Engaged Research
Narrative Analysis.
"The oldest and most natural form of sense making" are stories or narratives (Jonansses & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002, p. 66). Stories are how we make sense of our experiences, how we communicate with others, and through which we understand the world around us. Stories, also called "narratives" have become a popular source of data in qualitative research. The key to this type of qualitative research is the use of stories as data, and more spefically, first-person accounts of experience told in story form having a beginning, middle, and end. Other terms for these stories of experience are biography, life history, oral history, autoethnography, and autobiography.
First-person accounts of experience constitute the narrative "text" of this research approach. Whether the account is in the form autobiography, life history, interview, journal letters, or other materials, the text is analyzed for the meaning it has for its author.
As with other forms of qualitative research, narrative research makes use of various methodological approaches to analyzing stories. Each approach examines, in some ways, how the story is constructed, what linguistic tools are used, and the cultural context of the story. For example, a biographical approach can seek to understand the influece of gender, race, family of origin, life events, turning point experiences, and/or other persons in the participants' life. As well, a psychological approach concentrates more on the personal, including thoughts and motivations. A linguistic approach, or discourse analysis, focuses on the language of the story or the spoken text, and and also attends to the speaker's intonation, pitch, and pauses.
This page features narrative analysis tools, resources, and examples to help you analyze your narrative data.
Below is a brief outline differentiating four types of narrative analysis (adapted from Cresswell, 2009 and Merriam, 2009):
Narrative Analysis Tools and Resources
Thematic Analysis
Thematic analysis in its simplest form is a categorizing strategy for qualitative data. Researchers review their data, make notes and begin to sort it into categories. Styled as a data analytic strategy, it helps researchers move their analysis from a broad reading of the data towards discovering patterns and developing themes. While researchers debate whether thematic analysis is a complete "method" per se, it is a process that can be used with many kinds of qualitative data, and with many goals in mind. For that reason, thematic analysis is often implicitly and explicitly a part of other types of data analysis including discourse analysis, grounded theory, and case study.
Structural Analysis
Structural analysis focuses on the ways in which the narrative is conveyed by the speaker with particular emphasis given to the interaction between speaker and listener. In this form of analysis, the language that the speaker uses, the pauses in speech, discourse markers, and other similar structural aspects of speech are the focus. When utilizing this approach, oftentimes the narrative is divided into stanzas and each stanza is analyzed by itself and also in the way in which it connects to the other pieces of the narrative.
Dialogic Analysis
Dialogical analysis is an interpretative methodology which closely analyzes spoken or written utterances or actions for their embedded communicative significance. Although dialogical analysis tends to focus on discourse, it is distinct from discourse analysis and conversation analysis because its focus goes beyond the question of how people speak and what they achieve by speaking. Dialogical analysis uses dialogue as a metaphor for understanding phenomena beyond communication itself, such as the self, internal dialogues, self-talk, misunderstandings, trust and distrust, the production of knowledge, and relations between groups in society.
Visual Analysis
Visual analysis seeks to understand how words and images convey meaning; subsequently exploring the visual message.
The researcher is offering their analysis of the visual document in a manner that is clear, concise, and informative. Visual analysis is not describing the data, as the method explains the rhetorical strategies at work and the ways in which the document communicates visually.
You can download more information about the application of thematic analysis below:
You can download more information about the application of structural analysis below:
You can download more information about the application of dialogical analysis below:
You can download more information about the application of visual analysis below:
Utilize excel as a means to perform text analysis. Excel allows you to automatically find unique phrase patterns within text, identify phrase and word frequency, custom latent variable frequency and definition, and find unique and common words within text phrases.
Narrative Analysis & Excel
That's right-- you can utilize excel as a tool for text analysis! Download the easy-to-follow guide below and/or watch the video clips below to explore data analysis tools.
Watch this webinar to better understand how to use excel to organize and code qulitative data.
Narrative Analysis Software (free!)
QDA Miner Lite is a free and easy-to-use version of our popular computer assisted qualitative analysis software. It can be used for the analysis of textual data such as interview and news transcripts, open-ended responses, etc. as well as for the analysis of still images.
Click here to download the QDA Minor Lite program.
Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT) is a free service of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), and hosted by the University Center for Social and Urban Research, at the University of Pittsburgh, and QDAP-UMass, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The toolkit consists of a ASP.NET based suite of tools to facilitate efficient and effective analysis of text datasets that have been coded using the CAT coding module or ATLAS.ti.
You can dowload the quickstart guide below:
This video is a short introduction to QDA Miner, a qualitative data analysis software for mixed methods research.
Originally released in 2009, this video introduces the basic Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT) features. CAT is a free, open source, web-based system for having multiple coders label a semi-structured text dataset.
Narrative Analysis Overview
Introduction to Coding Text
The following interview coding module, instructional videos, and slides provide additional information as to how to organize and thematically code (interview) data. For additional information in developing your coding scheme and organizing your data, you can download the introductory coding manual below:
This tutorial demonstrates how to focus on segments within the transcripts, develop codes, and create thematic categories. However, it is important to remember that you can also analyze qualitative in its entirety and not in segments. The tutorial assumes that your task is to make sense of a lot of unstructured data ( i.e., that you have qualitative data in the form of interview transcripts). You can use the steps described in this tutorial to analyze:, notes from participatory, observations, documents, web pages, and other types of qualitative data.
This module will illustrate how qualitative data is analyzed. A common form of qualitative data analyzed by action researchers is interview data.
The following example is an annotated interview between a researcher and a bilingual education teacher and will be used to illustrate step-by-step how the action researcher analyzes and interprets the interview data.
The qualitative process of data analysis is an inductive one, in which the data is examined from a "bottom-up" approach (Creswell, 2005). The specific data is examined to identify more general themes that will be used to understand the meaning of the data.
Narrative Analysis Examples
Narrative Analysis in Action!
Explore the ways in which researchers' utilize narrative analysis to present research findings, the implications of the research, and the diverse forms of narrative analysis utilized.
Visual Analysis- Selfies
In her talk about "Selfies", Elizabeth A. Urbanski covers the fascinating and sometimes puzzling phenomenon of publicly posted instant self portraits snapped on cell phones, and examines these self edited pictures through an art historian's lens and attempt to categorize and analyze as well as understand them in relationship to works significant to Western art history.
Diaological Analysis- Stories in Motion
Storytellers in Motion documents the evolution of indigenous images in cinema and television though the life experiences and works of directors, producers, writers and actors and examines the works of selected Aboriginal films and filmmakers. Their voices come from the indigenous cultures of Canada and New Zealand. Their tools are the communications technologies of the 21st Century.