Hi!
What follows is a section from the current BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual. It summarises in a way that might be useful some recent changes in emphasis and preoccupation from those which readers of older versions might not have followed. If you want the the current version, just drop me a line and I'll send it.



#1.2. Differences of this 2012 update from earlier pre-2010 versions#

These notes make most sense for those who have read earlier versions of the BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual. 

If you haven’t read previous versions of this Short Guide and Detailed Manual, ,
leave this section till later (or don’t read it at all!): 
Instead, Go to p. 73



In general, the two chapters on BNIM in my 2001 textbook Qualitative research Interviewing (Sage) are now significantly  updated  (but not not entirely replaced) by this Short Guide and Detailed Manual. 

Ten years or more of further work and training and BNIM practice have occurred since 2001, and -- though other chapters in the 2001 text still stand – something but not so much would be lost if ch.6 and 12 of the 2001 text vanished from your copy of the textbook and were replaced by this text. Where the two clash, use this more up-to-date text. Use both: stereoscopic is better than single vision!

And there are technical details in the 2001 textbook not repeated in the BNIM Detailed Manual, and available only there.

 
 
1.2.1. TFA Terminology. October 2010 +. I am currently changing terminology. 

•	The ‘T’ in the term ‘TFA’ used to stand for ‘thematic’ (as in Thematic Field Analysis). I am now starting to use it to mean ‘Teller’ (as in ‘Teller Flow Analysis’).  This obliges the user to think in terms of the subjectivity telling the told story rather than the impersonal ‘themes’ in the told story. 

•	More correctly, to get to the point where a structural TFA can be constructed, the researcher first needs to have done a ‘flow’ TFA. The procedure is unchanged. 

•	I have started to rework the text below with the new terminology, but have only got a short way on this. To indicate this movement, you could have a double ‘F’ as in ‘TFFA’. Therefore, the current version contains a potentially confusing mix of the old and new language. The procedure of TFA work remain completely untouched by this change in the terminology. 

•	The distinction will therefore be between first developing an account of the  Teller-flow-process that goes through the Telling-flow chunks of the sequentialisation chunk-by-chunk and future-blind, and, when this is completed, the TFA-structure where you then construct an account of key features of the Teller, the whole current subjectivity/perspective as embodied/detected in the interview.

See section 1.8.1. below (starting p.202) for further discussion of Teller Flow interpretation. 

•	In addition, instead of ‘evolution’ of the case (History of the Case Evolution HCE) , One could talk of ‘mutations’ of the case and ‘History of Case Mutations’ (HCM).  This avoids any implication of unilinear or necessary ‘progression’ in the history of the case. An evolution can as easily be importantly ‘negative’ – as, say, in the onset of psychoses, or senility, or Alzheimer’s or moral corruption.  Irrespective of the term chosen, the BNIM procedure is unchanged






 
1.2.2.  Preparing for BNIM (Teams of 1 or more, say , say 4)

This section and the appendix to which it refers are in course of construction.

BNIM is increasingly used for team research projects in which a number of team members are funded to be simultaneously trained in the BNIM methodology which they will then use in the project itself. These teams are typically small (say 3 or 4 members).

The earliest anglophone BNIM team research project was that of Sostris (1997-1999) (with 14 or so members across seven countries) and since then further small-team trainings have been undertaken.

Certain questions of any preparation for BNIM work emerge more strongly with the training of BNIM teams. The careful reading of the 2001 textbook (Wengraf 2001) can no longer be taken for granted, and collective team preparation poses additional questions (and great opportunities) which one-by-one training (for PhD or individual post-doctoral work) does not generate and provide. There is always one BNIM enthusiast in such teams (otherwise the successful application for team research and for funds for preliminary team training in BNIM would not have succeeded), however one or more other members of the team might be less enthusiastic, especially researchers hired specifically for the team project. This poses questions of joint preparation. 

