'Analysis of Personal Narratives' by Catherine Kohler Riessman. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein (Eds.). Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002.
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Riessman opens the paper with an account of a commonly found problem in interview research: the long and lengthy responses that interviewees give:
"It is a common experience for investigators to carefully craft interview questions, only to have participants respond with lengthy accounts-long stories that appear, on the surface, to have little to do with the question."
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"If participants resisted our efforts to contain their lengthy narratives, they were nonetheless quite aware of the rules of conventional storytelling. After coming to the end of the long and complex story of a marriage, a participant would sometimes say, "Uh, I'm afraid I got a little lost. What was the question you asked?"
These responses were identified as narratives, and narrative analysis grew to be a wide and varied field.
Riessman limits discussion about narrative research to first-person accounts in interviews in this paper. She presents background references on the "narrative turn" and the shift in interview approaches to more relaxed styles which are open to participants' personal choices about how to organise meaning in their lives. Narrative analysis methods are presented as one possible approach, and an appropriate one for life disruptions, politics, social movements and macro-level phenomena. Personal narratives are acknowledged to serve many purposes - "to remember, argue, convince, engage or entertain their audiences."
She acknowledges the cultural relation involved in human storytelling, both in reference to the culture-based analysis of Ken Plummer, but also in relation to her own work. She states:
Storytelling is a relational activity that encourages others to listen, to share and to empathize. It is a collaborative practice and assumes that tellers and listeners/questioners interact in particular cultural milieus and historical contexts, which are essential to interpretation. Analysis in narrative studies opens up forms of telling about experience, not simply the content to which language refers. We ask, "Why was the story told in that way?"
Narratives are acknowledged to be located in the place, time and society in which they inhabit.
Approaches which consider the entire life-history as narrative are placed in sharp contrast to event-centred approaches such as that of William Labov, which are in turn contrasted with "extended accounts of lives that develop over the course of interviews." The latter are treated as an evolving series of stories which build to a larger interaction-framed narrative. She states they are distinguished by:
Presentation of and reliance on detailed transcripts of interview excerpts, attention to the structural features of discourse, analysis of the co-production of narratives through the dialogic exchange between interviewer and participant, and a comparative orientation to interpreting similarities and contrasts among participants' life stories.
All three approaches share sequential and temporal views of narrative structure; one action is given as consequential for the next. Structuring can also be thematic, spatial, or episodic.
Riessman acknowledges that not all talk in interviews is 'narrative' and suggests that a movement into and out of narrative structures is signalled through the use of entrance and exit talk. However such movements are not always clearly bounded, and are co-negotiated; analysis needs to consider "paralinguistic utterances ("uhms"), false starts, interruptions and other subtle forms of interaction."
Narratives can be analysed textually, conversationally, culturally, politically/historically, and performatively. Riessman gives examples of people who have addressed narratives in these ways. The analytic approach used can also affect the type of transcription required; depending on whether the focus is on interactional co-construction, culture or conflict resolution. The researcher selects where a narrative segment starts and stops. Thus the investigator "'infiltrates' the text."
Riessman argues for analysing narrative in terms of performance (see Langellier, 1989/2001): when we tell a story about our lives we are 'performing' our preferred identity. This is related to Erving Goffman's (1959/1981) powerful use of the dramaturgical metaphor, where "social actors stage performances of desirable selves to preserve 'face' in situations of difficulty, thus managing potentially 'spoiled' identities." The presumption here is that informants do not reveal an "essential self as much as they perform a preferred one."
This approach therefore also strengthens an argument to consider linguistic performative acts; emphasis and enhancement, repetition, paralinguistic features and gestures, appeals to the audience, and body movement (see also Bauman, 1986). Social positioning is presented as a useful point of entry for analysis, as it is open to many interpretive questions: such as who, where, how are actors positioned, what is the position of the audience, what are told as the 'turning points' and how are scenes contrasted.
The truth of a story from a performative or social constructivist stance can therefore be recognised as less important than understanding the meanings of events as located within culture and history. It becomes 'irrelevant' as to whether the events told 'really' occurred as reported.
In the concluding comments of the paper she emphasises that the narrative approach is one of many, and should not be considered a panacea. The approach works well with a small, detailed data set, and in contrast, poorly with a large number of participants as the analytic detail required is prohibitive and time-consuming. She emphasises that the approach is still useful for representing and analysing the multiplicity of identities which can be presented by an informant and opening a discursive space for participants.
The approach presented in this paper brings together the study of event, experience and cultural narratives, while acknowledging the performative aspect of storytelling in co-construction of narratives. It is a compelling argument, and acknowledges that it is only one of many possible approaches that could be taken to the text: as the approaches which can be taken to narratives are wide, diverse and can be conflicting. Admittedly, more discussion could have been made about the varieties of approach and how they contrast, as well as other types of narrative than those found in interview contexts (which are acknowledged, but again not discussed). There is also room for discussion about 'performances': are they effective, successful, etc. However, overall the paper presents a clear, cohesive approach to narrative analysis.
I had been awaiting this one session ever since the programme was first published. Happily I was not disappointed.