The Narrative Study Of Lives

The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions. This stellar collection of scholars examine such topics as: how the larger construct of `personality' can read out of a life story; the development of multicultural identity as a dynamic process; the transition away from delinquent behaviour; the importance of cultural continuity for understanding loneliness in elderly refugees; race relations and how it relates to the meaning of the decade in which the interviewee

How does context shape biography? How do language and relationships affect the development of people′s work lives? An international group of scholars from diverse disciplines addresses these and other issues in this volume of The Narrative Study of Lives. They explore what it means to take narrative seriously and how an empathic stance in narrative research opens out on the dialogic self. The contributors also consider questions of how participants make meaning out of their experience in the framework of available interpretive horizons. In addition, there are sections that use narrative approaches to develop a deeper understanding of loneliness and the "coming out" process in homosexuality. This volume examines the many ways in which people interpret their experience and explores conceptual avenues to make use of these understandings in the analysis of human life. Those interested in qualitative methods, evaluation, and education research will find Interpreting Experience to be an invaluable contribution.

In taking up the topic of ethics and narrative inquiry, The Narrative Study of Lives rightfully establishes itself as the site where the most critical theoretical, methodological, and interpretive work on narrative in the human disciplines is now occurring. The editor and the contributors to this volume are to be thanked for their deeply probing, forward-looking analyses of the ethical problems that arise when researchers produce narratives about persons with whom close personal relationships have been formed. --Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "All of us who work with life-history narratives are grateful to Dr. Josselson and her colleagues for moving us step-by-step toward a discipline with definable ethics and methodology, and at the same time holding up for us the incredible diversity of the field and the range of insights it offers." --Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Peripheral Visions The most significant truths about human beings are to be found in the stories of their lives. But what happens to those stories and to the people whose lives are told when a researcher seeks to make those stories known? Ruthellen Josselson has assembled an international cast of scholars to reflect on the process of life-narrative study and the ethical dilemmas that face researchers whose very mode of narrative inquiry may inevitably involve a violation of another and unwittingly lead to a sense of betrayal, shame, or guilt. In these disarmingly candid and engaging essays, narrative researchers of many different stripes talk about the morally delicate and epistemologically precarious enterprise of telling another′s story. The authors raise fascinating questions about who ultimately controls the tellings, what happens to stories once they are told, and why stories influence not only the people whose lives are told but also the tellers themselves, whose own professional and personal lives may even be captured by or appropriated into the stories they are aiming to tell. This exceptional volume, the latest in The Narrative Study of Lives series, is essential for researchers, professionals, and students in research methods, including qualitative methods, developmental psychology, education, relationships, and language and discourse analysis.

The editors bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, narrative identities become the stories we live by.

Recipient of the 1994 Critics′ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association People tell stories to help organize and make sense of their lives. In the past, their narratives have often been torn apart by social scientists looking for themes, variables, and specific answers to specific questions. But in recent years, the development of narrative analysis has given life to the study of the narrative as a form of information for social research. Why are they constructed as they are? How does one dissect a narrative to understand the lived experience of the narrator? What steps can the researcher take to translate these tales and life stories into usable research? Catherine Kohler Riessman provides a detailed primer on the use of narrative analysis, its theoretical underpinnings and worldview, and the methods it uses. Replete with examples and transcriptions from previous narrative studies, Narrative Analysis is a useful introduction to this growing body of literature.

Contributors from five countries, in fields including criminology, literature studies, nursing, psychology, and sociology, explore issues such as how to make meaning of narrative interviews by considering the problem of interpreting what is not said, how cultural meanings about gender are transmitted across generations, and uses of the transformati.

A concise volume aimed at researchers and academics in sociology, anthropology, psychology and interpersonal communication.

In recent decades, there has been a substantial turn towards narrative and life history study. The embrace of narrative and life history work has accompanied the move to postmodernism and post-structuralism across a wide range of disciplines: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, social history; literary theory; and, most recently, psychology. Written by leading international scholars from the main contributing perspectives and disciplines, The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History seeks to capture the range and scope as well as the considerable complexity of the field of narrative study and life history work by situating these fields of study within the historical and contemporary context. Topics covered include: • The historical emergences of life history and narrative study • Techniques for conducting life history and narrative study • Identity and politics • Generational history • Social and psycho-social approaches to narrative history With chapters from expert contributors, this volume will prove a comprehensive and authoritative resource to students, researchers and educators interested in narrative theory, analysis and interpretation.