ABSTRACT
Can narratives do more than confirm our existing preconceptions? We argue that the analysis of narratives provides data and insights crucial for policy makers and practitioners. The chapter shows how the biographicalinterpretive method (Breckner 1998; Rosenthal 1995) enables us to identify structuring themes in people’s lives which remain dominant despite external influences, such as the subject of the research topic and the specificity of the interviewee/interviewer situation, and despite the issue of researcher bias throughout the interpretive process. We aim here also to give a flavour of how biographical-interpretive analysis works by describing a small part of the process, the thematic field analysis. We believe that such emergent themes often contradict prior and sometimes stereotypical ideas relating to, in this case, carer perspectives and concerns.
