Narrative analysis

Question 1

What is stories?

Answer 1

Making sense of life

Exploring the complex interactions
between self and society,
:construted through language
:mediated by particular material conditions

Meaning is continually
constructed and reconstructed

This occurs within, and is made
visible through, stories

Question 2

Forms of narrative analysis

Answer 2

• People produce accounts of
  themselves that are ‘storied’
• The social world is itself ‘storied’
• Most interview accounts
  are likely to be ‘storied’
• Narratives link the past
  to the present

Question 3

Definitions

Answer 3

Characterised by:

An element of transformation

Action and charaters

Are brough togethre
in a plot line

Question 4

Narrative theory

Answer 4

1. Structural analysis:
   focus on story grammar
   (Labov, 1973)
2. Sociology of stories approach:
   focus on cultural, historical, political context
   (Plummer, 1996)
3. Functional approach:
   focus on what work particular stories
   do in people’s lives
   (Bruner, 1990)

Question 5

Functions of narrative

Answer 5

Narratives as ‘Acts of Meaning’

• solving problems
• tension reduction
• resolution of diemmas

Deal with & explain mismatches
between the exceptional &
the ordinary
(When events occur that
we perceive as ordinary,
then explanations
are not required)

Re-cast chaotic experiences
into causal stories
in order to
make sense of them,
and to render them safe

(Bruner, 1990)

Question 6

Emplotment

(Plot setting)

Answer 6

Put narratives into
a plot or story

>might include many
disparate elements
in just one story
(e.g., digressions, sub-plots, etc.)

Question 7

Structuralist approches

Answer 7

Narratives can take different forms

Propp (1968) argued that

:The Fairytal involves
a narrative form that is
central to ALL story-telling

>structed not by the
nature of the characters
but by the FUNCTION
they play in the plot

>And the number of possible
functions is fairly SMALL

Question 8

FFairytale violence

Answer 8

Wood’s (2001)
participants relied on romance narratives -
which entailed both fairy tale and
dark versions - to make sense of
violence int their relationships

~Narrative analysis can be used to
predict harmful choices and
prevent them -
in farmyard accidnets
as well as
domestic violence situations

>Even women who percceive
their partern’s violence as wrong
often maintain that
their partern love them
because of their
Prince Charming periods

Question 9

Focus on

Answer 9

“the ways in which people make
and use stories to interpret the world”

Question 10

DO NOT

Answer 10

treat narratives as stories that
transmit a set of facts
about the world,

and is not primarily interested in
whether stories are ‘true’ or not

Question 11

View narratives as …

Answer 11

social products that are
produced by people

in the context of specific social,
historical & cultural locations

interpretive deveices through
which people represent
themselves and their worlds
to themselves and to others