The most challenging aspect of narrative research is to find and select stories that go beyond ‘a good story’ to some kind of wider, theoretical meaning or implication. How can we know what is good work in narrative research if there are no methodological commandments? How can nonlinear concepts, such as persuasiveness, credibility, and insightfulness be measured? Exploring these provocative questions, the contributors to this volume examine such issues as the various guides to doing qualitative research, how scholars from two different disciplines (psychology and literature) respond to an analysis of several autobiographies that were published and analyzed by a third scholar, how to make meaning of narrative interviews by considering the problem of interpreting what is not said, how cultural meanings and values (particularly about gender) are transmitted across generations, the transformational power of stories within social organizations and the use of these stories as an agent of change, and more. The papers in this volume come from five countries (United States, Finland, Holland, Israel, and England) and five disciplines (criminology, literature studies, nursing, psychology, and sociology). These chapters will spur and support the quest for understanding through narrative and reflect the many ways to approach this type of research.
Cuprins
Introduction – Ruthellen Josselson
In Acknowledgment – June Price
A Review and Critique of Qualitative Research Techniques
Autobiography and the Value Structures of Ordinary Experience – Paul John Eakin
Marianne Gullestad′s
Everyday Life Philosophers
`Black Holes′ as Sites for Self-Constructions – Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen
An Interpretive Poetics of Languages of the Unsayable – Annie G Rogers et al
Gender, Generation, Anxiety, and the Reproduction of Culture – Wendy Holloway and Tony Jefferson
The Recruitment of Women into the Academic Elite in Israel – Beverly Mizrachi
Anna′s Narrative
Powerful Stories – Tineke A Abma
The Role of Stories in Sustaining and Transforming Professional Practice within a Mental Hospital
Writing as Performance – Barbara Crowther
Young Girls′ Diaries
Ding Ling and Miss Sophie′s Diary – Dora Shu-fang Dien
A Psychobiographical Study of Adolescent Identity Formation
Love Stories in Sexual Autobiographies – Elina Haavio-Mannila and J P Roos