As of September 2012, arising from a numberof such trainings over the last few years, I’ve therefore  started  to plan an appendix relating to such issues of team preparation. I’ve realised that many of the points I wish to make also apply (in slightly altered form) to individual researchers who are going to work on their own (team of 1). 

This new appendix will be A.2. Team of 1 or more (pretend 4), starting on p. 783 . So far, unfortunately, it’s a blank page! 

Though of special interest to leaders of such teams (Principal Investigators), it has some material relevant to all preparation  for BNIM work. 

In particular, it deals with questions about ‘preparing to investigate a particular social category’, since most applied social research takes the form of investigating one or more social categories. There is a separate and earlier discussion of multi-category interviewing for triangulation (section starting p. 114). 



1.2.3. Appendices  on ‘Variants and Adaptions’ of  and around BNIM 

The bulk of the present text has been and remains strongly normative, presenting what might be regarded as ‘classic BNIM’. I make no apology for this. It is important to have a clear well-tried set of procedures as a basis for one’s research and self-training..

However, it is important to see how people have adapted and adopted different components of BNIM procedure. Hence Appendix E. Some of these may certainly strengthen the method for certain purposes;  others may certainly weaken it. One way or the other, given that every researcher who uses the method will eventually develop their own minor or major ‘subtractions’ and ‘additions’  (and different ones in different contexts), it is important to be fully aware of one’s own choices and be able to know and think about those of others.

I would like just to signal two other  ‘E’ appendices: 

(i) one is about the use of BNIM within the context of a fully psycho-societal approach (p. 999 onwards) ; 

(ii) the other (April 2010) is about Critical Realism and the mutual congruence/support of this developing philosophy  of social-science research practice on the one hand and BNIM approaches on the other (p. 1017 onwards).  

You will be unsurprised that I  commend both!


 
1.2.4. The BNIM interview – push for ‘Pauses’ as you push for ‘(in)-PINs’ and foster Free-Associative Leaps


1.2.4.1.  Push pausefully ….

As regards BNIM interview practice, I have stressed the importance of ‘pausing before responding’  much more than I did before. 

During the June 2009 BNIM London training,  I become more aware of the dangers of mind-stopping rapid-response-unit-style questioning (UK - Jeremy Paxman style) and the many important  benefits for both parties in Sub-session Two if the interviewer always ‘Pauses Before Responding’ …… and models this for, and gives permission to,  the interviewee to do the same.

Both interview-partners need to pause to listen about what has just been said (whoever said it, themselves or the other interview-partner), and have time to sense what they feel about it all, before starting talking again.  

Without pauses, we are only going through the motions of listening to what and how ourself or the other person has only just completing saying; and we are likely to fail to listen  to what’s going on between us.

Only pauses give proper spaces to think, free from the pressure of ongoing speaking or ongoing listening.

There needs space to think: What has just been said? What’s the significance of it being said? Why was it said that way? At this point? What do I feel about it all? What might my interview partner be feeling about it all? What am I feeling about it all, right now? No need to use words, yet. Get a sense of it all -- and all about it -- quietly. Listen. If listening can be seen as a form of ‘pushing’ then a new slogan might be…

“Push for thoughtful Pauses;then Push for then-felt, heart-felt, In-PINs”. 

This will make more sense, later..

The silences between words and the sayings allow the unsaids (that make up what one might call the ‘crucial interword’) to come through.   Pause here.  What are the implications of accepting the idea in the first sentence of this paragraph, and those of rejecting it? Why not? What stops you? 

What interviewing practice and behaviour – or indeed, reading practice in relation to  the text you are now reading --  needs to be ‘pushed against’ to allow the coming through of ‘thoughtful pauses’?

The Western tendency to be ‘afraid of silences’, the compulsion to block thoughts with words. These ‘instant wording’ have to be ‘pushed against’ to get thoughtful pauses and proper listening to self. 

Pauses are ‘pregnant’; for good natural delivery, let the pauses have a full gestatation, taking the time they need. You are not a hurried and harried  extractive surgeon, you are a facilitating midwife, particularly of yourself. Also for your interviewee.


