Questioning and Transcribing: How to Gain Access to Personal Narratives

Abstract

The process of narrative analysis begins with the issue of collecting narratives in ways that allow participants to thoughtfully talk about the issues with which the researchers, and hopefully the participants themselves, are concerned. This is most commonly achieved through a relatively ‘open’ form of interviewing, which aims to target a set of research questions whilst also allowing for flexible and ‘rich’ talk. This chapter is organised around the reflexive question of how to establish whether the interview questions are eliciting the kind of material the participant wants the researcher to hear, and the researcher wants to analyse. To examine this, we consider the issue of ‘the unit of analysis’, focusing as an example on a short stretch of text from an interview with Lance, a 16-year-old boy who has sexually abused a number of children. We show that methodological choices have a significant impact on the ways in which the narrative material is interpreted, and that this in turn affects how or indeed whether the ways ‘the culture “speaks itself” through the individual’s story’ (Riessman, 1993: 5) may be heard.