Narrative Research

A hermeneutic narrative inquiry method developed by Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber (1998) was utilized to study the life stories of shamanic practitioners from North America. These practitioners were not from indigenous cultures but utilized indigenous and contemporary shamanistic healing methods within industrialized Western societies.
The study explored the lives of these individuals to better understand Western interest in shamanism following the publication of Eliade’s (1951/1964) seminal work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The history and development of contemporary forms of shamanism, including neoshamanism and core shamanism were surveyed.

Six participants, three (3) men and three (3) women, were interviewed utilizing the life story interview protocol. The participants were shamanic practitioners who were at varying levels of training and experience with some participants just starting their training and others having worked as full-time shamans for many years. The data was analyzed using the holistic-content analysis strategy focused on identifying individual as well as group themes for the participants. The researcher, of South Korean ancestry, grew up in a traditional shamanic culture, which served as motivation for the study yet was bracketed to minimize bias.

Three collective themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) Early Experience of Not Belonging/Feelings of Difference, (b) Finding Belonging through Shamanic Identity, and (c) Individualized Path to Shamanism. The themes touched on the identity of contemporary, neoshamanic practitioners whose paths were unique in terms of how they achieved their identities. They described experiences of being different due to their spiritual gifts and created their own ways of becoming shamans without having the guidance from an existing cultural tradition. The themes informed narratives of belonging and the factors that allowed for a sense of belonging in the lives of modern-day Western shamanic practitioners who bring with them a history of not belonging in their early lives.

The findings of this study were discussed in the context of improving mental health services for those living in today’s complex world and the incorporation of alternative healing practices. Implications for future research include expanded knowledge related to indigenous and shamanistic healing, particularly pertaining to benefits and/or limitations in Western treatment modalities.

This research-based storybook for young children, contains research information in the back for parents, educators and family workers. The narrative follows the experiences of five-year-old Anthony who describes his struggles with waiting for his parent to come home from military deployment, his anger at his parent for being away for so long and the ways he stays in contact, despite the distance. The book was produced from research data and findings as part of a PhD study entitled 'Young children's experiences and understandings of parental deployment within an Australian Defence Force family' using the Mosaic approach and Narrative research methods. The research themes explored in the book include Emotional responses to deployment and post-deployment, tools and stories that assist children to understand the concepts of deployment and family communication. The eBook is an example of the way research data and findings can be made accessible to the general public to create impact. In this instance, the book is made available free of charge to parents, children, educators and family workers through a partnership with the Defence Community Organisation and the Department of Defence.

Riset naratif yang dilakukan pada tahun 2013 oleh Mohamad Jagad Marcelleno terhadap pengguna instagram dan komunitas iphonesia. Instagram sebagai jejaring sosial yang dijadikan sebagai sarana untuk  identitas,  kekerabatan, peluang bisnis, serta aktivitas untuk menangkap dan menciptakan sebuah momen yang dapat dibagikan.

A complexity-friendly, SenseMaker-based approach to understanding how to build sustainable livelihoods and communities in conditions of high uncertainty and change. The tool also detected underlying attitudinal change among participants in UNDP Yemen programmes.

This narrative self-study focuses on my experience as a sixth-grade teacher in Quebec, Canada making the pedagogical shift to student-centered assessment. Student-centered assessment is defined as one that decentralizes teacher authority, increases transparency of evaluations, and increases assessment dialogue. Some elements of student-centered assessment are in line with the Quebec Education Plan while others are more diametrically situated. Through a “bricolage” approach to narrative inquiry, I analyzed how the role of the teacher in terms of curriculum and assessment is impacted by political, cultural, and philosophical realities that impact the teaching context. My identity as a teacher, and particularly my ideas on teacher authority, informed my responses to dilemmas during the shift and my approach to introducing student-centered assessment to students at the sixth-grade level.

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Learning how to use critical self-reflection creatively when practising therapy is an important component of training. This level of self-awareness is, however, often neglected in research, despite the centrality of the researcher to their work.

Doing Practice-based Research in Therapy: A Reflexive Approach makes the vital link between practical research skills and self-awareness, critical reflection and personal development in practice-based research. Starting with a clear introduction to the theory, practice and debates surrounding this type of research, the book then guides the reader step-by-step through the practicalities of the research process, encouraging them to reflect upon and evaluate their practice at each stage.

