Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 27

So far, we have painted narrative analysis in broad strokes, outlining strategies for comparing sizable samples of narratives and lengthy segments of interview transcripts in order to find their common themes, orientations, or storylines. We now turn to literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytically based strategies for focusing more closely on the miniscule, and the meanings it conveys. These will be especially useful in three situations:

 If you’re thinking, ‘I just have stories! I don’t think my project fits into any of the broad strokes approaches discussed so far!’ Okay. Then try these. You may need only one or two strategies, pursued in depth, for your project to work.

 If you’re thinking, ‘Sure, I have some stories, but storytelling isn’t all that my respondents did.’ Your transcripts might include many passages that are not related to time at all, such as lists, descriptions, rhetorical statements, or explanations of procedures. While it would be odd to present a narrative analysis that altogether neglects narrative, other aspects of talk that help to elaborate the meanings that matter to narrators are fair game for analysis.

 If you have very small samples or short stories. When you have so little data that comparing and contrasting among respondents is impossible, then look at your data close up. Although these strategies are suited to working with samples comprised of even only one narrator, short segments of transcripts, and the smallest of parts of speech, they also can complement any of the broad strokes approaches that we’ve been discussing.

These strategies can be of help whether you’re using a realist paradigm or a more constructionist one. In the former situation, they can give you insight into a narrator’s possible biases; in the latter, as Polkinghorne (2007) had suggested, they can bring nuance and enhanced validity to your understanding of a narrator’s interpretations. Bauer and Thompson’s (2004) review of works on Jamaican transnational migration warns us to go about this with a grain of salt, being aware of how culturally available and historically grounded forms of expression (or what Part III will speak of as discourses) may be mistaken for distinctive and telling individual ones. They give the example of how,

when a woman describes herself as a stepdaughter treated as a Cinderella, she may be using this ancient metaphor not only to convey her childhood sufferings, but also to indicate the obstacles she has successfully overcome. It would be very dangerous, without looking at an interview as a whole, to assume that because she spoke of herself as a Cinderella child, the woman’s sense of self was as a Cinderella. (2004: 347)

A final observation before we launch into these strategies is that the imagery and other devices that we might interpret as narrators’ expressions of subconsciously held meanings, following Freud (1900/1999), are also used consciously as rhetorical devices by politicians and creative writers. It is probably best to be more cautious about claims as to whether a narrator uses a rhetorical device consciously or subconsciously, and more bold about claims as to how it affected you as a reader or listener.