Chapter 2

What Is Narrative?

Narrative is rather a messy area. This chapter and the next two will try
to make sense of it first in terms of what we mean by narrative, narrative
psychology and narrative and culture. Narrative is messy partly because
it is employed by a number of disciplines, which define the construct
differently according to their own theories and methods. Disciplines use
narrative for different purposes, so it is not surprising that there are areas
of disagreement. This is not the place to examine all these areas of dis-
agreement, as the purpose of the book is to enable psychologists to make
practical use of narrative. I will largely ignore the applications of narrative
in other disciplines except insofar as they are helpful to understanding
narrative psychology. Anyone who wishes to have a linguistic, sociologi-
cal, or other explanation of narrative should look elsewhere. We need
a workable theory of narrative that can be applied in a consistent and
useful manner.
In this chapter, I will attempt to define narrative, examine the key con-
cepts associated with narrative, explore some elements of differing theoret-
ical perspectives across disciplines to show ways in which they are helpful
for psychologists and outline the general theoretical perspective employed
in this book.
While there is much disparity between narrative approaches, as we have
already seen, they do have common foundations. They centre on the nar-
rative or story as a unique form of discourse.

Narrative and Story

There is little consensus regarding the uses and meanings of the terms nar-
rative and story. They are often used interchangeably. For the purposes
of this book, as we are discussing narrative psychology, there is a clear
distinction. A story is a specific tale that people tell. Narrative refers to
the resources and skills that we have that are used to construct the story.
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 Narrative and Story 17
Narrative is a series of biological, cultural and social resources that provide
the means by which people can construct stories. We can discuss the nar-
rative components that make up stories. Narratives are about temporality,
coherence, plots and so on, and the result is the story. This distinction will
not be acceptable to everyone but it has practical utility. Stories matter
when we are discussing the application of narrative. It is through inter-
preting stories that we examine people’s mind and behaviour, sometimes
through examining the effectiveness of their narrative processes, processes
which can break down or fail under certain circumstances.
Narratives and stories are important because without them language is
just a sequence of sounds, little more useful than crude grunts and gestures
were to the first homo sapiens. Our ability to make language meaningful
is the work of storytelling, an ability that allows us to recognise and make
meaningful patterns of words, phrases and inflections, to make and rec-
ognise common story forms and archetypes, and to be responsive to those
patterns when they are communicated to us in fragments.
Narrative itself can be split into two elements: first, the narrative skills
and processes that we all have, the brain components that enable us to con-
struct the second, the stories or narratives themselves. A story is a sequence
of related events that are situated in the past and recounted for rhetorical/
ideological purposes. Events are composed of multiple elements, includ-
ing actors, times and other entities which relate to one another through
actions that occur. The term ‘story’ is often used in a colloquial sense to
refer to a wide range of resources ranging from official and unofficial news
stories to family stories to online postings and blogs. Stories can emanate
from a variety of places and serve a variety of purposes; they all share a
similar structural integrity: a sequence of related events situated in the past
that is recounted for a rhetorical or ideological reason.
Are narratives and stories the same thing? Stories are relatively unam-
biguous. We all know what a story is, a sequence of words describing
series of structured events with characters, actions and so on. Narratives
can be stories but narrative also refers to the skills we have in construct-
ing stories. There are implications of narratives and stories not being the
same thing.
We all have our narrative skills, but there are individual differences in
how effectively we can use them and we tell different stories of the same
event. Two people may have a similar experience but the stories they tell
may be very different. This is partly because of how they focus the story,
what is important to them, what they remember and partly because of the
audience they are aiming at. A story is not a perfect reflection of experience,

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 18 What Is Narrative?
but an interpretation derived from not only what happened but also per-
sonal memories, interests, personality and so on. In psychology, the study
of narrative skills is important. It is often assumed that we all have effective
narrative skills, that we can all produce coherent stories about the world
in which we live, but this is not necessarily so. People differ in their abil-
ity to use narrative skills. Some people have very good narrative skills and
some have poor skills. This is why narrative therapy may not be suitable
for everyone. The key question here is whether we can get those with less
effective narrative skills to produce good narratives. Can we train narrative
skills? Is this why we have creative writing courses? When psychologists
are using narrative exposure therapy (NET, see Chapter 9), they are not
relying particularly on the narrative skills of the client, but on the ability
of the therapist to help the client construct the story. This might work for
verbal forms of narrative, but can it work with narrative writing, where the
therapist is not providing that level of guidance? This is not clear, as we
shall see in Chapter 7, on narrative writing.
In general usage, narrative and story are interchangeable, and this is in
part due to the connotations of the words and the ways they are used in
everyday speech and writing. These connotations are used throughout the
book in order to be pragmatic and avoid awkwardness. This is an applied
book, not a deep consideration of the finer points of narrative theory. In
the end, someone who says they are describing a narrative are describing a
story, and vice versa.