The book:
- incorporates case studies throughout to illustrate different methodological approaches
- uses real life examples from students conducting practice-based psychotherapy research
- includes exercises, chapter objectives, end-of-chapter questions and suggestions for further reading to help consolidate learning
- encourages ongoing personal development by introducing personal development planning (PDP) and lifelong learning in the field of research

By demystifying the reflexive approach, this highly practical guide ensures that trainees and qualified therapists get the most, both professionally and personally, from their practice-based research.

This paper is based on one case study, drawn from a larger qualitative study of 30 mental health service users (MHSUs) in three Norwegian community mental health centers. The meaning of context is analyzed from a meeting with Marianne, a 31-year-old mother of three children diagnosed with bipolar disorder three years before the interview. Faced with dominant narratives that define mothers diagnosed with a mental illness in negative terms, Marianne provided a personal story that created a contextualized understanding of being a mother and an MHSU.

This article begins with a cursory look at the history
of narrative inquiry. It then points to a few
examples of how researchers are using this form of
inquiry to understand their own literate lives and
the lives of those whom they study. Finally, the
major part of the article focuses on issues that
currently define narrative inquiry as a way of
knowing and writing, and the implications of these
issues for research and practice in literacy
education.

Narrative inquiry, a relatively new qualitative methodology, is the study of experience understood narratively. It is a way of thinking about, and studying, experience. Narrative inquirers think narratively about experience throughout inquiry.

روایت پژوهی یکی از روش های کیفی است که در سال های اخیر بطور گسترده تری مورد استفاده محققان علوم انسانی قرار گرفته است و هم اکنون به عنوان یکی از دروس دانشگاه فرهنگیان برای آموزش معلمان مورد تاکید است کتاب حاضر تلاش دارد تا با استفاده از فعالیت های کارگاهی متناسب داشچو معلمان را با بکارگیری این روش آشنا کند

This study explores the meaning of the death of a companion animal through autoethnographic poetry in conjunction with narrative reflections. This method expands the depth and scope of poetry in qualitative research by transforming expressive works into both the subject and product of inquiry.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the new qualitative method of “Narratives of Change” to evaluate a project’s impact. This new methodology arises from a combination of the most significant change technique with a narrative analysis approach, and it is suitable for community development interventions.
Design/methodology/approach – Narrative approaches are seldom used in programme evaluation. However, depending on the nature and context of a project, it might be useful to offer a space for people to tell their story. Asking people to recognise change by recounting the passage from their previous to their present situation can help the researcher grasp particular concepts that may otherwise not be visible. At the same time, while the analysis of in-depth interviews can be difficult and time consuming, the method introduced here simplifies this process by offering a tool that allows the researcher to extrapolate semantic fragments from long interviews and facilitates the identification of prototypical characters in each narration.
Findings – After offering a theoretical discussion that introduces this technique, its practical illustration and the example presented in this paper show how this method represents a useful instrument for participants’ stories analysis in qualitative project evaluations aimed at identifying change. Originality/value – This paper introduced a new qualitative method to carry out a programme evaluation using narrative analysis.

This article explores the uses of poetry in qualitative research. In this study of adolescent identity and development, poetry is used as data, as a means of data representation, and as a process of inquiry. The authors explore the nature of poetry as a tool of qualitative research for investigating human phenomena. Autobiographical poems are used as data which are analysed through thematic analysis. From this analysis, research poems in the form of Japanese tankas are created. Finally, the third and fourth authors respond to the original poems and the 'findings' from the grounded theory analysis as responsive poems.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

Secular descriptions and practices of therapeutic mindfulness in the West have claimed positive physical benefits and improved mental wellbeing. Alongside these developments, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan is addressing unprecedented social problems through emerging counselling and psychotherapeutic services. Approaches seek to align with Bhutanese values, ethics and cultural mores, integrating mindful awareness training from the country’s Buddhist heritage.

The present research project took a critical approach to deconstruct the place of mindfulness in the personal lives and professional practices of counsellors and psychotherapists in Australia and Bhutan. An interpretive and collaborative narrative research methodology was adopted to encourage reflexive, relational and dialogical understandings of participants’ views on mindfulness. The design comprised three sites of enquiry. First, as it is widely accepted that Buddhist traditions offer precise concepts and skills for mindfulness and given that Bhutan is founded upon the Kagyu and Nyingma schools of Buddhism, individual interviews were held with senior monastic and lay Buddha Dharma teachers from both the Mahayana and Theravada traditions to provide an historical context. Second, senior organisational managers who have promoted mindfulness, directly or indirectly, in their social service organisations were consulted individually. Third, in keeping with the principal aims of this project, six counsellors and psychotherapists in Perth, Western Australia and five counsellors in Bhutan were interviewed deploying a four-part cooperative group inquiry. To enhance reflexivity, these primary research partners were witnesses to each other’s interviews in their own countries, bringing forth their values, beliefs, and commitments in their professional and personal lives with regard to mindfulness. They were interviewed twice with impressions of the interviews being shared between the two countries to produce a conversational reciprocity. Throughout I situated myself as an active interpreter and co-author of the emerging discourses and practices while making transparent my research intentions.

