As I took a first pass through the development of a methodological approach to my study, I was primarily concerned with the possibility that hegemonic assumptions would arise from my analysis, simply because I occupy a position of advantage in comparison with the majority of my study participants. I aimed to select a methodology that would bring forth participants’ distinct voices and experiences, and grounded theory’s emphasis on analysing data based on codes drawn directly from participants’ accounts presented a path forward. After grounded theory analysis, however, the ensuing results seemed to lack much of the nuance of the raw data. There were powerful details of participants’
accounts that lost their meaning when broken down into discrete codes and that could only be understood in the wider context of an individual’s life situation. I had identified storytelling as a defining feature of Roma health communication, yet my grounded theory analysis gave little attention to participants’ distinct stories. With this in mind, I revisited methodological approaches and identified narrative analysis as a means for capturing the key details of participants’ health communication, and also for giving voice to participants in a deep and meaningful way.
Organising life events into stories can be seen as a means of making sense of a chaotic reality, and narrative analysis looks to understand the connections that people draw across events in their lives and
their reasons for relating particular stories at particular times (Josselson, 2011; Riessman, 1993;
Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Greenhalgh, 2016; Robert & Shenhav, 2014). Narrative analysis is not concerned with representing events exactly as they happened, but rather focuses on the holistic development of an individual’s story in light of the social and cultural settings in which both the events of the story and its telling occurred (Josselson, 2011; Muller, 1999; Gubrium & Holstein, 2008;
Greenhalgh, 2016). This mode of analysis traditionally avoids division of the story into thematic categories, seeking instead to represent an individual’s lived experience as a coherent whole (Josselson, 2011; Muller 1999; Gubrium & Holstein, 1998).
The first step towards narrative re-analysis of data was to consider the narrative character of my ethnographic observations. When taken together, ethnography provided a broad view of the patterns arising from social interaction – such as differentials in social status and collective behaviours of a social group – and narrative analysis supplemented these broader accounts through individual stories (Gubrium & Holstein, 1999). Interspersing individual narratives with a wider ethnographic account can thus ‘constitute meaningful social experience, as well as produce distinction and nuance’, while simultaneously upholding the overarching attention to social structures and patterns of interaction (Gubrium & Holstein, 1999, p. 568).
Narrative ethnography operates on the central premise that the external social and cultural environment in which storytelling occurs is the main factor determining the details and structure of the resulting narrative (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008). Key to this analysis model is the idea that there are multiple perspectives on every story and multiple contextual factors that shape the way in which the storyteller chooses to represent events (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008). Where multiple interpretations of a narrative are possible, it is the role of the researcher to determine where these perspectives diverge, and then to identify the sources of this divergence. Culture influences both the individual’s choice of which stories to tell and also the method of telling, and narrative research seeks to understand how these individual narratives are broader cultural narratives, and the ways in which members of a culture collectively understand events (Muller, 1999). Narrative ethnography thus is key in providing context to individual life stories and in elucidating the impacts of external social and cultural factors on participants’ representations of reality. This can help to establish the link between the individual and the wider social environment, which, when viewed through a critical theory lens, can also shed light on the power differentials implicit in participants’ narratives.
The idea of control over the means by which stories are told highlights connections between narrative research and critical theory, in which storytelling can be harnessed as a tool for marginalised groups to
‘frame and probe the status quo’ (Price, 2010, p. 158). Narrative analysis looks at the unique social position and profile of the storyteller, giving attention to which voices are silenced and which voices are heard and revealing how the stories people tell are indelibly bound with the collective impact of life experiences within systems of social dominance (Price, 2010; Robert & Shenhav, 2014). Furthermore, particularly when employing narrative ethnographic frameworks, the researcher must be careful to present the research subject not as an ‘exemplar of culture’, but rather as a complex individual with a varied array of life experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 45). Narrative inquiry seeks to provide as nuanced a view of the research subject as possible, achieving this through analysis models that take a holistic view of life experiences, behavioural factors and environmental influences in explaining how individuals understand their lives.
Narrative analysis must account for the multiple perspectives and interpretations of events that emerge through a research text, as well as the many ways in which they can be interwoven to produce a nuanced view of the social world under observation (Muller, 1999; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). In considering these multiple perspectives, it is important that a researcher’s understanding of a social phenomenon may differ fundamentally from a participant’s perception (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
Neither interpretation should be privileged over the other, and the researcher should seek to understand potential social and cultural sources for the discrepancy. The narrative researcher is thus continually filtering through alternate readings of research texts, looking at what is said, what is not said and the reasons for inclusions and omissions of information (Riessman, 1993). Despite an overall focus on the voice of research participants in creating meaning through narrative, it is important as well to consider how the researcher is integrated into the development of participants’ narratives and the ways in which the researcher’s personal impressions shape the representation of the field (Muller, 1999;
Riessman, 1993). On one level, the presence of the researcher influences the stories that respondents choose to tell and the details that they choose to disclose (Muller, 1999). Yet the researcher’s personal experience in the field also constitutes an individual story in itself, which can shed light on elements of the research environment that participants in the research environment may take for granted (Clandinin
& Connelly, 2000).