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