Storying noteworthy events and turning points in the lives of the counsellors and psychotherapists and revealing the significance of relationships with secular and spiritual teachers highlighted how meanings about mindfulness were shaped by diverse cultural conditions and personal circumstances. Everyday embodied storied lives and the broader discourses of cultural meaning-making generated similarities, uniqueness and novelty. The recognition of relational and contextual influences provided a foundation for reconsidering the descriptions, purposes and applications of mindfulness in personal life and professional settings.

This first chapter provides an overview of the four themes of the book that will frame the study of poetry, music and narrative: (1) bilingualism, (2) multicultural knowledge, (3) origins and evolution of the abilities of poetry, music and narrative and (4) the systems and subsystems of cognition that underlie these abilities. The first theme is especially concerned with how language systems interact, among themselves, and then with other kinds of ability. For example, how are the knowledge systems of language and music related and how are they different? Multicultural aspects of poetry, music and narrative will be concerned mainly with the idea of cross-cultural differences (and interactions) and cross-cultural universals. In this case musical ability will provide a good example for studying culture. The problem of origins takes an evolutionary research point of view. Lastly, the study of component systems and subsystems examines the applicability of an important concept from evolutionary science, that of modularity. 1 Introduction: Art in the Voice The problem of how music and literature are related, and how they interact in real life, has a long history. Going back thousands of years, one idea was that the relationship was actually very close; that music and literature sprang forth from the same wellspring. Today, musicologists and linguists have begun to take another look at this relationship, in some ways different and in some ways the same, with a lens borrowed from the branch of psychology that studies cognitive processes. This new appreciation and curiosity has opened another ripe forum for the science-humanities dialogue. Poetry, narrative and music are aesthetic genres that have a number of things in common, even though narrative also includes strictly prosaic and non-artistic forms. Today, we often associate them with literacy, writing and musical notation. But in all three cases this aspect of their reading and (written) composition is completely secondary, secondary from the historical and evolutionary point of view and in how the respective abilities develop throughout the life span of individuals. Possibly, most adults (or depending on how one counts, at least a large percentage), even today, who are skilled and active creators/performers-poets, narrators and musicians-do not read or write. Not that writing and notation are inconsequential-something can be "secondary," in the above sense, but turn out to be important and widespread, with time, even come to be indispensible in some ways. For example, Chapter 4 of this book is mainly about poetry and writing. In music, poetry and narrative, there are purposes for which writing and notation are useful and even necessary. But they are not the primary motivating purposes, at least not the ones that might tell us something about underlying core characteristics. If this idea turns out to be correct, it has important implications for studying how beginning learners experience these genres. What prior sensibility (if such a thing exists) might we possess, from the beginning, that allows us to process music and literature as objects of art? The three genres are also universal: all normally developing individuals acquire, without deliberate instruction, the basic receptive capabilities of each ability and all cultures pass on from one generation to the next their respective repertoire of poems, stories and songs. In this way, the defining sensibilities and skills associated with poetry, narrative and music cross the oral-written "divide" (not a "divide" in the true sense) and cross all cultural boundaries. Upon closer inspection, the apparent exceptions might even be good examples of this generalization. The focus in this book will be on these poetic, narrative and musical abilities, how they develop and how we learn them. What might be some of the primitive components that distinguish one set of abilities from another, and then which components might be shared in common? A better understanding of the nature of these kinds of knowledge and skill, and the

The Virtues Project is a moral education program that has gained popularity amongst ordinary classroom teachers in different types of schools in diverse cultures. The originality of its approach is found in its five strategies, though it is often identified by its long list of virtues or by the origins of its founders. It is drawing attention from emergent research and education surveys, and has been remarked upon by moral education researchers and “virtues ethics” academics. This study contributes to research on The Virtues Project and to the larger field of moral education research by exploring its ethical, educational and cross-cultural coherence as a moral education approach in a school setting. This explorative study is underpinned by the phenomenological philosophical view put forward by Charles Taylor. His account assumes a broader account of morality beyond moral decisionmaking that encompasses human nature, the moral form of life, human moral engagement, and which has cross-cultural implications.

