Narrative Analysis
Follow the story. Examine how events become a plot, how a teller claims a position, and how an audience helps shape the account.
What you will learn
- Recognise narrative material and frame a suitable research question.
- Choose among thematic, structural, dialogic/performance, and visual approaches.
- Preserve a story’s sequence while examining its parts.
- Analyse plot, evaluation, turning points, voice, and positioning.
- Write a supported interpretation and explain its scope.
Prepare: Read Sections 1–5 and choose the question your analysis will answer.
Investigate: Follow the fictional journalist’s account through Sections 6–9. Make notes before comparing interpretations.
Apply: Try the media example, watch the lecture, and complete the workshop in Section 12.
Understand narrative analysis
Narrative analysis examines how people and institutions select, connect, and evaluate events in stories. It investigates the meanings carried by an account and the work that telling it performs in a particular context.
A journalist recounts a mistake that changed their practice. A family narrates its move to a new city. A documentary links a factory closure with changes in a neighbourhood. Each account arranges experience: it introduces people, places events in relation to one another, and invites an audience to understand what matters.
The lecture emphasises this connection between storytelling and identity. A teller may connect a remembered self with a present position and an imagined future. The story can explain a decision, defend an action, claim expertise, ask for recognition, or preserve a shared memory. These possibilities become questions for analysis.
What is told?
Events, experiences, characters, relationships, and the meanings the teller gives them.
How is it told?
Sequence, pacing, contrasts, reported speech, evaluation, images, and endings.
What does telling do?
It may position a person, explain conduct, invite agreement, or challenge an established account.
Recognise a narrative connection
Compare “My first newsroom was busy” with “During my first week, I published an unverified claim; the correction changed how I approached deadlines.” The second connects events and marks a consequence. Narrative analysis follows that connection and asks how it gives the experience a particular shape.
A narrative can extend across a life history or occupy a brief exchange. It may revisit the past, imagine a future, or remain unfinished. Researchers working with small stories examine these everyday tellings, including stories shaped jointly by several speakers.
Locate the method within the study
Narrative inquiry can provide a broader orientation to researching experience through stories, relationships, time, and place. Narrative analysis names the analytical work undertaken with narrative material. Explain the role of each term in your own design.
Choose an analytical approach
Narrative approaches direct attention towards different features of storytelling. Choose the features that help answer your question, then explain how your procedures preserve and examine them.
The lecture introduces thematic, structural, and dialogic/performance analysis. Riessman’s extended guide also develops visual narrative analysis. These approaches can inform one another. A study may examine a story’s content and then show how its structure or performance supports that meaning.
On a small screen, swipe the table horizontally.
| Approach | Main analytical attention | Question about the journalist’s story |
|---|---|---|
| Thematic narrative | The meanings and concerns developed through an account, with attention to the case and its context. | How does the teller connect a reporting mistake with becoming a responsible journalist? |
| Structural | How the telling is organised: sequence, narrative functions, contrasts, pacing, and evaluation. | What happens when the account opens with the correction and then moves back to the assignment? |
| Dialogic/performance | Storytelling as situated action involving a teller, listeners, relationships, and wider social narratives. | How does this reporter present professional competence to this interviewer? |
| Visual narrative | How images and their arrangement work with words, sound, editing, and viewing contexts. | How would a documentary sequence connect a ticking clock, a published headline, and a correction? |
Write an analytical commitment
For example: “I will use a structural reading to examine how early-career journalists organise accounts of professional mistakes. I will also consider the interview questions through which these accounts were produced.” This states a main emphasis and a relevant contextual extension.
A thematic narrative analysis usually keeps the individual account visible while developing its meanings. A cross-dataset thematic analysis may organise the findings around patterns shared across interviews. Both can use coding and comparison; the research question determines what must remain intact and what relationships the analysis develops.
Frame the question and define the case
A narrative research question asks how experience becomes an account: how an event is remembered, how a change is explained, or how a person or institution presents a course of action.
Experience and identity
How do early-career journalists narrate assignments that changed their understanding of professional responsibility?
Public storytelling
How do selected news features narrate the movement from flood damage towards recovery, and whose actions drive that movement?
Define what counts as a case
A case might be one person’s account, one interview containing several stories, an organisation’s account across several documents, or a bounded media narrative. State the relationship between the source and the unit of analysis. One interview may contain an assignment story, a training story, and a later return to the original event.