Pushing for PINS and for more and more details of those PINS, for other PINs provoked by the retailing of the first PIN: what does it do? 

Pushing pausefully for in-PINs

invites practitioners to focus on crucial moments in their actions, moments
when more possibilities of next steps might be [have been] available than at first  thought [remembered] 
(Shotter and Tsoukas 2007, materials in square brackets added)

We are all ‘practitioners’ of our own lives, let alone any other practices we practice. 


The four Ps: Pauseful Pushing for in-PINs, and then Pause again! 
A final point: not hastily towards in-PIN but gradually

If somebody aged 70  replies to your SQUIN by saying “Well, I’ve had a most amazing life?” and then stops, what do you not do?

You don’t ask a question which would be a really a good question later on; you don’t say “You said you had a most amazing life; do you remember the most amazing moment in it, how it all happened?”.

You want a much richer overview (or Report) of more of  the whole 70 years, so that you can then move gradually down towards PINs on various cue-phrases embodied in the overview Report. You might say, breaking the default rules, somerthing that could be called a 'Grand Tour' question:

You said you had a most amazing life; can you give me some idea of how it developed, how it all happened?”.

And hopefully they will eventually give you some sort of overview with, say, five components. You can then push towards PINs within each of the 5 component areas.

The detail of PINs can be very much differentiated into separate  Mini-Moment PIN. 

For example, “You said you quickly decided to phone your boy-friend. Do you remember any thoughts or feelings you had while you were deciding to phone your boy-friend, how all that happened?”. If you are successful, you are pushing towards a PIN of internbal subjective experiencing, a very valuable thing if you can get it.

Elsewhere, I refer to the notion of going for a “Grand Tour” before focusing on each “Mini-Moment” element mentioned within the grand tour (see p.388 ). Moving gradually towards any particular in-PIN.

1.2.4.2.  and…foster leaps:Anything else come to mind?

The SQUIN, the open-narrative question allows for un-prompted free leaps in sub-session 1. 

How can we foster the same free-associative leaps in sub-session 2, where the interviewer is taking the freely-offered cue-phrase but persistently driving towards in-PINs relating to that initial cue-phrase? 

The danger is that we do foster   ‘free-associative’ leaps in any direction in  subsession one, but, in subsession two. only rather heavily guided unfree associative drives in one (interviewer-selected) direction. Does this make you think of anything else?

The key phrase in subsession two is that, at a point where for one reason or another, you as interviewer are no longer pushing towards an in-PIN generated by a cue-phrase some ‘rounds’ before (hopefully because you got your in-PIN in enough mini-moment detail)., you can then ‘prompt for a free-associative leap in any direction’ by asking quietly Does this make you think of anything else?

The use of that phrase first – before you go on to older cue-phrases already written ¬– is a quiet mini-prompt for any other memory (potential PIN) that comes to mind. 

The phrase Anything else come to mind? is as free as the SQUIN that staets sub-session one; in fact, it is more free. It gives back the interviewee’s mind its autonomy, and its power to start a new interesting ‘meander’.

In a recent interview, a very experienced doctor was recalling a powerful and wonderful progressive training for professionals he had recently experienced, about which he was unambiguously enthusiastic. He provided several powerful-in-PINs about that experience.

An unskilled interviewer might happily have lect it that and gone on to his next cue-phrase note several rounds back. Luckily this did not happen.

Luckily, the interviewer remembered the ‘pause for a possible coda’ principle.  

She paused long enough, and then  asked him an “anything else that brings to mind?” pause-and-coda-question.

Immediately, he gave a powerful image of the cane that stood in the corner of his primary school when he was a boy, a cane called “Betsey”, and, after letting that sink in and scenically ‘re-experiencing’ the classroom and the teacher.  found himself producing in-PINs about that experience of 30 or so years before, in-PINs which vividly related his primary school experience to his later-life  professional concerns and chosen specialisation. 

