One way of starting off a list discussion would be for each of us to 'come
clean' about our individual personal interest in it. I pose myself the
question:
"Why am I interested in researching narratives in respect of health and
social policy practices and institutions?"
1) I am a social research methodologist, specialising in
biographic-narrative interpretive methods and I am interested in learning
from other people who are developing such methods and in particular who are
finding ways of using such methods either (a) in doing research into
people-service activities such as health, or (b) in adapting and applying
'biographical perspectives' in their own professional practice to
understanding (i) themselves and their co-workers, (ii) their
clients/patients
2) As governments and multi-national corporations fight to reduce the
quantity and therefore the quality of time that professionals have for
'thoughtfully being' with each other and for 'thoughtfully being' with our
clients/patients, this aggravates the need to understand the 'interpersonal
crisis' that is therebye produced for us and that we fitfully or
systematically attempt to address. As professional persons, such an
'interpersonal/inter-professional crisis' can be made into an opportunity
for understanding our actual and our potential practice better. How deeply
can our understanding of 'forces making for crisis' and leverages for good
outcomes go?
3) My personal professional practice has been primarily one of teaching
postgraduate and undergraduate students in a university. In teaching such
qualitative techniques as observation, participant observation, and
semi-structured interviewing, a key focus has to be the teaching of
simultaneously addressing the external reality of those being researched
and that of the internal reality of the researcher him or herself. We do
not learn much more about one side of the equation without starting to see
the other differently. Conversely, if we are in such a state as to be able
to confront less about one side, this starts to cripple our perception and
understanding of the other. What inter-professional and professional/client
research and forums can be set up to rectify this?
4) To understand people more as whole persons in their whole social context
(and ourselves in the same way) I think that we have to understand
ourselves, others, and the institutions in which we move in a
biographical-historical way. This means a larger sense of a 'case-history'
producing more effective case-understanding and therefore
case-intervention. How can narrative research and biographical-narrative
practices help us to understand our 'collective situation' as a particular
historical experiment or case-history?
5) I personally am particularly interested in the ways that the histories
and functioning of institutions such as universities, hospitals, general
practices, etc help to mould our capacities and our incapacities for
understanding our own situation-in-relation-to-others as relations of
people. What changes of regime and practices in our work-place have people
experimented with to produce better outcom,es?
6) Items of reading that I recall as having been very insight-provoking for
me at different stages of my career have been
(a) Erving Goffman 'Asylums' (1961 Anchor Books)
(b) Isobel Menzies Lyth 'Containing anxiety in institutions: selected
essays vol.1' (1988: Free Association Books)
(c)Anton Obholzer and Vega Roberts (eds) 'The unconscious at work:
individual and organisational stress in the human services' (1994 Routledge)
(d) R. Hinshelwood and W.Skogstad (eds) 'Observing organisations: anxiety,
defence and culture in health care' (Routledge 2000)
What many of these lack is a very rich sense of the 'individual
biographical case', however, and two other books dealing better with
particular cases, though not specifically yet in a specifically health care
setting, are
e) Daniel Bar-On 'The indescribeable and the undiscussable" reconstructing
human discourse after trauma' (1999 Central European University Press)
(f) Gabriele Rosenthal (ed) 'The Holocaust in three generations: families
of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime' (1998 Cassell)
! TWO ADVERTS !
If you are interested in semi-structured or biographic-narrative depth
interviewing, this advert is just to say that details of my long-awaited
(by me, at least!) and now just published textbook on
'Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and
semi-structured method'
are on
<http://www.sagepub.co.uk/shopping/Detail.asp?id=4813>
ALSO:
The 5th London Short Course at the Tavistock on
'Biographic-Narrative-Interpretive Interviewing'
is being run by Prue Chamberlayne and myself during
November-December-January (3x3 days)
I can send you a flyer if you're interested.
!END OF ADVERTS!
Tom Wengraf
24a Princes Avenue
Muswell Hill
London N10 3LR
UK
(44)/(0) 20 8883 9297 / 8444-4322
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