Characteristics of Narrative
Narratives are characterised by sequence (temporality) and consequence
(point, message; Reissman, 2008). Narratives also have characters, plot,
space and genre (Randal, 2017). The ability to capture time means narra-
tives are essential to human existence (Ricoeur, 1984). This will be explored
further in Chapter 3, but without narratives, we would have only limited
access to the past (as memories would have limited organisation) and pos-
sibly no meaningful access to the future. Without the past and the future,
there is a limited or no sense of being human.
Bruner (1991) proposed ten features of narrative, a list which is adapted
below as twelve points.
1. Universal. All people use narrative for most of their thoughts and
interactions with others. Narrative does not constrain interaction
between people, language does. Narrative enables translation of one
language into any other language.

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 Characteristics of Narrative 19
2. Temporal. Narrative is irreducibly durative. Time is essential to
narrative. Without time, all we have is an event.
3. Generic. There are conventionalised representations, both of
narrative itself and the forms of telling. Stories are told in particular
ways and not other ways. It is from generic stories that we then
develop into particular stories.
4. Intention. What happens with narrative in a social setting is
relevant to people’s intentions. Social settings are affected by what
people do in those settings; social settings derive from people’s
stories.
5. Meaning. Narrative helps provide individual and social meanings
for events.
6. Canonicality and breach. There are canonical scripts for situations
(e.g. restaurant and classroom). For a story to be worth telling, this
script must be breached in some way.
7. Referentiality. There is always reference to truth in narrative, both
in factual accounts and in fiction. Both use reference to truth and
so it can be difficult to differentiate truth from fiction. For truth,
we rely on trust.
8. Normative. Narrative is essential normative because it relies
on breaches of these norms for a story to be worth telling. This
illustrates the importance of narrative as scaffolding for stories,
providing the essential components of a story on which the actual
wording of the story is based.
9. Context sensitivity. Stories are not just about individuals, they are
about the context in which the individual exists.
10. Negotiability. It is usually possible to tell several different versions
of the same story. There is socio-cultural negotiation which depends
on the context and the people involved.
11. Accrual. Stories are grouped together and eventually become culture
or history (as master narratives, see Chapter 4).
12. Audience. Without an audience, there is no story. Narrative
requires participants. Sometimes, the audience may be the person
creating or telling the story, but on most occasions, there is an
audience or an intended audience or at least an imaginary intended
audience.
Wright (2002a) argues that there is an interplay between three terms, nar-
rative, story and myth, with a preference for the word myth as the medium
through which religion, neuroscience and mental well-being all interact.
This illustrates the terminological difficulty we experience when studying

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 20 What Is Narrative?
narrative. As established, narrative consists of the set of rules and skills for
creating stories, and so functions at a higher level than stories and myths,
terms that are in many ways interchangeable as all stories are myths, they
mostly contain some truth and some fiction, with a broad sweep of inter-
pretation included. Shannon (2005) made a similar mistake, arguing that
if rational explanations such as quantum physics and evolution are fully
adequate explanations of our origins and realities, then why do we continue
to read, create and reformulate myths? This is a misunderstanding of the
nature of science. Quantum physics and evolution do not provide fully ade-
quate explanations of anything, they are just the best stories we have at the
moment. Science is narrative (Prickett, 2002). Indeed, according to Niels
Bohr, and he should know, quantum theory is not telling us what is, but
what we can say to each other. Presumably, at some point in the future, bet-
ter stories will replace our current science stories. Personally, though with-
out evidence, I am looking forward to the story that removes the story of
the Big Bang, which is just another term for God in the sense that humans
need to have a beginning. Genesis or the Big Bang? Both are interesting
stories. Neither are good representations of the ‘truth’, whatever that means
in this context. Humans have very limited cognition and require begin-
nings and ends, not only to our own stories, which always have beginnings
and ends, whether formal, for example, novels, or informal, for example,
describing what happened today, but also the stories of the universe.
Discourse is, according to a Wittgensteinian approach, a rule-based
manipulation of symbols in multi-person episodes that unfold in mate-
rial settings, that is, human narrative capabilities, enable us to talk to each
other in the real world and interpret that real world in different ways.
This approach, central to this book, relies on the work of Wittgenstein,
Vygotsky and Garfinkel, all of whom focused on the importance of the
social in the development of the human mind; and to be social, we need
narrative.
Herman (2007) outlined five key concepts that inform narratological
research.
1. Positioning, for example, powerful/powerless or admirable/
blameworthy people. We use position-assigning speech acts in our
everyday speech.
2. Embodiment. This is a critical scientific position. Unlike during
the first cognitive revolution, we accept that the mind is embodied,
minds are a nexus of brain, body and environment. The mind is put
on the same footing as the environment. This helps avoid making