This ‘prompted free-associative jump’ at the level where he was already remembering at the in-PIN level was a complete surprise to him, and an amazingly powerful contribution to understanding the ‘situated subjectivity’ that characterised him.

Without the Anything else come to mind? as a last-word free-associatie prompt, this crucial key to understanding his present subjectivity would almost certainly not have come to mind, to his mind. 

Push pausefully for PINS; pause and push for codas with the coda-question; foster free associative leaps and glides….Anything else come to mind?.

 
1.2.5. The BNIM interpretation process

1) The Unsaid. I have tried to insist more on the fact that only people interested in the ‘unsaid of the said’ will generate good narrative interviews or interpret them well. 

If you ignore what is not said, you will not help them to say that unsaid to you,  let alone understand the person doing that saying by unsaying. 

If you are only interested in what is said, then the significance of the way in which the said is said and the way in which the unsaid is also said…. will both escape you. 

2)  Checking back. Partly as a result of the emergence of new audio-visual recording and computer-aided qualitative data interpretation  programmes, I stress more than I used to do the value of checking back to the original recording both during the interpretive process (micro-analysis) and also at late-points in that process after provisional interpretations have started to crystallise.

 New technologies enable you to switch between a place in  the transcript and a place in the audio/visual recording at the press of a button. See Appendix B.4. From tape to transcript and back again: videotapes? starting on p. 824.

3) Foreign-language interviewing.  In addition, there is a discussion of foreign-language interviews and also – a separate question --  of  BNIM–panel interpreting  of the lived experience of interviewees who have had a lot of significant experience in ‘dated foreign locations’ (times and places) foreign to most or all people on your BNIM panel. See Appendices A.4 and B.4. 

4) Temporally-linked cases: transmission. I have inserted a page of notes to myself for a new sub-section 3.7.6.3. on ‘linked cases’, getting ready to think more carefully about ‘transmission and conditions of mutation’. You can find these notes to myself about this on p.777. 

5) In the discussion of the BNIM interpretation process of the sequence of the Teller Flow Analysis (Track 2) --  and the putting forward  of hypotheses about the lived experience of the person telling the story in the interview (now) about experiences that he or she had earlier in their life (then) --   I now refer more explicitly than I did before  to the need to think of hypothesising in the TFA as being  ‘Double Experiencing’ Hypothesisings (DEH), both  the past experiencing being remembered and the present experiencing in the interview that leads to decisions about what to say, and what not to say, and how to say it. 

Hypothesising about the lived experience in the interview of this double experiencing by the interviewee  has always been part of good practice in BNIM, but I have only now made it sufficiently explicit.

6) In thinking about the role of the researcher in the BNIM interview and as the BNIM panel facilitator, I have been struck by an analogy.

A good BNIM interviewer pushes carefully but determinedly for more PIN-detail and in-PIN engagement by the BNIM interviewee, who can be quite reluctant to go so deeply into their subjectivity.

A good BNIM panel-facilitator pushes carefully and determinedly for more imaginative detail and precision and in-panel engagement by the the BNIM panel-members, who can be quite reluctant to go so deeply into their subjectivity and into the complexity of the subjectivity of the interviewee.

If we talk about ‘pushing for deep and detailed interesting hypothesising’ as the key strategic direction of the BNIM panel facilitator, then we could call this latter activity ‘pushing for in-HYPS’ (sounds like“in-HIPs”). This would be different from ‘about-HYPs’ because they would address the depth and complexity of the imagined subject of the panel and they would do from the depth and complex subjectivity of an engaged panel member.

There is no point in having deep and detailed pushing for in-PINs if the interviewer turned facilitator (and her or his panel members) contents themselves with rather and shallow descriptions of the subjective data generated.

Because you want in-depth material in your interviews,  you push pausefully for in-PINs in the interview. Because you want in-depth interpretations of your material, push pausefully for many complex and deep in-HYPS from your panel members. 

And, to set up a habitus and a habit, do both early!


