Narrative research has become a catchword in the social sciences today, promising new fields of inquiry and creative solutions to persistent problems. This book brings together ideas about narrative from a variety of contexts across the social sciences and synthesizes understandings of the field. Rather than focusing on theory, it examines how narrative research is conducted and applied. It operates as a practical introductory guide, basic enough for first-time researchers, but also as a window onto the more complex questions and difficulties that all researchers in this area face. The authors guide readers through current debates about how to obtain and analyse narrative data, about the nature of narrative, the place of the researcher, the limits of researcher interpretations, and the significance of narrative work in applied and in broader political contexts.

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

Using Narrative in Research by Christine Bold provides an accessible, easy-to-understand guide to the theory and practice of the use of narrative in research. Written with those new to narrative in mind, this book will enable readers to understand the origins of narrative traditions and to plan and carry out a narrative study of their own. Christine Bold′s book examines narrative approaches across a range of research contexts and disciplinary boundaries and will be of equal value to practitioners and academic students and researchers alike. Drawing on a range of real-life examples of narrative studies, Using Narrative in Research will enable readers to provide a sound justification for adopting a narrative-based approach and will help them to write about and write up narrative in research. This book examines: • How we design research projects with a narrative approach • Ethics • Narrative thinking • Collecting narrative data • Analysing narrative data • Representation in narrative analysis • Reporting and writing up narrative research.

Critically examines current approaches to the study of teachers' narratives and argues that, for narrative research to be effective, we need to see narrative in a multi-disciplinary perspective.

There has been a major ‘turn’ towards narrative, biographical and life history approaches in the academy over the last 30 years. What are some of the new directions in narrative research? How do narrative research approaches help us to understand the world differently? What do we learn by listening to stories and narratives? How do narratives extend our understanding that other research approaches do not? This collection of work grows from a symposium organised to explore new directions in narrative research. What emerges is a fascinating, innovative and generative series of essays, generally exploring narrative enquiry and more specifically themes of culture and context, identity, teacher education and methodology. This book will be useful for students and researchers using narrative and biographical methods in a range of disciplines, including education, sociology, cultural and development studies.

This book directly addresses the multiplicity and complexity of narrative research by illustrating a variety of avenues to pursuing and publishing research that falls under the umbrella of narrative work. The chapters are drawn from a wide range of disciplines including education, literary studies, cultural studies, music and clinical studies. Each chapter considers a particular methodological issue or approach, illustrating how it was addressed in the course of the research. Each of the chapters concludes with a set of discussion exercises and a further reading list. The book offers a valuable resource for established researchers seeking to expand their methodological and theoretical repertoire, and for graduate students and researchers new to narrative methods.

This book provides a much needed up-to-date introduction to the topic of narrative inquiry – which has seen a growing interest in recent years. Narrative inquiry provides researchers with a framework through which they can investigate the ways humans experience the world depicted through their stories. The book looks at how this method can effectively be applied as a means of research in a range of contexts, including flexible, open and distance or workplace learning. It demonstrates the value and utility of employing narrative as a research tool in a range of teaching and learning settings and includes chapters on background, methodology and case studies to illustrate the application of narrative inquiry as a research method.