Identify the boundaries using the question and material. A story may begin with an interviewer’s invitation, continue through a digression, and reach a provisional ending when the speakers move to another topic. Keep the surrounding exchange available so that a quotation retains its place in the telling.
Select cases for a clear purpose
Choose people or materials that can illuminate the question. You might seek journalists at different stages of an early career, stories about different types of assignments, or contrasting institutional settings. Explain the selection criteria, access route, exclusions, and the depth of analysis the corpus permits. The separate chapter on Sampling Methods can develop the broader sampling decisions.
For media material, record outlet, author, date, genre, publication setting, retrieval date, and any updates. A personal column, a breaking-news report, and a documentary offer different storytelling opportunities. Comparing them requires attention to those conditions.
State what an account can help you know
A study may investigate how journalists remember a mistake, how they claim responsibility during an interview, or how newsroom practices operated at the time. The first two questions centre on the telling. The third may also require records, observations, or additional accounts. Explain the relationship between narrative evidence and other evidence.
I will examine ______ stories produced in ______. My question concerns ______. A case will consist of ______, bounded by ______. I will select cases because ______ and analyse them through ______. The findings will address ______ within the context of ______.
Generate and prepare narrative material
Rich narrative material lets a teller develop an experience in their own terms while retaining the circumstances of the telling. Careful preparation preserves the features your analysis will need.
Invite an episode
A broad prompt can open a narrative interview: “Tell me about an assignment that changed how you report. Start wherever the story begins for you.” Allow time for the account to unfold. Follow-up questions can then clarify sequence, characters, evaluations, and changes in perspective.
- Extend the sequence: “What happened after the email arrived?”
- Recover a scene: “Who was there when you discussed the correction?”
- Clarify an expression: “You called it a turning point. What made it one for you?”
- Explore time: “How did you understand the event then, and how do you describe it now?”
- Invite variation: “Has your account of that assignment changed when telling it to other people?”
Record your own contributions as well. A prompt about an assignment that “changed” someone already invites a change story. A question about “failure” offers a different frame. Keep these invitations visible when interpreting the resulting account.
Use the sources that fit the question
Stories may arise in interviews, conversations, diaries, autobiographies, oral histories, organisational documents, films, or journalism. An interview creates a specific research encounter; an archived story has its own production and circulation history. Document how the material came into being and how you obtained it.
Transcribe with an analytical purpose
For a content-focused reading, a checked verbatim transcript with paragraph and speaker markers may suffice. An interactional reading may need pauses, overlap, emphasis, laughter, interruptions, and interviewer turns. A visual study may add shot descriptions, timecodes, captions, music, and changes in camera position.
Use consistent conventions and explain them. In this chapter, square brackets indicate a teaching annotation such as [pause]. Numbered passages make the worked example easy to revisit. In research, connect the transcript to the source recording and retain version information.
Preserve language and setting
When a participant moves between Bengali, Hindi, and English, the shift may carry a change in intimacy, authority, or quoted voice. Keep an original-language version where possible, explain consequential translation choices, and check interpretations with linguistic and contextual knowledge.
Read whole stories and examine their parts
Narrative analysis develops through repeated reading, listening, and interpretation. First establish how the account hangs together; then examine details and return to the whole with a sharper question.
The lecture describes this movement through the hermeneutic circle: understanding a part depends on the whole, while a closer reading of parts can reshape the whole. A final sentence may change how an opening sounds. A new account of the interview setting may alter how you read the teller’s claim to competence.
Record the overall movement, setting, central tension, and provisional meaning.
Examine order, voice, evaluation, interaction, and details that complicate the first reading.
Build a working record
- Read or listen through: Write a short case synopsis using the teller’s organisation.
- Map time: Separate the order of reported events from the order in which the account presents them.
- Mark relevant features: Annotate turning points, evaluations, contrasts, reported voices, and listener contributions.
- Develop an interpretation: Connect those features with the question and wider context.
- Test and revise: Examine awkward details, alternative readings, and further cases where the design includes them.
These activities can recur. A structural observation may change the case synopsis; a contrasting story may lead you back to an earlier passage. Keep a memo trail that links each interpretation with its evidence and records changes in your reasoning.
Coding can help retrieve passages, provided the story’s context remains accessible. Keep source IDs, paragraph numbers, and a whole-case summary alongside codes. When comparing cases, start with a clear account of each and then examine shared or contrasting narrative patterns.
