ABSTRACT
Qualitative researchers invoke the term narrative or narrative analysis to refer to a range of methods that share a common interest in stories and storytelling as constitutive elements of the ways in which individuals construct meaning in their lives (Berger and Quinney 2005; Clandinin 2013; Ochs and Capps 2001; Riessman 2008). Increasingly, researchers who use interviews to generate empirical knowledge also recognize that it is the stories people tell that are of most interest to them and their readers. Barbara Czarniawska (1997), for example, recalls asking her interviewees questions that required them to generalize from their experiences, as well as the panic she felt when participants would break from the controlled structure of the interview by telling stories she had not asked for but which provided background information about how they came to understand their current circumstances. As she writes, “this used to bring me to the verge of panic—‘How to bring them to the point?’—whereas now I have … learned that this is the point” (p. 28). Similarly, Robert Coles in his book The Call of Stories (1989) tells of the advice given to him by one of his supervisors, Dr. Ludwig, while he was working in a psychiatric ward. Dr. Ludwig urged Coles to dispense with the theoretical abstractions of his profession in order to let patients tell him their stories: “Let the story itself be our discovery,” Ludwig advised (p. 22).