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 Characteristics of Narrative 21
cognitive processes wholly explanatory of behaviour and ensures that
narrative approaches are grounded in a scientific realist position.
3. The mind is distributed. Minds are in an essential way spread out
among the participants in discourse, speech acts and objects in the
environment. There is transindividual activity across participants and
groups.
4. Emotion discourse and emotionology (Stearns & Stearns, 1985).
There are collective emotional standards of a culture rather than the
individual experience of emotion itself.
5. The problem of qualia. Qualia are qualitative experiential properties
of mental states. Are they reducible to physical brain states or are
they an unbridgeable explanatory gap between accounts of brain
physiology and the phenomenology of conscious experience?
Fludernik (1996) argues that experientiality or the impact of narrated
situations on consciousness is a core property of narrative itself. The
position here is that qualia are reducible to brain physiology but how
it happens is as yet unknown.
We continue to propagate myths because intrinsically humans love sto-
ries. They love stories that provide an explanation, any sort of explana-
tion, even God, and stories that appear to provide an explanation, and
stories that do not provide anything other than entertainment. We run
our lives through stories, we love stories, we love making them up, telling
them and listening to them. The story is often more important than any
truth or falsehood behind it. Gottschall (2012) argued that ‘Religion is the
ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our minds’ (p. 119). A little
like Marx’s opium of the masses. We care less about truth than we do
about a coherent explanation, which is why religion remains popular in a
scientific enlightened world. Prickett (2002) argues that ‘we are concerned
with models of reality – and such models are usually verbal and almost
invariably narrative’ (p. 71).

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 Chapter 5

Narrative Methods

There are no fixed rules for how we should obtain narratives, for example,
through interviews, looking at journals or watching films. And there is
no agreement on how to analyse narrative data. This is rather a difficult
position, for a practical applied book. Nevertheless, we can find practical
solutions to practical narrative problems.
Narrative analysis is usually qualitative, where we attempt to make sense
of a script in narrative terms and draw conclusions about the coherence of
the narrative, the meaning of the script or some other factor. This can be
difficult due to the complexity of narrative and the lack of objective meth-
ods, but by focusing on the key aspects of narrative as discussed in earlier
chapters, we can make sense of the stories that we see. Narrative is some-
times analysed quantitatively but this involves translating an essentially
qualitative story into numbers, which is not always practical or desirable,
and inevitably loses the essential point of narrative understanding. Many
aspects of psychological life cannot be reduced to quanta and may be a les-
son for other areas of psychology where human behaviour is oversimplified.
Earlier I discussed how we can look at narrative as a fundamental basis
for human existence. We all use narrative processes and in principle, we
can identify these processes as part of brain functioning. At another level,
narrative is socially constructed, and so narrative analysis must be derived
from narrative constructionism (Smith & Monforte, 2020). Stories do
more than simply reflect or recount experience, they act in people’s lives in
ways that matter deeply. Any narrative analysis must recognise this.
What is narrative analysis and how is it differentiated from other forms of
qualitative analysis? There are philosophical assumptions such as ontologi-
cal relativism, which recognises the real physical world, but psychological
phenomena are multiple, created and dependent on us, as opposed to exist-
ing independently. Epistemological constructionism (Smith, 2013) suggests
knowledge is constructed and fallible. Fundamentally, we live in a world
subject to the laws of physics but we have minds that – at least according to
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 64 Narrative Methods
our current understanding – have elements that are continually constructed
and reconstructed. Our stories do not depend solely on physical reality, but
on the content and structure of our thinking and feeling.
Narrative constructionism sees humans as meaning-makers who use nar-
rative to interpret, direct and communicate life, configure experience and
give a sense of who they are. Meaning-making is central to narrative and
so must be central to any narrative analysis. Narratives are passed down in
people’s social and cultural worlds. These are important constructs, enabling
us to differentiate between a socially constructed world which rests on very
little, and a social constructed world which is subject to scientific laws and
procedures. It forms the link between realism and relativism.