Work with a complete account
A close reading begins with an account that readers can follow. The fictional story below lets us trace how a reporter connects an error, a correction, and a claim about professional change.
Teaching setting: An early-career reporter is speaking to a researcher who has introduced the study as an investigation of learning in newsrooms. The opening prompt is: “Tell me about an assignment that changed how you report.” The numbered passages are reference points for analysis.
- The correction is what I remember first.
- It was my third week on the local desk. A post said that the riverside school would close after the floods.
- Our page was due in ten minutes. I called the head teacher, got no reply, and used the post.
- The school stayed open. A parent emailed us the next morning.
- My editor asked, “Where did this come from?” I could show the post. I couldn’t show that I had checked it.
- I put the correction at the top of the page.
- I used to think a good reporter was the first to publish. Now I keep a space in my notes for what I haven’t checked.
- [Pause] I still remember the clock.
Describe before interpreting
A useful synopsis might say: “The reporter recalls publishing a claim about a school closure under deadline pressure. A parent’s challenge and an editor’s question lead into an account of correction and changed practice. The story ends by returning to the deadline.” This preserves the movement while leaving room for competing interpretations.
- AssignmentClosure claim and approaching deadline
- PublicationUnconfirmed post used in the report
- Challenge and correctionParent’s email and editor’s question
- Later practiceRecording what remains unchecked
- Correction foregroundedThe opening announces what is remembered
- FlashbackThe assignment and deadline are reconstructed
- ConsequencesThe challenge and corrective action follow
- Present perspectiveChanged practice, then the remembered clock
The first sentence offers a retrospective frame. It directs attention towards repair before the listener hears how the mistake happened. That observation supports a question: does the account organise professional learning around taking responsibility? We must examine the remaining passages before settling on an answer.
Examine narrative structure
Structural analysis investigates how a story’s organisation helps it carry meaning. It attends to what passages do: introduce a situation, advance events, mark their significance, resolve a difficulty, or return to the present.
Labov and Waletzky’s work on oral narratives provides an influential foundation. A widely used Labovian model, developed through this tradition, distinguishes six narrative functions. The model helps us ask precise questions about the teaching story.
On a small screen, swipe the table horizontally.
| Function | Question to ask | Possible reading of this story |
|---|---|---|
| Abstract | How is the story announced or its point previewed? | Passage 1 foregrounds the correction and signals what the teller will make memorable. |
| Orientation | Who is involved, where, when, and in what situation? | Passage 2 supplies the third week, local desk, school, and flood context; passage 3 adds the deadline. |
| Complicating action | What sequence carries the story forward? | Passages 3–5 connect a failed call, publication, a parent’s email, and the editor’s question. |
| Evaluation | How does the telling convey why these events matter? | The contrast between showing the post and showing verification in passage 5 evaluates the mistake. Passage 7 states a changed professional criterion. |
| Result or resolution | What outcome or response is reported? | Passage 6 reports placing the correction prominently. Passage 7 extends the outcome into present practice. |
| Coda | How does the telling close or reconnect with the present? | “Now” in passage 7 and “I still remember” in passage 8 bring the account to the teller’s present standpoint. |
Follow evaluation through the wording
Passage 5 places two sentences beside each other: “I could show the post. I couldn’t show that I had checked it.” Their parallel form sharpens a distinction between possessing a source and verifying a claim. This creates a moment of recognition within the event sequence.
Passage 7 makes another contrast: “I used to think” and “Now”. The teller divides professional understanding into an earlier and a later position. Structural attention reveals how the claim of change is built into the wording.
Examine the ending closely
The correction supplies an outcome, and the changed note-taking practice supplies a lesson. Yet the final clock image keeps deadline pressure in view. The ending can therefore support a reading of learning with continuing pressure. It complicates a simple account of a problem fully left behind.
Another reading might treat the clock as a vivid closing device that gives the story a memorable finish. Compare both readings with the wider interview and, where available, the recording. Explain which details support the interpretation you develop.
Interpret themes, plot, and turning points
A thematic narrative reading examines the meanings developed through a story’s events and relationships. Plot analysis asks how those events are connected into a movement that makes sense from the teller’s present position.
In the teaching story, useful initial annotations include “speed as competence”, “verification gap”, “public challenge”, “visible correction”, and “remembered pressure”. These help us retrieve details. The next analytical task is to explain how they relate within this account.