The ontological and ethical coherence of The Virtues Project is explored through the lens of Taylor’s account of the moral form of life and his philosophical anthropology of the self. The Virtues Project views the essence of human being as spiritual, living a physical life with the purpose of realising the virtues that exist in potential within, and seeing virtues as actualized within relational engagements. It has embedded in its foundations a fusion of past moral horizons, sourcing the understanding of virtues from various sacred texts and cultural traditions and drawing on psychotherapy as well as indigenous wisdom to understand moral engagement between human beings and communities.

A narrative research approach explores the educational and cross-cultural coherence of The Virtues Project. Teachers in a Mongolian school contributed narratives about their experience of implementing its five strategies and practicing virtues, whether named on its list or not. The Listening Guide analysis method enables the narrative inquirer to listen for, and analyse, the singular and collective voices of the teachers and the ethical features embedded in their stories. Two narrative retellings of the teachers’ experiences reveal the educational and cross-cultural dimensions of The Virtues Project. The first focuses on a crucial feature of moral education, namely the moral being and becoming, or flourishing, of selves, relationships and community. The second retelling is about the teachers’ experiences of becoming Mongolian in their modern day context as they engaged with The Virtues Project. Preceding the second is a retrieval of the moral dimensions of the cultural and historical embeddedness of Mongolian being.

Reflections on this exploration of The Virtues Project, it is hoped, may contribute to a wider discourse on and in moral education.

In this presentation, we outline(d) the broad approach to the study of, and research into, intercultural communication that we are pursuing at the University of Manchester. Through undergraduate and Masters courses and in doctoral supervisions, we are encouraging a “small-culture” approach (Holliday, 1999) to the exploration of ‘cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ phenomena and practices. Much of the intercultural study in the department also employs narrative research design and adopts a reflective and reflexive stance. We first introduce these aspects of our approach and illustrate how these are utilised in our teaching and supervision. We then present a case study illustrating what such a reflexively-undertaken, narratively-pursued small culture approach looks like. This case is that Xiaowei’s doctoral study – a narrative study of the acculturation experiences of some Chinese postgraduate students in the UK. We conclude by discussing the issues and insights emerging from our approach to the ‘intercultural’ with view to drawing out some conceptual and methodological implications for our future teaching and research.

NARRATIVE VOICE AND ITS EFFECT ON TEMPORAL ORDER IN MARÍAS' "THE INFATUATIONS"

What does it look like to recount with intensifying premonitions that cause increasing curiosity about the past event? How does the memory set free the narrator make deviations with regard to narrative sequence? This paper seeks response to these questions by analysing Javier Marías’s novel The Infatuations.  In his novel the deviations in sequential ordering demand to be attentive to his readers. The narrator María Dolz’s describes the story  as she remembers the experiences lived.  On the other hand the narrator’s delicate digressions contribute to be more complex of the story: they procure insights about the murder story with the questions of love and death in a modulation that makes the reader go throught it with her on an emotional level.  Also, the narrative beginning in medias res, immerses the reader with Miguel Desverne’s murder news in the middle of the discourse. Hence, the narrator María moves back and forth from present to past in the basic rhythm of the story. Practically the story time is linear, in contrast, the discourse time, the arrangement in the story is strictly changed by the memories and digressions of the narrator. In the first section of this paper gives a brief overview of how is characterized Marías’s fiction, and then through a close reading of the Infatuations that relies on narrative theories, it will be discussed how his narrative develops with lengthy and complex phrases and thus how is altered strictly the non-linear progress of his narrative.