What Is a Narrative Interview?

The narrative interview is the main technique used in narrative research. In
this chapter, we examine the general principles; later chapters explore spe-
cific types of narrative interview. Not all interviews are narrative in style or
function, so the researcher must ensure that the data produced are in story
form. The narrative interview is inevitably a narrow focus, and there are
other narrative approaches, particularly analysing extant narratives such
as novels, journals or other accounts. Fundamentally, a narrative analysis
analyses narrative data, irrespective of its derivation.

Messy Data
Narrative research is messy. This may put some people off, but it is true.
It is not always even clear what constitutes data (Andrews, 2020). Data are
everywhere, from written stories to interviews to talks in the pub to pictures
on a wall to films on the TV. Even when we have the most straightforward
data source, the interview, we have to take into account not only what
someone said but also the way they said it, their emotional reaction and so
on. Narrative depends on context and so requires a subtle approach, not
only considering what is said but also non-verbal elements of communica-
tion, hesitations, emotions, etc. We also have to take into account also the
world around the interviewee, as this provides context. When we speak,
we take many things for granted, there are often nuances in the choice of
words and phrases, not only idiomatic language but also words that have
several meanings depending on how they are used, and words that have
different meanings for different people, which is why someone from a dif-
ferent culture may have difficulty fully understanding someone.

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 What Is Narrative Analysis? 65
Another form of messiness is the nature of the stories themselves. They
are often not objectively true. They may be entirely false. This may or may
not be known even to the speaker, let alone the interviewer. Elements of
the story may be accurate, but others are not accurate. There is a whole
subjective dimension to narrative that cannot and should not be removed.
It is part of the nature of narrative.
Somehow in the narrative analysis, we have to sort this mess out. When
conducting a narrative analysis, we have to make decisions about what is
important and what is not important. For instance, in my own work (e.g.
Hunt & Robbins, 2001), I interviewed World War II veterans about their
experiences in the war and the impact these experiences had on them. I
quickly realised that not everyone told the truth about their experiences,
either enhancing or demeaning their role, or simply not being able to
remember, or, in one memorable case, one veteran paratrooper told me
in great detail about what was happening several miles from where he was
fighting. As a sergeant, there is no way he would have such an overview.
It was only when I saw all the books and films he had about the battle in
question that I realised that he had blended his experiences with what he
had later read and seen. This is not necessarily untruthful, it is the way
narratives work, drawing together stories derived from real events, what
one has been told, what one has read and seen and how one interprets the
information. We do not remember things in isolation. The paratrooper
(probably) genuinely thought he remembered incidents he could only
have learned about afterwards. Memories are not fixed; they are manipu-
lable by the development of narratives. We remember what is useful to
us – and we also selectively forget.
The importance of this in terms of the narrative method is that we – as
psychologists – have to realise that we are interested more in psychological
processes than in objective historical truth. When we carry out a narrative
interview to explore some aspect of a person’s life, we are interested in
their interpretation of what happened and the impact it had on them and
others more than we are interested in what actually happened. We are not
historians or police officers.

What Is Narrative Analysis?

Narrative analysis claims to be holistic, analysing a text at the macro
level. Nevertheless, as we have seen in earlier chapters, we must examine
the elements of a narrative in order to explain the totality. Narratology
describes the limited number of elements and variations of elements in