Learning to make uncertainty visible
The story moves from publishing quickly towards recording the limits of verification. Its two visible objects—the correction at the top of the page and the space for unchecked claims in the notebook—give professional responsibility a practical form. The closing clock retains the pressure under which that responsibility must be exercised.
Distinguish an event from a narrated turning point
The parent’s email changes the reported situation. The editor’s question exposes the verification gap. The correction marks a response. A researcher might locate the turning point at any of these moments, depending on the question. Show how the teller’s wording and organisation make your chosen moment significant.
The “used to/now” contrast gives the sequence a developmental plot: an inexperienced reporter learns a professional lesson. That pattern resembles a wider story of learning through error. Ask how the particular account uses that familiar pattern, where it departs from it, and what experiences it leaves available for further questioning.
Compare a plausible alternative
A responsibility-focused reading foregrounds the correction and changed practice. A workplace-pressure reading foregrounds the ten-minute deadline, the unanswered call, and the remembered clock. The account can sustain a relationship between these readings: the teller claims agency while keeping institutional pressure visible.
Record what additional material could sharpen the comparison. A later passage might explain the editor’s response, describe routine verification rules, or revisit the event from a different perspective. An absent detail can prompt a follow-up question; its absence alone gives limited grounds for assigning a motive.
Compare cases while retaining their shape
If another reporter narrates a similar error as evidence that deadlines make responsible reporting impossible, the shared subject is “mistakes”, but the plots differ. One account foregrounds changed practice; the other foregrounds continuing constraint. Compare how each assigns agency, evaluates events, and imagines what happens next.
Study voice, audience, and positioning
Dialogic and performance approaches study storytelling as an event involving people, relationships, and social expectations. They examine how a teller presents characters, addresses listeners, and draws on available ways of being a person.
“Performance” draws attention to what the telling accomplishes through language, delivery, gesture, and interaction. In our example, the reporter may seek recognition as someone who learned to act responsibly. The research setting, introduced as a study of professional learning, makes that version particularly relevant to the encounter.
The reporter acts, the parent challenges, and the editor asks for an account.
The reporter presents a changed professional self in response to a question about learning.
The account draws on ideas of the fast reporter, the responsible professional, and learning through error.
Examine reported voices
The editor receives a direct question: “Where did this come from?” The parent appears through an email whose wording remains unspecified. The head teacher is present through an unanswered call. Ask what roles these representations give the characters and whose perspective receives space.
The quotation of the editor also changes the story’s sound. It stages a moment of accountability. In an actual retrospective interview, the quoted words would be the teller’s reconstruction unless another source established the original wording.
Keep the interviewer in the account
Researcher: “So that was when you became more careful?”
Reporter: “More careful, yes—but the deadline still comes.”
The researcher offers a learning interpretation; the reporter accepts part of it and restores the pressure. An analysis of the exchange would examine both contributions and the qualified agreement.
Different audiences can invite different versions of an event. A reporter speaking to a trainee group may emphasise a lesson; speaking to an editor may foreground workflow; speaking with peers may draw on shared deadline experiences. Investigating such variation requires the relevant tellings and their contexts.
Analyse news, documentaries, and visual narratives
Media narratives connect events with public meanings. Their openings, sequences, voices, images, and endings can make particular experiences visible and place particular actors at the centre of the story.
The lecture proposes climate-change coverage as a possible study. Begin by defining a corpus: a specified event, period, set of outlets, and genre. A question might ask how selected long-form news features narrate the relationship between flood damage and recovery.
Begin with lived disruption
“At dawn, Mina lifted a schoolbook from the mud. Across the lane, neighbours began counting what the flood had left behind.”
Begin with a policy response
“Officials announced a new drainage programme on Monday, following a week of flooding across the district.”
Lead A begins with a named resident and an object; Lead B begins with an official announcement. These openings establish different entry points. To interpret the complete narratives, follow which voices appear next, how causes are explained, and whether residents or institutions drive the movement towards an outcome.
Follow the text beyond its opening
- Sequence: Does the feature move from a personal scene to expert explanation, then to proposed action?
- Agency: Who initiates change, who responds, and who waits?
- Evaluation: How do quotations, descriptions, and contrasts establish urgency, responsibility, or hope?
