ABSTRACT
To understand what a narrative analysis “is” it is first vital to appreciate the paradigmatic and theoretical assumptions that underpin it. This is of importance because, as Holstein and Gubrium (2012) noted, narrative analyses extend out of, and are informed by, particular epistemological, ontological, and theoretical sensibilities. For example, as several authors have highlighted in reviews of the field (e.g., Schiff, 2013; Sparkes & Smith, 2008), postpositivism, realism, and constructivism have been used to inform how narrative analysis is practiced (e.g., McAdams, 2013). Largely, however, narrative analyses have been underpinned and informed by interpretive epistemologies and ontologies, such as constructionism, post structuralism, or critical inquiry (see Kim, 2016; Sparkes & Smith, 2008; see also Chapters 1, 4, 10, and 21, this volume). Narrative analysis is often also underpinned by a psychosocial approach that emphasizes human beings as meaning-makers who, in order to interpret, direct, and intelligibly communicate life, configure and constitute their experience and sense of who they are using narratives that their social and cultural world have passed down. A complementary core premise of narrative work is that narratives shape human emotion and conduct; narratives can
do things for humans and, as actors, narratives can do things on, in, and with us, affecting emotional life and “what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided” (Frank, 2010, p. 3).