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 66 Narrative Methods
narrative composition (Onega & Landa, 1996). Time, structure charac-
ters, agency, coherence, evaluation and spatial and interpersonal rela-
tions of characters are all important. There are a limited number of
elements which correspond to limited number of psychological con-
structions, whereas the text itself can be endlessly variable at the surface
level. Quantitative approaches to narrative based on the narrative com-
positional elements use algorithms that are able to automatically detect
and process each feature. This is radically different from most narrative
analysis and will not be considered here (see Franzosi, 2010, for details of
quantitative narrative analysis).
There are several problems when studying narratives. For instance, there
are no agreed start and end points for many stories (Andrews, 2020); this
is usually the case when we are studying human stories. We do not want
to study the whole of someone’s life. We are probably interested in a tran-
sition. In this case, we may look at three elements, before the transition,
during the transition and after the transition – but who determines which
elements of life we examine before or after the transition? Who determines
what is or might be important? There is no clear answer.
According to Riessman (2008), narrative analysis is a family of meth-
ods that share a common focus on stories. This needs to be unpacked
further. When looking at the types of narrative analysis, we should not,
as some may do, restrict ourselves to a particular approach, we should be
employing the best narrative method for the job in hand. As Smith and
Monteforte (2020) argue, ‘a researcher does not have to pledge allegiance
to one standpoint only and see the other as a family enemy’ (p. 2).
It is important to differentiate between the story teller and the story
analyst (Bochner & Riggs, 2013; Smith & Sparks, 2006). Do we even need
to analyse the story or can we just tell it and leave it at that? The decision
regarding analysis should be made at the outset of the research. The story
itself may be the analysis. Outside the story, we may be interested in the
impact of telling the story (see Chapter 9 on Narrative Exposure Therapy).
Story analyst and story teller may describe a particular form of constructiv-
ist narrative analysis, dialogic narrative analysis. Dialogic narrative is a mir-
roring of what is told (the content) and what happens as a result of telling
(effects), that is, includes what stories do (Frank, 2010, 2012). When oper-
ating as a story teller, the analysis is the story and the story is communi-
cated in the form of a creative analytic practice (CAP) to produce the tale
as a story. The researcher retells parts of the story to share the participants’
experiences. The result is a story rather than a traditional research report.
The story itself is the analysis. One example is CAP (Richardson, 2000).

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 Indicators of Quality of Narrative Research 67
CAP is an umbrella term for research cast into evocative and creative non-
fiction where findings are conveyed in the form of fictional tales grounded
in empirical data.

Indicators of Quality of Narrative Research

Any scientific approach must have appropriate indicators of quality such
as reliability and validity to ensure that the research has been conducted in
the best possible way, and that any potential problems are highlighted and
can if possible be rectified. These qualities include:
1. Trustworthiness. According to Reissman (2008), a narrative
account must be plausible, reasonable and convincing. These are
difficult qualities to quantify or operationalise, but the researcher
can examine different accounts or negative cases, and can explore
alternative interpretations of the data.
2. Critical reflexivity. The researcher should take a reflexive stance,
examining the nature of the participants (are they the right ones?
Did they answer the questions as truthfully as possible?), how did
the researcher approach the topic, the people, the narrative accounts?
How are the researcher’s biases showing in the research and how
are they dealt with? Are the results interpreted appropriately,
are they reliable? Is there any sense in which they have broader
generalisability (not necessarily relevant)?
3. Co-construction of meaning. As we will see in Chapter 9, where
co-construction is explicit, most narratives, and certainly those
that are interviews, are co-constructed. There is no meaning that is
pure to the participant; it is always affected by the people around
them and their environment. Meaning is always created, modified,
contested and resisted. The researcher must be sensitive to how
meaning is created.
4. Related to co-constructionism are those elements that are not said,
that may be implicit in the construction of the narrative. There may
be characters that are not discussed but impacted the formation of
the narrative (e.g. a teacher or respected colleague). As Freeman
(2004) notes, this is the presence of what is missing.
5. Temporal fluidity. Stories do not stand still. They are constantly
changing, whether this is explicit or implicit reconstruction. Life does
not stand still for the person, new information is constantly brought
into the life narrative and new interpretations of past events are created.

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 68 Narrative Methods
6. Multi-layered stories. Stories are told in different ways to different
people (including oneself). Stories may be explicitly about a single
person, yet above this are social and cultural levels of understanding.
7. Stories are always told contextually. This is not only about broader
cultural aspects but the immediate context of the story. Someone
tells their life story different to a spouse, to a group of friends in a
pub or to work colleagues. The audience matters.
8. Scholarship. Good narrative research should be contextualised
within other scientific work within the area (both of narrative and
the topic under consideration).
9. Ethics. As with all psychological research, there are ethical
considerations with narrative research. These will depend on the
specific research and the context, but should always be taken into
consideration.