- Closure: Does the ending promise recovery, leave uncertainty, or return to an unresolved scene?
- Context: How do genre, production conditions, and publication setting help explain the form?
Read visual and audio sequences
For a documentary, build a sequence log with timecode, image or shot, speech, sound, caption, transition, and analytical note. A return to the same flooded classroom after a repair sequence may create a before-and-after plot. A voice-over may link scenes that were filmed at different times; examine how the edit constructs that connection.
For photographs, examine their sequence, captions, publication layout, and the account offered around them. Ask how the available material establishes time and relationships. Keep the production and viewing contexts alongside the image.
Write, reflect, and evaluate quality
A persuasive narrative analysis develops a clear interpretation through contextualised evidence. It explains how the account was produced, how the researcher read it, and how particular details support the argument.
Build an analytical paragraph
Start with a claim, locate the relevant passage, examine its wording or organisation, and explain its contribution to the question. Include a complication when it changes the reach of the interpretation.
The reporter presents professional learning through a shift from speed towards visible accountability. Opening with “the correction” places repair at the centre before the error is described. The parallel sentences “I could show the post” and “I couldn’t show that I had checked it” then separate possession of a source from verification. This distinction becomes practical in the present-day notebook, where the reporter records unchecked claims. Together, these features support a reading of responsibility as acknowledging the limits of knowledge. The final clock image complicates the developmental plot: deadline pressure remains part of the teller’s present relationship with the event. The account therefore presents changed practice within a continuing workplace demand.
Let reflexivity change a decision
Reflexivity examines how your location, relationships, commitments, and responses shape the research. Record the consequences for interpretation as well as the background you bring.
“My teaching places a high value on correcting the public record, so I am drawn to a story of professional growth. That reading foregrounds the correction and the notebook. The final clock sentence directs me back to working conditions. I will examine both the claim of changed practice and the account of continuing pressure.”
Explain the method through the work done
We examined ______ to understand ______. Cases were selected through ______ and bounded as ______. Material was generated or retrieved in ______, with attention to ______. Transcription and translation preserved ______. Analysis involved whole-case synopses, ______, and interpretive memos. We examined alternative readings through ______. Our relationship to the material shaped ______. The report uses ______ to support claims within the scope of ______.
In the findings, introduce the case and telling context before close analysis. Retain enough sequence for a reader to follow the story. Where several cases are compared, explain their differences and show how the comparison develops the argument.
Use quality questions that fit the approach
- Fit: Do the question, case boundaries, material, and analytical approach support one another?
- Context: Can readers understand when, where, to whom, and under what conditions the account was told?
- Evidence: Are claims connected with passages, sequences, or interactions that readers can examine?
- Interpretive depth: Does the analysis explain how the story makes meaning and what the telling accomplishes?
- Openness: Are competing readings and difficult details addressed?
- Reflexivity: Does the report show how researcher decisions affected the account?
- Scope: Are conclusions appropriate to the cases and design, with their possible relevance elsewhere explained?
Protect the person within the story
A narrative can reveal someone through a distinctive combination of events, places, relationships, and quotations. Review those connections when planning consent, quotation, and publication. Discuss sensitive episodes and the involvement of third parties; explain any changes made to protect identities and consider how those changes affect the analysis.
Participant feedback may clarify an episode, add a later perspective, or contribute to a collaborative interpretation. State its purpose and how you treated differences. A later account can become further narrative material, especially when the question concerns how stories change over time.
Software can organise cases, link memos, and retrieve passages. Automated tools may assist with transcription or indexing when appropriate safeguards are in place. Check outputs against the source and record consequential corrections; preserve the evidence needed for your interpretation.
Learn with the lecture and analysis workshop
Use the lecture to revisit the relationship between a story’s content, form, and telling context. Pause at the suggested points and compare your notes with the worked example.
Open the lecture on YouTube. The approximate starting points below follow the supplied transcript. The written chapter extends the lecture with a fictional case and guided activities.
Try each task before revealing the response
Activity 1 · Separate event order from telling order
Prompt: What changes if the story opens with “It was my third week” instead of “The correction is what I remember first”?
Suggested response: The revised opening begins with chronological background. The original foregrounds repair and the teller’s present memory before reconstructing the error. Compare the complete versions to see how each directs the listener towards the account’s point.
Activity 2 · Find evaluation within the action
Prompt: Why is passage 5 useful for more than listing the next event?
