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- Volume 17, Issue, 2007
Narrative Inquiry - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2007
Volume 17, Issue 2, 2007
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Beyond the counter-narrative: Exploring alternative narratives of recovery from the psychiatric survivor movement
Author(s): Alexandra L. Adame and Roger M. Knudsonpp.: 157–178 (22)More LessThe discourse of the medical model of mental illness tends to dominate people’s conceptions of the origins and treatments of psychopathology. This reductionistic discourse defines people’s experiences of psychological distress and recovery in terms of illnesses, chemical imbalances, and broken brains. However, the master narrative does not represent every individual’s lived experience, and alternative narratives of mental health and recovery exist that challenge our traditional understandings of normality and psychopathology. Guided by the method of interpretive interactionism, we examined how psychiatric survivors position themselves in relation to the medical model’s narrative of recovery. In its inception, the psychiatric survivor movement created a counter-narrative of protest in opposition to the medical model’s description and treatment of psychopathology. Since then, the movement has moved beyond the counter-narrative and has constructed an alternative narrative; one that is not defined in opposition to the master narrative but instead participates in an entirely different discourse.
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The narrative reconstruction of psychotherapy
Author(s): Jonathan M. Adler and Dan P. McAdamspp.: 179–202 (24)More LessGoing to psychotherapy represents an atypical, usually unanticipated, and often emotionally significant experience in the life course. As with many such events, people construct stories about therapy experiences in order to make sense out of them and to provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose. Yet beyond these purposes, the storying of psychotherapy is also central to the maintenance of the therapeutic gains achieved during the course of treatment (e.g., Frank, 1961; Spence, 1982). In the present study, the psychotherapy stories of 76 community adults are assessed using grounded theory methodology to determine narrative patterns that distinguish between individuals who currently show different constellations of psychological health. Two dimensions of current psychological health — ego development, or complex meaning making processes, and psychological well-being — serve as the basis for comparisons between participants. Four ways of storying psychotherapy are described, and preliminary interpretations for these types are suggested. In summary: participants high in ego development and high in well-being emphasized their personal agency throughout their stories; participants high in ego development and low in well-being prominently featured their therapists and pointed to the therapeutic alliance as the mechanism of treatment; participants low in ego development and high in well-being adopted components of dominant cultural narratives of therapy; and the stories of participants low in ego development and low in well-being presented an interpretive challenge, lacking a certain standard of narrative coherence. The themes we identified lay the groundwork for future research on the narrative construction of psychotherapy and may prove useful to clinicians as they strive to help their clients to co-construct successful stories about their therapeutic work together.
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Telling stories their way: Narrative scaffolding with emergent readers and readers
Author(s): Alison L. Bailey and Ani C. Moughamianpp.: 203–229 (27)More LessFifty-nine mother-child dyads were studied when children were 3, 4 and 5 years to examine (1) parental verbal support of children’s personal narratives, and (2) how support may relate to later literacy outcomes. Supporting narration by prompting for specific events was the most widespread and frequent scaffold when children were 3 and 4 years old. All mothers decreased the number and range of support types by the time children were 5, but specific event prompts were used more frequently by mothers of children who were readers by the end of 1st grade than by mothers of emergent readers. Mothers of readers also used more of their own narration to add to the detail of stories and to elicit responses when children were 4 and 5. Mothers of emergent readers used proportionately more prompts for non-specific events and for correction of stories. Emergent readers were less responsive than readers at all 3 time points.
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But what will they say?: The impact of receiving feedback on women’s relationship narratives
Author(s): Carolyn Birnie and Diane Holmbergpp.: 231–258 (28)More LessIn this study, 72 women wrote eight emails over the course of a month discussing one of two topics: (a) non-emotional events (i.e., control condition), or (b) their thoughts and feelings regarding their current romantic relationship. Some of the latter group received feedback on what they had written, whereas others kept their narratives more private. Participants who wrote about their relationships differed from those in the control condition on a variety of dimensions; they used different words (e.g., words related to positive and negative emotions, cognitive mechanisms), they perceived their narratives differently (e.g., more self-disclosing) and they found the experience of participating in the study more valuable. Very few significant differences emerged between the narratives of those who received feedback vs. those who did not. Overall, whether a woman anticipates receiving feedback on her relationship narrative does not appear to have a substantial influence on its content, style or depth of emotional disclosure and processing.
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Narratives of identity: A poststructural analysis of three Deaf women’s life stories
Author(s): Rachelle Holepp.: 259–278 (20)More LessLiving in the world as a Deaf person provides a different situatedness in which deaf individuals construct their identity. How does living in the world, different from the hearing majority, influence the ways deaf individuals go about the creative act of constructing identities? Traditionally, researchers of D/deafness have constructed identity categories in order to research identity and hearing loss. For example, there is a distinction made in the literature between deafness (written with a lower case ‘d’) — an audiological state related to having a hearing loss — and Deafness (written with an upper case ‘D’) — a marker of a culturally Deaf identity. This article is about how three women constructed narrative identities relating to hearing loss in life stories. And how they incorporated, resisted, and/or rejected various cultural discourses in narratives they told? Using a poststructural narrative analysis, I explore how identities relating to hearing status were shaped and limited by four discourses at work in the participants’ narrative tellings (discourses of normalcy, discourses of difference, discourses of passing, and Deaf cultural discourses). For example, I discuss how discourses of normalcy and discourses of difference led to the construction of identities based on opposites, in a binary relationship where one side of the binary was privileged and the opposite was “othered”, e.g., hearing/deaf, and Deaf/deaf. Finally, drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I conclude the article with a discussion of some theoretical implications that emerged from using a poststructural narrative analysis.
