Big stories co-constructed: Incorporating micro-analytical interpretative procedures into biographic research

Tying up to previous narrative work that is concerned with the interrelations between big story and small story research (Bamberg, 2006; Freeman, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006b), this article aims to demonstrate that big story research can profit from methodological procedures that understand narrative research interviews as interactional encounters and positions assigned to the narrator during this encounter as impinging on the biographic accounts they deliver. For that purpose, I take the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee — both before and during the actual interview — as an analytical point of departure and argue that the self-constructions that narrators undertake when engaging in (auto)biographic self-reflection have to and can only be understood against the background of this embedding interaction.