Narrative Inquiry - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2010

This article tells about stories with stories alongside a theoretically based analysis. The author’s personal story is combined with the story of this research project to tell and analyze the stories of two mothers whose children have autism. The mothers’ narratives are interpreted in this study as a defense of the narrators’ goodness as mothers and a defense of their children’s goodness. The narratives do this is in part through their structure, which holds many qualities in common with two traditional Western literary structures: romance and irony.

Experiencing personal growth via reflection on negative events is well established. Yet, we know less about how people process and grow (or not) from different types of negative events, and how such narrative processing might differentially predict important outcomes, in this case, wisdom and well-being. Eighty-five community members participated in an online study examining the narrative processing and self-perceptions of traumas and transgressions, and how narrative processing predicted wisdom and well-being. Results showed few differences in the processing of traumas and transgressions, though the latter was viewed as less important to the self compared to the former. Further, growth in transgressions predicted wisdom, and narrative resolution of transgressions predicted well-being. In contrast, for trauma narratives well-being was predicted by the interaction of resolution and narrative complexity. Discussion focuses on the role of event types in narrative processing in relation to wisdom and well-being.

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.

Narratives matter. They shape the social world in which they circulate, reflecting and refracting the cultural limits of what narratives can be told, in what setting, to whom. From this perspective, they structure how we make sense of ourselves, as members of a community, but they also structure how we understand right and wrong, good and evil. Nowhere is this more apparent than in capital murder trials in which the narratives that are constructed are literally life and death matters. The research on narrative processes in capital trials documents how the courtroom is a place for “story-battles” where each narrative works to disqualify the other and legitimize itself, in an effort to structure jurors’ decisions. This is accentuated in the penalty phase of the capital trial where both mitigating and aggravating narratives “thicken” the narratives told in the guilt phase; in the penalty phase jurors make the decision to sentence the defendant to either life without the possibility of parole, or to death. While some research of juror decision-making shows that jurors favor the prosecution narrative and make up their minds to give the death sentence independent of the penalty phase narratives, other research on mitigation narratives shows that contextualizing the defendant, via mitigating narratives, can overturn the power of the prosecution narrative and lead to a life, rather than a death, sentence. This research seeks to avoid efforts to associate juror cognitive processes to narrative processes and instead seeks to examine the connection between jury sentencing decisions, for life or death, as a function of narrative closure which is, in turn, defined in terms of two narrative dimensions: structural complexity and moral transparency. Using this framework, the penalty phase narratives in two capital trials are compared along these dimensions; the findings suggest that moral transparency and structural complexity provide the foundations for narrative closure in the penalty phase, as both structural simplicity and moral obtuseness are characteristic of narratives that are not adopted by the jury. While the sample size is small, the narrative data is rich, and the study, overall, is intended not to suggest a causal relation between dimensions of narrative closure and jury sentencing, but rather aims to illustrate a method for assessing narratives in relation to jury sentencing in the penalty phase of capital trials. However, at the broadest level, the paper offers a framework for examining the way that narrative works to contain violence.

Recent research in Taiwanese families has found that children’s transgressions are narratable and parents encourage children to confess and reflect upon their faults. Little, however, is known if adults do the same when talking with children or other adults. This study examines transgression stories from interviews with 102 adult participants in Taiwan. It finds adults often tell stories about the faults of close family members such as spouses, parents, children, and aunts and uncles. However, they are less likely to tell stories of their own faults. Furthermore, they say telling transgression stories to children must take into account the child’s age and the story’s potential didactic value. The study also finds that many stories, especially those told by older adults, i.e., grandparents, articulate part of a “master story” lamenting how they persevered from a bitter past to a much better present. Such a story shapes cross-generational narrative and lends greater moral authority to elders. Finally, implications are discussed how this study sheds light on a theory of confessional narratives by authority figures across different cultures.

Narrative inquiry is a rapidly developing social sciences and humanities research methodology. In this paper we provide a brief history of this development, indicate some of the distinguishing features of different lines of narrative inquiry, and describe a practical line of work which explicitly addresses school-based research.