 
7) The new third column.

Perhaps the most useful  innovation in the BNIM interpretation procedure is a further modification/addition to the process of developing a case-interpretation. 

The shift from a 2-column summary to a 3-column summary. 

The original model of the 3 one-page diagram that holds the result of the twin-track separations was a two-column one: 

(i) living of the lived life (BDA); 
(ii) telling of the told story  / teller flow analysis (TFA): 

That is, the ‘objective facts about the life (say, 40 years)’; the detailed facts of the ‘telling of the told story in the interview’ (say 2 hours in the 40th year), both ‘interpreted and a pattern inferred from each’. This is the one that can be found in the textbook, Wengraf 2001:  287.

The ‘detailed facts of the pattern of the telling of the told story in the 40th year’ (column two) clearly reflect inevitably the ‘subjectivity of the teller’ in the current phase of the evolution of their subjectivity, and it is used to infer that current ‘historically-situated subjectivity’  (the individual’s “current perspective”) operational in  that 40th year.

But the material in that interview (and in any other subjectivity-expressing data) can also be used to explore earlier phases of development of that 40-year-old subjectivity.  Up to and including (and sometimes going further back beyond)  the study period of the whole of the ‘lived life’. 

We therefore now typically work towards  three columns:

Two as before
(i)	(phases in the) living of the lived life (or part thereof) (BDA); 

(ii)	(phases in the ) telling in the interview of the told story of that life (or part thereof) teller flow analysis (TFA); 

and now also
(iii)	 (phases in the) evolution of situated subjectivity over the period of the living of the lived life (or part thereof)

Enabling the clear comparison over a single life or life-period  of the phases of the living of the lived life (i) and the phases of the evolution of subjectivity over that life-period (iii),  the relation between the two can then be explored as a base for constructing the case-history.

This third (central)  column can be seen in the one page 3-column diagram to be found on Figure 49 Three-columnn case-condensation – blank. This explicit introduction of a third (central) column with phases of mutating subjectivity over the same ‘lived life’ period as that dealt with in the ‘biographical data period’ in the first column is discussed in sections 3.6.1 onwards. 

This then leads to the construction of a Case-History in which the analytically and procedurally abstracted ‘objectivity phases’ and ‘subjectivity phases’ are brought together in a Case-phase Account.



A note on TFA.

Since with those with a good foundation in English and normal social sciences education and training continue to have such a powerful ‘habitus’ in favour of detecting and abstracting themes from the told story in a narratological sort of way, I have gone even further in now translating ‘TFA’ as primarily ‘Teller Flow Analysis’ (interpretation of the situated subjectivity telling the told story in situ) of the data given by a ‘Telling Flow’ data-set, and to relegate the term of ‘Thematic Field’ to a large, but not complete extent, to early BNIM pre-history. 

The data-set is the ‘telling’; the interpretation is of a ‘Teller’.

So. ‘TFA’  Teller flow analysis works on Telling flow data [as represented  most of the time in the sequentialisation (TSS)] in order to end up with (different sorts) Teller Flow interpretation.  

The procedure in broad terms for what (Wengraf 2001) called ‘Thematic Field Analysis’ is not changed; the way of understanding it is, I hope, improved…..  

For TFA overview, see section 1.8.1., a little revised, starting on p. 202; 
for TFA details, see section 3.5.3.  starting on p.601


These are the main differences of the current version of the BNIM Detailed Manual from earlier ones. They have accrued gradually over the past two or three years or so. 

 
 
1.2.6. More examples of ‘writing up’ the various stages in different ways

The Detailed Manual  now provides further examples of the actual writing-up of the different types of intermediate documents needed at the different stages of the BNIM interpretive process, to make clear the type of thinking and the type of text you should decide to aim for.

Each piece of intermediate writing up -- as listed below --  is very different, in ways that are not immediately obvious to the beginner. Because they are not, and cannot be, immediately obvious to the beginner, the definite differences have to be slowly and painstakingly learnt. 

