ABSTRACT
As I have discussed, narrative analysis has become increasingly popular in British social research since the 1990s, but it has continued to be eclectic. Researchers have perhaps turned to narrative because it seemed to offer a way of analysing interesting or moving stories, for example, of experiences of illness. They have often looked to the US for analytic approaches. In her extremely popular short guide to narrative analysis, Catherine Kohler Riessman (1993), contrasts it with `Traditional approaches to qualitative analysis (which) often fracture these texts in the service of interpretation and generalization by taking bits and pieces, snippets of a response edited out of context' (p.3). This implies that there can be analysis without interpretation (conversation analysts also make this claim about their technical approach; see Schegloff, 1998) or selection, which I would dispute. However, Riessman's position, that narrative analysis, avoids interpretation or selection and somehow retains the voice and integrity of the original speaker, is one that I suspect many narrative researchers would agree with. It perhaps underlies claims by some narrative researchers that their work is `realist'.27
