-216.

Any other suggestions?

Trisha Greenhalgh
Professor of Primary Health Care
University College London
Room 410, Holborn Union Building
Highgate Hill, London N19 3UA
Tel 00 44 20 7288 3246
Fax 00 44 20 7281 8004
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-----Original Message-----
From: Researching and evaluating the use of narrative in health and
related fields [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Tom Wengraf
Sent: 26 October 2001 16:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: What does NBM offer that does not already exist in the form of
established naturalistic methodologies?


Leslie Gelling's first question to the <Narrative-health-research> email
list

"What  do Narrative Biographic Methods offer healthcare researchers and
professionals that does not already exist in the form of established
naturalistic methodologies?" (version expanded by me)

 is a really good one, and no doubt different people will have different
points which could help to make interesting and useful eventual answers.
Here is me thinking about it:


A) ESTABLISHED NATURALISTIC METHODOLOGIES

1) It partly depends on what you take to be "established naturalistic
methodologies", and obviously they could be so broadly defined as to
include any 'narrative research methodology' one chose to put forward.

2)The meaning I give to the term  'naturalistic methodologies' is that it
means something like non-obtrusive observation or minimally-obtrustive
participant observation together with informal conversation that does not
significantly alter the pre-researcher patterns of 'natural' behaviour. The
contrast is with 'methodologies that ask those in the situation being
researched to do something which is non-ordinary, which they are doing only
for the purposes of the research method, and which they would not do
otherwise.

4) A research interview focused on eliciting 'narrative' is
non-naturalistic (i) because research interviews are non-ordinary events,
and therefore not 'naturalistic', (ii) because research interviews do not
oridinarily focus on eliciting one type of response, but are usually 'more
open', in which the questions aims at getting descriptions, statements of
position, expressions of attitudes, etc.

5) I shall assume something like (2) to be true, in order to answer the
question.


B) WHAT IS A 'NARRATIVE-FOCUSED' METHOD?

6) A narrative-focused interview is one in which the questions and the
situations are 'un-naturally' designed to elicit narratives (one big
narrative, as in a biographic-narrative method; or a number of little
narratives). Such methods may be written or spoken narratives, or a
combination of both. The responses may include a variety of other material,
but hopefully will be 'more narrative' than they would be if the questions
were not narrative-focused.

7) The processing/interpretation of such materials can be done in a variety
of different ways. Characteristically, there is not much point in having a
narrative-focused interview producing (we hope) material with an unusually
high proportion of 'narrative', if, among our methods of analysing
qualitative data,  we do not have an 'interpretive procedure' specifically
designed for understanding narratives.

8) A narrative-focused methodology will therefore be non-naturalistic; the
questions put to, or the task set for, the respondent will be
'narrative-focused'; the procedures developed for processing/interpreting
the 'materials produced' will include one or more 'interpretive procedures'
which are specific to the task of extracting significance from narratives.


C) WHAT DO NARRATIVE FOCUSED DATA-COLLECTION AND NARRATIVE-FOCUSED
DATA-ANALYSIS PROCEDURES HAVE SPECIFICALLY TO OFFER?

9) I shall attempt to give one range of answers deriving from the
particular school of narrative work in which I have been working for the
past few years -- the biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) --
and which I have outlined in my recent textbook on 'Qualitative research
interviewing'. Others will, I hope, answer from other positions.

10) The working hypothesis held by proponents of BNIM about the
significance of eliciting narratives in interviews is that, in telling
narratives about all or some of their own biographic experience,
individuals are enabled to get closer to that original experiencing than
other types of questioning typically produce. This produces more detailed
accounts of sequences of events (life-history, critical incidents) on the
one hand and less guarded accounts of the individual's subjective
experiencing and understanding of such events (present perspective as
expressed in the told story) on the other. Analysing the lived-life and the
told-story  separately, and then putting the results of these separate
analyses together to understand why a person who lived their life (or part
of it) in a certain way then tells the story(ies) of that life in the way
they do( and not some equally or plausible way) is the heart of the
biographic-narrative interpretive method.

11) Such lived-life/objective happening analysis contrasting (and then
combining)with 'subjective told-story' analysis enables the 'interview
account' to reveal aspects of the life of which the individual is fully
conscious but also the cultural and personal assumptions and presumptions
concealed in the way the narrative is told.

12) Such 'greater understanding' of the personal-cultural 'implicit' of
somebody's present understanding/perspective on themselves and their
situation then makes for a more effective and less counter-productive
interventions for change.


D) FOOTNOTES

13) A recent conference in London on 'Biographical Methods and Professional
Practice' (October 2000) produced a brilliant set of discussions about the
use of biographical narratives for improving the complex mutual
understandings of different types of professional workers necessarily
involved in co-operative tasks of different sorts and for improving the
complex misunderstandings of clients/patients by such professionls, and
vice-versa. An edited volume 'Biographical Methods in Policy and Practice'
emerging from this conference will be published in about 12 months time.

14) A more detailed description of one methodology for narrative research
(BNIM) is to be found in

     'Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and
semi-structured method'
                                                        details on
                <http://www.sagepub.co.uk/shopping/Detail.asp?id=4813>