Xi’an Narrative Workshop
Friday July 30th + Sunday Aug 1st
Overview
•
Friday, July 30
– Morning
(i) General Introduction
---of ‘Narrative Methods’ in
Cross-Cultural Research
---and of EACH OTHER
(ii) Honing in on Small Stories
– Afternoon
(i) The Davie Hogan story
(work with transcripts)
(ii) Betty tells her story (work
with transcripts)
• Sunday, August 1
– Morning
(i) Introduction to ‘Small
Stories’
(ii) 10-year-olds on “why girls
are disgusting”
(iii) 13-year-olds on “why it is
okay to tease girls”
– Afternoon
Work with Participants’ stories
(i) Introductions (self presentations)
(ii) Collected transitions from
childhood to adulthood
General Introduction
this morning
 Introductions
• Leading up to SMALL
 Brief stories of who
STORIES
we are -- in English
– What are small stories?
(presentations of our
– How are they differrent
from LIFE STORIES and
selves in terms of ‘who
LIFE-EVENT Stories
I am’)
– Different Approaches in
‘NARRATIVE
 Introducing
RESEARCH/METHODS’
‘Narrative Methods’ – Merits of ‘Small Stories’ for
for the purpose of doing
Cross-Cultural Research
Cross-Cultural Psychology
• INTRODUCTIONS I
• Brief: name, country,
institution, what I’m
doing
• Example: my self:
Michael Bamberg
-teach Psychology @
Clark University, US
-used to do research on
children’s story-telling
development
-now doing research on
adolescents
• INTRODUCTIONS II
– We tell my neighbor
who we are
• a SHORT life story
– My neighbor takes
notes (or records)
– Then we switch
We’ll use these notes
later <Sunday
afternoon>
---DON’T WORRY!!!
---NO TEST!!!
Narrative Research/Methods
and their use for Cross-Cultural Psychology
• What ARE narrative Methods?
– People’s stories as ‘windows’ into their understanding of
‘who they are’ <<self-understanding>>
– People’s stories as joint co-productions of ‘who they
are’ <<self-understanding in contexts>>
– People’s stories as reflections of ‘cultural themes’ <<sociohistorical “master narratives” -- “dominant discourses”>>
• How can we employ them for CCP?
– Tyler’s article
– Culture as components of our behavioral + cognitive
repertoires <culture as ‘conceptual’>
– Culture as our interactive habits <culture as ‘doings’>
Analyzing the meaning of lived lives
--in context-• My First Kiss
– what it meant to me “back then”
– refracted through what ‘kissing’ means - as a cultural
schema/script
– refracted through my personal + social history (the
here-and-now of my life-course + the telling situation)
• It’s not THE EVENT itself but its meaning
– In the form of a STORY told in context
•
•
•
•
to one’s peers
to a teacher <in class>//parent over dinner table conversation
to a researcher <one-on-one>
to a researcher <in a focus group interaction>
– same versus mixed gendered group
So what needs to be analyzed is not just
THE STORY, but THE TELLING of the
story IN CONTEXT
Why?
Because we’re not trying to find out about ‘kisses’, but
how participants MAKE SENSE of ‘kissing’
Therafter we can begin to compare how the significance
of ‘kissing’ changes - across age groups, different
genders, and different cultures
Leading up to SMALL STORIES
What ARE Small Stories?
 Short
 Conversationally Embedded + Negotiated
• before
• during
• after
 Fine tuned positioning strategies
– fine-tuned vis-à-vis the audience
– fine-tuned vis-à-vis dominant + counter narratives
– multiple moral stances (testing out and experimenting with
identity projections)
 Low in tellability, linearity, temporality + causality
Two Small Stories
Kimberly Speers -------- Yesterday’s Events
QuickTime™ and a
DV/DVCPRO - NTSC decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
QuickTime™ and a
DV/DVCPRO - NTSC decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Three Kinds
of Narrative Approaches to the
Study of Self and Identity
• Life-Story Approaches
• Life-Event Approaches
• Small Stories
– short narrative accounts
– highly embedded in every-day interactions
– unnoticed as ‘stories’ by the participants
– unnoticed as ‘narratives’ by researchers
but highly relevant for identity formation processes
Life-Stories
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Dan McAdams (1985; 1993)
Gabi Rosenthal (1998)
Chamberlain (2002)
Hollway & Jefferson (2000)
Wengraf (2001)
Hermans (1992)
Holstein & Gubrium (2000)
Miller 2000)
Mishler (1986; 1999)
Life-Events
• Episodic interviews
– Most narrative research
– Particular Life-Events
•
•
•
•
•
•
Chronic pain
My first kiss
My best friend
Growing up in the sixties
Falling in love
My divorce
INTERVIEW TECHNIQUE:
unfocused, open-ended, in depth,
detailed accounting,
psychoanalytic, user-focused,
‘empowerment’
INTERVIEW TECHNIQUE:
detailed accounts of particular
experiences/events; ranging
between open-ended and
more focused interviews
Merits of Life-Story & LifeEvent Approaches
•
•
•
•
tap into constructions of the ‘who am I’-question
bring out aspects of LIVED EXPERIENCE
accentuate the CONTINUITY of experience
force participants to focus on the meaning of
particular events/experiences in THEIR lives
• underscore a unified sense of personal (cultural)
identity
Narratives as tools // heuristics for the
analysis of subjective sense-making
Open Questions-----where small stories become worthwhile
• How does this unified sense of self come to
existence (issue of development + acculturation)?
– how does the person in his/her particular culture and
socio-historical context learn to “sort out” what is
called life - and what makes life “worth living” (- a
‘good’ life)
• Overemphasis of stories about ‘the self’
– underplaying stories we tell about others
• Overemphasis of ‘long stories’
– cutting out everyday, small stories
Questions
&
Discussion
WARNING:
• Narrative Elicitation
– Interviewing Techniques
• Narrative Transcriptions
 NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
• Publication of Narrative Research