ANALYSIS OF QUALITATIVE DATAevents. Thus, the narrative offered by the Pente-
costal churches blended a religious conversion with
a new self-understanding. The local men used it to
reinterpret their past actions and guide their current
activities. More than the telling of a story, the church
narrative helped them to construct identity and find
meaning in life.
Narrative inquiryis a method of investigation
and data collection that retains a narrativelike qual-
ity from social life (Chase, 2005). Using it as
inquiry, we try to capture people’s ordinary lived
experience without disrupting, destroying, or
reducing its narrative character. The inquiry is self-
reflective; that is, you place yourself in a flow of
events and self-consciously become part of the
“plot.” The inquiry itself—engaging participant-
observers in a field setting or examining historical-
comparative documents—appears in narrative
terms; that is, as a tale with a sense of movement
and a coherent sequence of events about an
engaged social actor in a specific context.
Narrative presentationgrows out of the inter-
pretative social science approach. Often called story-
telling(Berger and Quinney, 2004), this mode of
presentation blends description, empathetic under-
standing, and interpretation. It dissolves the space
between a researcher and the people being studied.
This makes the researcher an integral aspect of
description, discussion, and interpretation in a
study. Together, researcher and the researched
coparticipate in creating/gathering data, and both
reflect on the data. Such a process interweaves a
researcher’s life with the lives of the people being
studied. As an individual social actor, the researcher
becomes inseparable from the research process
and from data presentation. For this reason, a re-
searcher’s personal biography and life situation are
often included in the story format and in data pres-
entation, discussion, and interpretation. Besides
“giving voice” to the people who are studied, the
researcher’s voice, presence, and subjectivity
appear. The storyteller-researcher is not a disem-
bodied voice or detached observer; rather, he or she
is a storyteller whose emotions, personal experi-
ences, and life events become a part of the story that
is told.
Narrative analysis, a method for analyzing
data and providing an explanation, takes several
forms. It is called analytic narrative, narrative
explanation, narrative structural analysis, or
sequence analysis.^22 Besides recognizing the core
elements of a narrative (listed earlier), you may use
narrative analysis techniques to map the narrative
and give it a formalized grammar/structure. You can
not only recognize the narrative character of social
life but also analyze data in a manner that retains
and unveils that character. The narrative is an out-
line or model for organizing data, but it also serves
as a type of explanation.
Some researchers apply a few analytic con-
cepts to qualitative data whereas others employ
complex logical systems that outline the structure
of a narrative, often with the aid of computer soft-
ware. As you examine and analyze qualitative data
for its narrative form and elements—whether it is
an individual’s life history, a particular historical
event, the evolution of an organization over the
years, or a macro-level historical process—you
focus on events (rather than variables, individuals,
or cases) and connections among them. You find
that temporal features (e.g., order, pace, duration,
frequency) are essential organizing concepts. You
soon start to treat the sequence of events itself as an
object of inquiry.
Franzosi (1998) argued that once we recognize
narrative within data, we try to extract and preserve
it without destroying its meaning-making ability or
structure. We also look for what Abell (2004:293)
called “action linkages”—that is, how a social actor
engages in actions to transform one condition or sit-
uation into another or, simply put, makes things
happen. As we map the structure of a narrative’s
sequence, the process operates as both a mode of
data analysis and a type of explanation. It is an
answer to this question: Why do events occur as
they do? Some researchers believe that narrative
explanations are not causal, but others believeNarrative analysis Both a type of historical writing
that tells a story and a type of qualitative data analysis
that presents a chronologically linked chain of events
in which individual or collective social actors have an
important role.