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This approach is concerned with the desire to seek insight and meaning about health and illness through the acquisition of data in the form of stories concerning personal experiences. The narrative approach assumes that human beings are natural storytellers and that the principal task of the psychologist is to explore the different stories being told (Murray and Ziegler, 2015). The most popular source of material for the narrative researcher is the interview. The focus of the narrative interview is the elicitation of storied accounts from the interviewee. This can take various forms. The life-story interview is the most extended form of interview. As its name implies, the life-story interview seeks to obtain an extended account of the person’s life. The primary aim is to make the participant at ease and encourage him/her to tell their story at length.

Narrative analysis (NA) can take various forms. It begins with a repeated reading of the text to identify the story or stories within it. The primary focus is on maintaining the narrative integrity of the account. The researcher may develop a summary of the narrative account that will help identify the structure of the narrative, its tone and the central characters. It may be useful to engage in a certain amount of thematic analysis to identify some underlying themes. But this does not equate with narrative analysis. NA involves trying to see the interconnections between events rather than separating them. Having analysed one case, the researcher can then proceed to the next, identifying similarities and differences in the structure and content of the narratives.