L’histoire de la narratologie est paradoxale. Sa naissance découle de la prise de conscience précoce que l’horizon des travaux portant sur la narrativité déborde
du cadre de la théorie littéraire. Pourtant, cette discipline émergente a longtemps été réticente à s’émanciper de son périmètre d’origine. Il en a découlé qu’un certain nombre de concepts se sont figés dans des définitions qui les rendent difficilement applicables à des formes non verbales. A une époque où les grands récits de notre culture se déclinent sur une vaste gamme de supports médiatiques, souvent coordonnés, au sein desquels les narrations bédéiques, filmiques, télévisuelles ou vidéoludiques occupent une place de plus en plus centrale, il est devenu urgent de développer une théorie du récit capable d’embrasser cette diversité. Mais cet élargissement ne doit pas se faire au mépris d’une conscience aiguë des contraintes que chaque support, par sa matérialité, mais aussi par sa tradition historique, impose au message narratif. Si l’on regarde au-delà du phénomène de l’adaptabilité des histoires, il devient alors essentiel de refonder des concepts transversaux suffisamment souples pour s’adapter à n’importe quel média, tout en réfléchissant à la manière spécifique dont chacun d’entre eux s’incarne médiatiquement.

In Thailand, EFL mentees meet challenges in schools during a one year school placement and one of them is the quality of the support from mentors. The present study aims to acknowledge the gap between idealistic and realistic roles of mentors and to shed some light on a sustainable and successful mentoring training programme as well as the criteria and processes used to select experienced teachers to serve as EFL mentors. In this study of two English student teachers, narrative accounts both in written and verbal were employed to investigate the two research questions as follows: "through the lens of mentees, what kinds of support did they receive and expect from their mentors?", and "how did mentees feel about the support they received from their mentors?" All data were analysed by following the procedures of qualitative content analysis. Even though there are substantial guides to mentoring, the findings acknowledge that the actual scaffoldings mentees received did not match with what is said in sociocultural theory. The mentees still required more scaffolding from their mentors especially concerning reflections on their teaching practices. The study seeks to raise awareness of problems during teaching practicum period by focusing on the support given by mentors and to encourage the formation of appropriate scaffolding given by mentors to student teachers during their school placement.

All languages have indexical words and/or grammatical categories (e.g., “I”, “you”, “this”, “that”, the past tense marker -ed) for grounding speech in the situation where it is being used. All languages also have ways of representing a another speech situation within the immediate one through the use of reported speech. Its most basic form, which is found in all languages, is direct discourse, in which the indexical grounding of the reported utterance is imported into the reporting one (e.g., “He said ‘I’ll go’ ”). Many languages also have forms of indirect discourse, in which the indexical grounding is shifted to that of the reporting speech situation (e.g., “He said he would go”). Often the shift is only partial, resulting in intermediate varieties between direct and indirect. There is also free indirect discourse, in which the speaker represents the speech of another without any explicit indication of that fact. Free indirect discourse shades off into the more general phenomenon of ‘voice’, which has been much explored by linguistic anthropologists under the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin. Here I present examples of all these phenomena in various languages of the world and relate them to other aspects of culture and social life.

• This is a narrative research study examining how people talk about their experiences of homelessness. Eight people experiencing homelessness were interviewed. They were each asked to tell their stories of homelessness. The research focused upon how participants' experiences have affected their identity claims and their mental health.

By Ignasi Ribó -- OpenBook Publishers, 2019

Prose Fiction presents the most important concepts of narratology in
a rigorous but accessible way. It follows a semiotic model of narrative
communication, which is based on the most recent literary theory, but
avoids engaging in overtly technical debates. By using simple language
and relying on many examples drawn from a wide range of short stories
and novels, some of them well-known to students, the book allows them
to develop a thorough understanding of the key elements of narrative.

This paper examines the profiles of five doctoral researchers posted on the Researching Multilingually website in order to identify key elements in the multilingual research process which these researchers individually emphasize. We selected three current and two recently-graduated PhD students from different linguistic backgrounds (Greek, Italian, and Mandarin). All of these researchers: a) have experience in researching multilingually; b) work in UK university context; and c) in most cases were supervised monolingually in English. To help them produce their online reflections, we provided them with the following guiding questions: 1) What is you experience of doing research multilingually? and 2) What is your experience of becoming aware of the complexities in this area? Having selected these five profiles, our first move was to analyze the answers they provided to these two questions especially in relation to the aspects of multilingual research design and practice they identifie...

This article explores the uses of poetry in qualitative research. In this study of the first author's lived experience with nonclinical depression and the second author's experience of living with someone experiencing depression, poetry and responsive narrative are used as data, as means of data representation, and processes of inquiry. The authors explore the nature of poetry as a tool for investigating human phenomena and its congruence with post-modern methods of research. Autoethnographic poems are used as data and analyzed via narrative written by the original author of the poem on two separate occasions. A third researcher added an additional layer of narrative analysis for increased depth. This self-reflection provides reflexive analysis of our individual understanding of depression via narrative.