JANE ROBERTSON HAS SENT THIS RESPONSE WHICH I THOUGHT MIGHT INTEREST OTHERS. TOM.

 

Dear Tom

 

Thanks for your message. I didn’t attend the Edinburgh workshop/seminar but the responses I read via email did seem antagonistic towards the method. I noticed this same attitude at an earlier event run for the Northern Narratives group, although someone who had used the BNIM method in her PhD (I’ve forgotten her name but she had trained with you) argued against the positivist perception of the approach.

 

Thanks for the comments, as no doubt there will be plenty of discussion at the meeting and these points will be helpful in accurately representing the potential of the method as one way of doing narrative analysis and countering particular assumptions. I’ve found the free associative aspect of the BNIM interview method very helpful for my own research, but I agree that some people get “hung-up” about the psychoanalytic connotations that are linked with free-association and a concern with gestalt, which brings another set of (often negative) assumptions to the debate.

 

I’ve found a linguistic approach to analysis very helpful in my own research on the basis of what seems to “work” with the data from my interviews, at least the data with participants with dementia, which weren’t really “interviews” in the formal sense but conversations and opportunities for listening that I had with people with dementia. My own assumptions and position have obviously influenced my attraction to this approach, which I will need to reflect on in my methodological discussion. As you say, the mind of the interpreter is quite distinct from any method, and each individual uses and interprets a method slightly differently.

 

For instance, Gee tends to present his analysis as paired stanzas within a longer strophe. I am finding that – from my detailed analysis of one interview at this stage – that Labov’s six-part framework is helpful when applied to the analysis after listening to how the words are spoken using Gee’s method. This analysis ties in with a strophe of five or six stanzas (with each stanza of several lines representing abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda). I hadn’t expected to find this framework as I had started with trying to apply Labov’s framework to the text, found this unhelpful, applied Gee’s analysis to break the text into lines, stanzas and strophes, and from this process then noticed that the individual stanza topics flowed along the framework that Labov suggested. The resulting “poetry” ties into some other work in the field of dementia research, Killick and Allan, although these researchers created poems in terms of how they understood what was “going on” for the person with dementia, rather than working with the actual words of the person.

 

At the moment I’m considering how to strategically work with the data to carry out detailed analysis on some cases / interviews and how to work on a more general analytical level across the fifty interviews that I have carried out.

 

Best wishes

 

Jane

 

 

Dear Jane,

Very nice to hear from you and that you might be doing something on BNIM.

 

Apparently at a recent Liz Spencer workshop/seminar, BNIM got criticized on the one hand for being too psychoanalytic and on the one hand for being too positivistic. My guess that these criticisms come from people who haven’t trained in or used BNIM themselves, and that one of them only read case material from a psychoanalytically-minded BNIMist and the other only read case-material from a positivist-minded BNIM-ist, and each thought they’d read the only sort of case-account that somebody using BNIM could produce.

 

I think there is an anxiety that BNIM (or any methodology perhaps) may stop you thinking your own thoughts and force you to think with somebody else’s mind. I remember somebody talking somewhere about ‘methodolatry’. This was a condition in which people thought that adopting a particular method meant that it being used would produce thoughtful results without you having to think at all, let the method do the thinking.

 

Such ‘methodolatry’ gives any and all methods more powers for good than any method can deliver. The Edinburgh interventions that reportedly took place might be giving BNIM (and any other method) more powers for evil than any method can deliver. Both might be regarded as ‘method-fetishism’ which can take either a positive form (methodolatry, method-idealisation) or a negative form (methodophobia, method-demonisation).

 

 Actually for good or for ill, whatever method you use it is still your own mind (positivist, psychoanalytical, feminist, any or multiple ‘ist’) that you are thinking with. BNIM lays down a sequential procedure for getting material and another for interpreting the material, but the mind that does the interview and interprets the material is one’s own (with panel enrichment and help) but nobody else’s.

 

Why have I got into this reverie? I think it was free-association to Scotland and the sort of arguments re BNIM that apparently took place there recently and I was thinking about how you or anybody could deal with them if they came up again. Anyway, it’s a good thing if there’s more discussion of BNIM, but it is so important to distinguish the method from the mind that uses the method. The method is standard, the minds working with it with their own ‘concepts and ideas in personal transition’ (their unique subjectivity) thank God aren’t at all standard but unique.

 

Anyway, I was very interested to hear about your use of Gee to interpret the material. If and when you have an example written up that you would be prepared to share, I’d love to see it.

 

Best wishes and do let us know the tenor of any BNIM-discussions and arguments/phantasies about BNIM  that do happen.

 

Tom

 

 

 

 

Dear Tom

 

I also meant to say in my email that I’m attending a methods group meeting examining narrative analysis at Edinburgh University in May and BNIM has been included as one of the methods being discussed. I am hearing the BNIM method being discussed more and more. Margaret Volante is going to present at Stirling and I might do too.

 

Best wishes

Jane

 

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Jane Robertson

Postgraduate Research Student

Department of Applied Social Science

Room 4S31 Colin Bell Building

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA

 

Tel: +44(0)1786 466308

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