Practicalities of Narrative Analysis

There are numerous strategies suggested for how to conduct narrative
interviews and carry out the analysis. It is essential that the interview pro-
cess and the analytic strategy are matched to ensure that the researcher is
collecting data that can be analysed in a narrative fashion. Several authors
have discussed issues around narrative analysis. What follows is a hopefully
straightforward account of how to conduct such an analysis. Narrative
researchers will undoubtedly disagree on some of the points, and may
argue for a more theoretically or philosophically driven approach, but in
the end, this is an applied book, and as such it is best for the reader to
provide a practical means of conducting the analysis which works. I am
not arguing that this is the only right way nor that it accounts for the work
that exists in narrative theory, but it should help the beginning narrative
researcher, and provide a practical guide to interviewing and analysis.
Analysis of narratives may involve grounded theory (GT) (Strauss &
Corbin, 2014), thematic analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2019) or inter-
pretative phenomenological analysis (IPA, Smith, 2011). It is acceptable
and appropriate to use these techniques as part of your analytic strategy
depending on the purpose of your study. In particular, IPA is very useful
with narrative work as it focuses on the particular experiences of the indi-
vidual and enables an examination of the process of events and experiences
in the person’s life – which is central to narrative.
The analytic process for narrative interviews is cyclical and iterative
rather than linear and fixed, so expect to go backwards and forwards

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 Practicalities of Narrative Analysis 69
through the process. Depending on the way you are doing your narrative
interview, this could involve the interview itself (See Chapters 8 and 9).
This is broken down into four main sections:
1. The interview
2. Familiarisation
3. Research questions
4. Pulling it together
1. The Narrative Interview
First of all, the narrative researcher has to decide what the story is and how
the story can be collected (if extant) or constructed. Extant stories can be
things such as books, journals, diaries or blogs, while constructed stories
are usually constructed via one or more interviews. We will be exploring
types of interviews in this and in future chapters. The interview is tran-
scribed, the level of transcription, what elements are included (e.g. pauses,
emotion and volume). The transcription itself is an active process, and the
researcher should be noting down anything that comes to mind as they do
the transcription. The researcher often has the transcription done auto-
matically or by others. This is not a problem, but the researcher should go
through the interview in detail, checking the accuracy of the transcription.
Narrative interviews ask big questions, prompting participants to look
backwards and make evaluations about the past and forward to share pre-
dictions and hopes about the future (McAdams, 2007) or to describe ‘self-
defining memories’ (Singer et al., 2013). People report on major life events
and personal evolution across the lifespan, and to make meaning, interpret
these experiences.
2. Familiarisation and Initial Analysis
The researcher should be highly familiar with the story. While it will
become familiar during the interview, it is essential that it is read and
reread several times, with the researcher immersing themselves in the data
and making notes as they go along. How they deal with this will depend
on how they are wanting to analyse the information, and this varies.
As already noted, sometimes the story itself is the analysis. It is pre-
sented as a whole or in significant chunks. On other occasions, the story
is subjected to further analysis, and this can be using general principles of
qualitative analysis, for example, IPA or TA, as long as the end result is the
story is retained (otherwise it is not a narrative analysis).
During this phase, the researcher gets to grips with the stories, perhaps
looking for classic elements such as orientation, coherence, characters,

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 70 Narrative Methods
relationships, temporality and so on. It is about identifying narrative
themes and narrative tone. What are the commonalities within and some-
times between stories? While it is important to highlight key points, it is
equally important not to overcode. Don’t code line by line, don’t lose the
story, look for the bigger patterns. Identify the structure, how the story
is put together and shaped. Look for the directions the story goes, any-
thing that suggests structure, reflections, evaluation, changes in tone, the
objectives of the story, changes to characters and significant interactions
between characters.
3. Research Questions
This is a means of opening up the dialogue further, addressing specific
questions of interest in relation to the stories. How do people construct
and shape their stories? What narrative resources do individual participants
have access to? Not all people have equal narrative resources. Do they need
assistance in constructing narratives? What about identity? How do the
stories inform about the identities of the participants and of the characters
in the stories? What about the body? There is a close link between stories
and the reactions of the body to the story. What thoughts and feelings are
generated in relation to the story?
4. Pulling It All Together
For publication in traditional journals, which is what most academic nar-
rative researchers wish to do, the standard academic structure of an arti-
cle must be, at least to some extent, adhered to. Fortunately, increasing
numbers of journals are accepting of qualitative research in general and
narrative research in particular, so the choice for publication is widening.
The actual structure of the article will depend to some extent on the type
of analysis used, and whether there is a need to integrate the results and
discussion sections. It will also depend on the extent of quotations given.
For narratives, the quotations are often long and may be at least partly
self-explanatory.
Another way of distinguishing types of narrative analysis is via codi-
fied (Chamberlain, 2011) and prescriptive (Frank, 2010). Both include a
set of prescribed steps or procedures that the analysis should follow, for
example, IPA, TA or GT. Frank (2010) provides a heuristic guide, a guide
to interpretation, rather than leaving the analysis as a vague guess at the
meaning of a narrative. This is useful for narrative analysis as, according to
Frank (p. 73), ‘too many methods seem to prevent thought from moving’.
Systematic and rigorous guidance can help the analyst with fresh direc-
tions and encourage theoretical curiosity and movements of thought.

