Narrative Inquiry - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2009

Narrating self-experiences inherently involves tension between real time and remembered time, between narrative event and narrated events. Narrators employ various strategies of footing and voicing to position their current “self” vis-à-vis their former selves and their audience. These characteristics are particularly pertinent in the case of significant life changes, such as learning to read and write for the first time as an adult. This paper treats personal narratives of an Israeli immigrant woman elicited during a meeting with a former literacy teacher. The encounter, forty years later, provides an opportunity for both to reestablish their relative identities and reframe their shared history. Analyzing the events — and narratives thereof — within their sociocultural contexts, reveal a delicate balance between gratitude and agency in the construction of a literate identity. These transformational narratives draw upon the Israeli hegemonic narrative of assimilation and modernization as well as the Mizrahi counternarrative of integration, creating a unique version of the consequences of (il)literacy.

Qualitative researchers studying children through the use of narratives face a particular set of ethical challenges as they relate to the need to report issues of abuse and neglect. These challenges are compounded by the lack of a court mandate to report abuse, for without such a mandate researchers are left to decide whether a case merits reporting and, if so, whether they are the ones responsible to do so. While researchers may be reluctant to support a mandate, citing issues of confidentiality, lack of training, harm to research outcomes, and social and political ramifications, it is argued herein that they have a moral imperative to report. Thus, to remain a silent bystander to suspected abuse ultimately results in complicity to the injustice. More generally, it is also argued that the role of the dispassionate researcher, committed to his or her data alone, must be suspended in order to protect vulnerable populations.

Despite exponential growth in the field of narrative inquiry, personal narrative writing by research participants remains a seldom used research method. This article explores what it meant to the author, a former writing instructor, and her participants, adult college students, to use personal narrative writing by research participants as part of a larger qualitative study that examined the impact of college on adult worker education students. The author found that writing the personal was one way for adult students to begin to locate and critically interrogate their educational experiences and begin to revise their understandings of their educational journeys. This article explores the potential of personal narrative writing to engage participants in a research paradigm that moves them towards a more structural understanding of their previous educational failures and a heightened sense of their agency.

Four published memoirs refute culturally dominant ideas about severe mental illness as personal weakness, as something shameful, and as a condition that necessarily leads to isolation and disenfranchisement. The narrative structure and content of the memoirs reveal that people’s experience differs from the hegemonic discourse: while narrating symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and acceptance of the illness, all four authors present themselves as accomplished, self-possessed, and socially integrated. Their memoirs, and the act of narrating their experiences with mental illness, challenge the established cultural discourse of mental illness as limitation. The narratives help change that discourse and our social attitudes toward people with mental illness.

Big stories are typically characterized by a high degree of reflexivity, which results in the construction of a fairly coherent — or even “rehearsed” — identity that is acceptable from a contemporary viewpoint. This article focuses on the life story of a former SS Leibstandarte soldier elicited by means of an interview. Most of the analysis confirms this idea of the construction of a “rehearsed” self, since the narrator consistently presents himself as a peaceful man who did not agree with Hitler’s regime. However, although rarely, the interviewee self-initiates stories that do not perfectly match this identity construction. These stories all contain highly reportable events, in which most attention is paid to enhancing credibility instead of making them conform to the prevalent identity construction. This demonstrates that also in big stories, the activity of narrating takes place in the here and now, thus making an audience-oriented criterion such as reportability so important that contradictions of this “rehearsed” identity may occur.

Within clinical and health psychology, narrative is used to understand how people make meaning of events that challenge one’s believes about the self and the world e.g. the diagnosis of an illness or the experience of a traumatic event. This paper introduces a model of narrative analysis that can provide insight into the ways in which people make meaning of traumatic events and the types of resources that aid or hinder this process. The model, an adaptation of grounded narrative analysis (Murray, 2003), was applied at two levels (narrative form and narrative content) to the narratives of British male veterans of World War II (WWII) and post WWII veterans up to and including the Iraq war (2003– ). Narrative form concerned the coherence of the narrative, which was defined as an oriented, structured, affectively consistent, and integrated narrative, indicative of the reconciliation. Narrative content focused on the social support experiences of the veterans. Through this two level analysis, it was possible to make theoretical links between the types of social support that aid the meaning making process and help veterans to reconcile their experiences.

The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 third generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portrayed families as hardworking, caring, and cohesive while negative legacies were more idiosyncratic. Individual family members typically responded to their family legacies by embracing the positive and rejecting the negative. However, individuals’ responses also pointed to additional complexities in accepting or rejecting family legacies. Specifically, some individuals embraced negative family legacies and rejected positive ones; others only accepted portions of the legacies; and some reported their legacies as unembraceable.

This paper examines how life story books were used in two care settings in the UK for people with complex support needs. The context of the research was the transition of six people from a long stay hospital to a community home. Discourse analysis was used to analyse talk and texts in the care settings including staff interviews, meetings and the written text in the life story books themselves. Three uses of the books are highlighted in the analysis. They were used as a resource for: getting to know the person; defining the person; and displaying personality and uniqueness. Mutual identities of the various participants were constantly changing with reference to the life story books. It is suggested that the books encourage acceptance in the care relationships. The analysis demonstrated that despite the different uses of the life story books, highlighted by the care staff, there is an underlying assumption that what is written in the books is a direct representation of the person. It appears that once this type of information is committed to paper the identity of the person becomes reified.

This paper investigates when, how and for what interactional function, police officers disclose something about their personal lives to the suspects they interview. Anonymized recordings of 120 interviews between different police officers and suspects in a constabulary area of the British police service were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. The analysis revealed that ‘clear’ cases of self-disclosure (SDs) had two main functions: (1) When positioned as full turn responses within a suspect’s narrative telling, SDs were designed to affiliate with suspects, in contrast to ‘continuer’ turns that aligned with the telling. A similar affiliative action was accomplished by SDs positioned as sequence-launching first-pair parts of adjacency pairs. Affiliative SDs coalesced around categorial phenomena by displaying shared knowledge of categorial items in suspects’ prior turns, and by temporarily suspending ‘officer’ and ‘suspect’ category memberships and making other identities relevant (e.g., ‘heterosexual man’; ‘social worker’). (2) When positioned as second-pair part responses to suspects’ questions, SDs blocked suspects’ attempts to halt the routine pattern in police interviews of question-answer sequences, and sometimes functioned to pursue admissions from suspects. As such, these SDs had a clearer institutional function than the affiliative SDs. Four further possible types of SD were also considered for their admission-pursuing function. Overall, the paper challenges psychological and narrative analytic approaches to self-disclosure, grounding the analysis of such phenomena in the potent reality of everyday life, rather than in researcher-elicited, self-reported narrative accounts.