Suggested response: The editor’s question advances the sequence. The reporter’s parallel “could/couldn’t” sentences also evaluate the difference between finding a post and checking a claim. Evaluation is embedded within the telling of the encounter.
Activity 3 · Examine an alternative reading
Prompt: Does “I still remember the clock” establish that the reporter remains anxious?
Suggested response: The sentence supports attention to the continuing significance of deadline pressure. Anxiety would be a more specific psychological inference. Examine the recording, surrounding account, and any relevant clarification before making that claim. The sentence could also function as a memorable closing image.
Activity 4 · Bring the listener into the analysis
Prompt: How does “Tell me about an assignment that changed how you report” shape the material?
Suggested response: It invites the teller to select an assignment and organise it around change. Keep that invitation alongside the account’s learning plot. A follow-up asking what remained unchanged might develop a different aspect of the experience.
Your independent narrative analysis
Use the teaching story or an ethically appropriate narrative you can study with permission. For a public media item, record its source and production context.
- State one research question and define the narrative unit.
- Record the telling or publication context and the reason for selecting the case.
- Write a 100–150-word whole-case synopsis.
- Map reported event order and telling order.
- Annotate three or four features relevant to your chosen approach.
- Write a memo connecting those features with a candidate interpretation.
- Develop a plausible alternative reading and specify what supports it.
- Write 600–800 words of analysis with contextualised evidence.
- Add a short reflexive account and a statement of the claim’s scope.
Completion check: A reader can follow the story, inspect the evidence, understand your analytical choices, and see why the interpretation answers the question.
Glossary and further reading
Use this vocabulary to describe how an account works. The readings extend the chapter’s discussion of narrative form, interpretation, identity, and situated storytelling.
- Narrative
- An account that connects events and gives them meaning through a particular telling.
- Narrative analysis
- A family of approaches examining stories’ meanings, organisation, production, and uses.
- Plot
- The meaningful arrangement and connection of events within an account.
- Event order
- The chronology in which events are reported to have occurred.
- Telling order
- The sequence in which the account presents those events and reflections.
- Evaluation
- Features that convey the significance of events and the teller’s stance towards them.
- Turning point
- A moment presented or interpreted as changing the direction or meaning of the account.
- Coda
- A closing passage that can return the telling to the present standpoint.
- Positioning
- How characters, tellers, and listeners are located in relation to one another and to available identities.
- Co-construction
- The shaping of an account through contributions and relationships among participants.
- Small stories
- Everyday tellings, including brief, unfinished, collaborative, or anticipated accounts, examined as situated narrative practice.
- Master narrative
- A culturally available, influential storyline through which experiences and identities may be understood.
- Hermeneutic circle
- The movement between understanding parts and understanding the whole.
- Reflexivity
- Examination of how the researcher’s position, relationships, and decisions shape the research.
Sources and guided reading
- Dr. USP. How to do Narrative Analysis: A step-by-step Guide [Video]. YouTube.The accompanying lecture introduces stories and identity, analytical approaches, narrative structure, reflexivity, and a possible climate-news study.
- Riessman, C. K. (2005). Narrative analysis. In N. Kelly, C. Horrocks, K. Milnes, B. Roberts, & D. Robinson (Eds.), Narrative, memory & everyday life (pp. 1–7). University of Huddersfield. Open chapter (PDF).A concise introduction to the narrative analysis family and differences in analytical emphasis.
- Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. SAGE.An extended guide to thematic, structural, dialogic/performance, and visual approaches, with attention to interpretation and research practice.
- Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 3–38. (Original work published 1967.)A foundational account of oral personal-experience narratives. Read the structural model in relation to the kinds of material it was developed to examine.
- Labov, W. (1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 395–415.Develops questions about narrative clauses, evaluation, reportability, and the organisation of personal narratives.
- Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 335–342. Author-hosted paper (PDF).A foundation for analysing characters, teller–listener relations, and identity positions. See also Bamberg’s explanation of the three levels.
- Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3), 377–396. Author institutional record.Extends attention to everyday storytelling and the local work through which identities are produced.
Take a second story into the notebook
Choose a story that reaches a different ending from the teaching example. Keep its sequence intact, then compare how the two tellers assign responsibility and imagine what comes next. Revisit Content Analysis to consider a category-based question about the same material, or use Research Methodology to connect your analytical choice with the wider study design.