Generalisations without sufficient examples (examples to be positive and negative: truth is perceived and corrected error as Gaston Bachelard might have said) don’t guide enough. 



So, in the Detailed Manual,  there is now a set of fullish example or examples of written-up accounts of 

•	Track One: Living of Lived Life
o	 Biographical Data Analysis (Phase Model of the Living of the Lived Life) – both the ‘first bare’ and the  ‘second enriched’ BDA.

•	Track Two: Telling of the Told Story
o	TFA-Teller Flow-Flow Analyses of the subjectivity-in-interview (mostly present perspective)
o	TFA- Teller Flow -Structure Analyses of the subjectivity-in-interview (largely present perspective),  and

o	Phase Model of Mutating Subjectivity over the period of the Lived Life (up to and including the interview)
 (previous subjectivity/perspectives)* 



During 2009, I made the distinction between TFA ‘flow’ analyses and TFA ‘field’ analyses. As of December 2010, I  relabeled this distinction as ‘TFA-flow’ and ‘TFA-structure’.  As examples show, this is  a ‘spectrum’ difference (rather like Report/PIN): but spectrum differences are important to think with! 

Any TFA-account will be somewhere on the spectrum between  describing an as-it-goes sequential flow of jerky subjectivity and  identifying a higher-level (or deeper-level) structure of that subjectivity/perspective. . In  fact, you are likely to  move from  mostly the first to more of the second.

 In October 2010, as said before and to be iterated later, the ‘TF’ in the above formulations  got renamed as  ‘Teller’, as in ‘Teller Flow Analysis’’. Procedures don’t change at all, but how you think as you do them can usefully change a bit. And this has subtle effects on the details of your practice

•	Case History: Connecting of Lived Life (Track One) to Told Story (Track Two)  

These examples are not prescriptive, but they should be suggestive of the sort of differences that you need to aim for…and hopefully provoke further exploration and innovation. 

If you start to feel that you are being asked to write”the same thing as before”, this is a sign that you have not yet sufficiently grasped the difference between the different tasks set. You have either not grasped the task set before, or the task set now, or both. Study the examples of both in this book. 

Do not expect the differences to be obvious.

They take time and close attention to learn.

At a certain point,a pre-metric  UK coin  the penny will drop and you will see the difference and be able to recognise and correct the places where, when trying to write to one genre-requirement, you have inadvertently slid into another.  
1.2.7. McGilchrist’s  ‘divided brain’; and the pleasure of practices

Ian McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain – a resource for understanding BNIM

(April 2010). I’ve just come across the work of McGilchrist (2009). It has really illuminated and re-awakened my sense of how some of the oddities and imperatives of BNIM work are supported by recent brain research and by clinical experience. All references to left and right hemispheres in this version of the Guide are based primarily  on this extraordinarily interesting book. Warning: it’s not a quick read, but it’s engrossing  as it – quite inadvertently – adds a new dimension to handling and understanding the productivity of BNIM’s procedures and approach.

For example, McGilchrist makes a very interesting point which can be related to the qualitative difference between an ‘in-PIN’ and several other textsorts (including about-PINs and GINs, Reports etc. His account suggests to me that the ‘in-PIN’ alone comes from the right hemisphere, and that the others depend on left-hemisphere processing. He writes:

The right temporal lobe deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature, what is called episodic memory,…..  where the left temporal lobe is more concerned with memory for facts that are within the public domain (McGilchrist 2009: 54).

At this pint he inserts an endnote of which I quote part:

…True recall of personal experience is consistently more associated with the right hemisphere….. Objective data about the self, or imagined (fabricated) autobiographical memories are less strongly lateralised to the right hemisphere…. The distinction that matters seems to be whether or not the episode is re-experienced in the moment of recall; clearly recall of some autobiographical information can become little more than objective recall of facts. There is this a distinction to be drawn between episodic and …[non-episodic, TW] autobiographical memory
 (McGilchrist 2009: 471). Material in square brackets supplied TW]

According to this model, the pushing towards in-PINs in the BNIM sub-session two is in fact an attempt to push towards a shift of dominant function to the right hemisphere. It is only then that the ‘re-experiencing’ happens. The distinction between ‘in-PINS’ and ‘out-PINs’) emerged empirically over the course of the last 10 years teaching and doing BNIM; for me, it was fascinating for me to find in McGilchrist’s work a line of neurological research and argument which explains and justifies the distinction. 