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 Reliability and Validity of Narrative Analysis 71
Narrative Coherence
As an example of how narrative analysis can be specific to a particular
situation, we conducted some research examining the importance of nar-
rative coherence in traumatic stress, exploring the assumption that when
someone is describing their difficult experiences in the past, the greater the
degree of narrative coherence, the lower the level of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) or trauma (Burnell et al., 2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010).
Narrative is used within mental health to understand how people make
sense of events that challenge their ideas about the self and the world. The
narratives here focused on narrative form and narrative content in rela-
tion to British war veterans. Narrative form is concerned with how people
tell their stories. Narrative content consists of what people say relating
to plot, characters and so on. For this study, which looked at the role of
social support in veterans, narrative content focused on the social support
experiences of the veterans. Narrative form concerned the coherence of the
narrative, which was defined as an oriented, structured, affectively con-
sistent and integrated narrative. In order for a narrative to be considered
coherent, it has to have all the characteristics listed.
Burnell et al. (2010) described the narratives of ten British World War
II veterans in relation to social support experiences. Veterans with coher-
ent narratives were less likely to have experienced (or reported) traumatic
memories compared with those with reconciled or incoherent narratives,
but they reported more positive perceptions of their war experience, more
positive experiences of their families and of society.

Reliability and Validity of Narrative Analysis

All analysis, whether qualitative or quantitative, is subjective and open to
various forms of interpretation. How can we know what the ‘right answer’
is? This is important for applied psychologists, who want to get it right so
they can have confidence that they are helping people.
Fisher (1989) defines two tests of narrative validity (which he also calls
rationality). The first concerns probability, whether the narrative ‘hangs
together’, whether it is coherent and makes sense. Fisher uses the example
of stories from the Bible. Some stories show that God cares if humanity
believes in him, and others show that he doesn’t care. This is not consis-
tent; it doesn’t make sense (though many religious people don’t seem to
care). To be coherent, a collection of stories must be systematic, they must
relate to one another in consistent ways and they must have a common

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 72 Narrative Methods
theme. They must form a coherent structure where each story reinforces,
elaborates or combines with the others to form a whole that is greater than
the sum of the parts.
Fisher’s second test of validity is narrative fidelity. Does the narrative
relate to the reality of the world as most of us understand it? Despite impor-
tant cultural differences, we all share basic desires for survival, security,
safety, happiness and so on. There are also common situations where these
are threatened (war, violence, etc.). We make narrative sense of these situ-
ations by establishing archetypal characters and relationships that ration-
alise these threats. For instance, a natural disaster can be explained as the
action of a deity to publish sinners, or unusual weather patterns brought
about by climate change. War could result from a villainous leadership of
a country which wants to exploit the people of another country. A narrator
makes sense of these negative events by framing them in this way.
In the end, a narrative analysis cannot usually be expressed in a number
indicating reliability or validity. An analysis depends on whether it appears
appropriate. Nevertheless, there are times when numbers are appropriate,
such as when we have used narratives to help reduce mental health symp-
toms (for instance, see Chapters 7 and 9), but this is one step removed
from a narrative analysis, it is the analysis of the impact of constructing or
reconstructing a narrative.

Conclusion
This chapter has briefly examined the key practical elements of narrative
analysis. These elements will be explored in further detail in the next few
chapters, where we will see how researchers, clinicians and others use nar-
rative analyses. There is no single way of doing narrative analysis. There is
no textbook solution. Narrative analysis is about understanding stories.
Stories take many forms, and researchers and clinicians analyse stories for
many different reasons. While it might be thought to be practical to have a
systematic proscribed approach, in actuality this would have serious prac-
tical limitations. We can add to the basics of analysis described above by
looking at some real examples.

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