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“My little sister had a disaster, she had a baby”: Gendered performance, relational identities, and dialogic voicing
Author(s): Julia Menard-Warwickpp.: 279–297 (19)More LessThis paper discursively analyzes an extended personal narrative from a life history interview with a Mexican woman immigrant in California, in which the teller details the varying reactions of family and community members to her younger sister’s unmarried pregnancy in a Mexican village at a time of increasing emigration. In analyzing the narrator’s account of these events, the paper focuses on her orchestration of multiple discourses and social voices, arguing that through her juxtaposition of competing gender ideologies, the teller performs a traditional “good woman” identity, while at the same time creating discursive space for other girls and women to make different choices.
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“Determined women at work”: Group construction of narrative meaning
Author(s): Trena M. Paulus, Marianne Woodside and Mary Zieglerpp.: 299–328 (30)More LessAlthough interest in narrative research is increasing, little attention has been paid to how individual stories become a group narrative. An online environment provides a rich opportunity to capture asynchronous group storytelling as it occurs in a formal class environment. This study focused on how a group story is created. Data included individual stories of four graduate student participants and the threads from their three-week, online discussion. Data analysis was collaborative among three researchers. The four participants used the online discussion to continue developing their own individual stories and to develop a group story. The women used temporality, shared themes, and epiphany to construct a story together. They extended a sense of agency to each other and to the group, using this aspect of their dialogue to reframe and recast individual stories and the group story. Implications for teaching and learning environments are discussed.
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What shapes narrative thought?: Effects of story type and culture
Author(s): Andrea Smorti, Anne McKeough, Enrica Ciucci, Michael Pyryt, Nicki Wilson, Alex Sanderson and Tak Fungpp.: 329–347 (19)More LessThe primary aims of the study were to investigate the narrative strategies used by Italian and Canadian youth on progressive (improving interactions) and regressive (degenerating interactions) stories and to investigate potential differences in story interpretation across the two countries. Two hundred and six participants, matched for age, gender and SES, were selected from fifth and seventh grade classrooms in Calgary, Canada, and Florence, Italy. Participants were presented with six stories of social interaction between peers, in which the protagonist performed an act that differed markedly from his/her habitual behavior towards a classmate, and asked to describe events that led to the discrepant act and to interpret the social attitude of the protagonist. The results showed that participants used different narrative strategies on the two story types. Moreover, country of residence shaped the children’s narrative interpretations.
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Memories and narratives about breast cancer: Exploring associations between turning points, distress and meaning
Author(s): Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen and Anders Bonde Jensenpp.: 349–370 (22)More LessTurning points are considered to refer to emotional and important events. The present study compared turning point memories to other memories on several ratings and investigated the association between turning points, distress and meaning. Memories may act as organising units in extended narratives, hence the study also tested whether overlap between memories and extended illness narrative was associated with a more coherent narrative. Fifteen patients with breast cancer were asked to tell a 10-minute narrative about their illness course and describe meaning in their illness.Each patient was asked to recall five memories, to state whether or not the memories were turning points, and to rate memories on both event and phenomenological variables.Lastly, the patients were asked to rate distress. The narratives were scored for coherence and the memories were scored for thematic content as well as thematic overlap with the narratives. The results showed that all participants rated the mammography as a turning point and that turning points were rated higher on both event and phenomenological variables. Patients reporting more turning points also reported more distress and not finding meaning in the illness and treatment. High degree of overlap between memories and narratives showed a trend towards an association with a more coherent narrative. The present article discusses processes, which may be involved in the interaction between memories and narratives.
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Small stories, positioning analysis, and the doing of professional identities in learning to teach
Author(s): Cate Watsonpp.: 371–389 (19)More LessInterest in the narrative construction of identities has become widespread in social research. Much of this research focuses on the grander narratives we tell about ourselves, the big retrospectives elicited from interviews. However, if identification is conceived as an ongoing performance accomplished locally in and through everyday interactions then it is the narratives that emerge in this context that become the focus of interest. “Small stories” are the ephemeral narratives emerging in such everyday, mundane contexts, which it is argued constitute the performance of identities and the construction of self. Drawing on Bamberg’s Positioning Analysis, this paper examines the construction of identities in a “small story” told by two student teachers, showing how this enables the participants to make claims about their developing professional identities. The paper also examines positioning analysis and its ability to link these locally produced identities to wider discourses.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
Most Read This Month
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Autobiographical Time
Author(s): Jens Brockmeier
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