Two working points February 2012:

Prue Chamberlayne suggests that vividly-experienced ‘condensed situations’ might also be stored in this way, image of ‘states of mind’, of ‘the atmosphere of situations’ which can only be grasped in metaphors and fragmentary glimpses, and maybe worked up into poetry. 

Clearly, the exploration of ‘images of the felt sense of traumas’ or for that matter of what Freud called ‘oceanic feeling’ such as bliss’ (individual collective) might well fall into such a category where ‘screen images’ of vivid experience cannot be unpacked into narratives but can convey lived experience like crazy. 

Such ‘lived situations’ can be expressed in a visual register by a verbal description equivalent to a photograph. 

Under other conditions, they emerge as something like a poem.

See Eva Hoffman’s After such knowledge on the preconceptual apprehensions of young people, children of parents who experienced and survived the Holocaust): 

May others who grew up in households like mine remember the torn, incoherent character of those first communications about the Holocaust, the speech broken under the pressure of pain. The episodes, the talismanic litanies, were repeated but never elaborated upon. They remained compressed, packed, sharp. I suppose the inassimilable character of the experiences they referred to was expressed – and passed on – through this form. For it was precisely the indigestibility of the utterances, their fearful weight of densely packed feeling,  as much as any specific content, that I took in as a child. The fragmentary phrases lodged themselves in my mind like shards, like the deadly needles I remember from certain fairy tales, which pricked your flesh and could never be extracted again (Hoffman 2004: 11)

Poetry can also convey something similar, not requiring ‘narrative’ (although what follows can appear as narrative):

From the window
you see in the sky
a thunderous hulk of metal
with complacent wings and an unerring aim
circling as it hunts for its next target
(could it be the woman in mourning?).
It pursues her
 beneath the threatened domes,
it pins her against her bedroom wall
(where the picture of her absent son
fixes his last smile in black and white),
It hunts for her 
beneath her clean white bed sheets, 
and in between her clothes’ lines.
It hounds her into streets
whose bruises are still warm.
It seeks out her blood
today;
it will seek it out again tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow
(Mourid Barghouti 2008, translated by Radwa Ashour: Midnight p. 39-40) 

NB: I shall add an example of a ‘condensed situation’ description from a BNIM interview as soon as I find a good example.

2. I feel that McGilchrist’s work can also illuminate  what goes on in the mind of the individual and collective researcher working on  the two tracks during the BNIM interpretive process, but I need to work this out some more before venturing in to this more complicated area. Pushing  to structural hypotheses and structural accounts pushes you towards right brain holistic apprehension of wholes……hypothesis.

The pleasures of professional BNIM practices

“It is the practice that breathes life…. (Armstrong 2005: 131).

The key practices of BNIM that breathe life into the work of the BNIM researcher are 

(i)	the moment of enabling the interviewee to give you an in-PIN and enabling yourself to receive it properly (see the BNIM interview Sub-Session Two extract on p. 50) 

(ii)	 the equally live encounter with the other members of your BNIM interpretive panels; and, eventually, 

(iii)	 the pains-taking and illumination-making of your post-panel interpretive work  as you reconstruct and come to understand the lived and the unlived unlived ‘case-journeys’ and ‘life-worlds’ of each of your interviewees. 

(iv)	the painstaking and illumination-making of your ‘writing up and conveying’ to different audiences your descriptions and understandings in a way that makes sense to, and helps, each of those audiences with their different needs and their different prior readiness for  (mis)-understandings.