ABSTRACT
As part of a growing interest throughout the social sciences in narrative forms of inquiry, the issue of data analysis has come to the fore. Various scholars have illustrated that there are multiple ways to conduct a narrative analysis depending on the theoretical and political positioning of the researcher and the purposes of the inquiry (Andrew, Squire, and Tamboukou, 2008; Clandinin, 2007; Gubrium and Holstein, 2009; Holstein and Gubrium, 2012; Riessman, 2008). From the range of possibilities now available, this chapter focuses predominantly on one type, dialogical narrative analysis. For me, this form of analysis allows us to take seriously Frank's (2012) claim that storytelling is a dialogue of imaginations which is real in its consequences for how people act. This is particularly so in relation to how people act towards their own bodies and the bodies of others in ways that, as Frank notes, can sometimes be brutally real and sometimes heroically real depending on the circumstances that people find themselves in over time.
