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After these first two readings, I created narrative summaries of each topic within the interviews. Barbara Miller, in her study of adolescent friendships, created this method as a way to preserve the natural storyline and the context of the adolescents’ relationships.¹² According to Miller, the two most important features of the method are that it accentuates “the elements by which we understand something as a story,” and it reduces the data to a more manageable quantity.¹³ Narrative summaries involve three steps: (1) the determination of a narrative; (2) a summary of that narrative; and (3) the exploration of all the gathered narrative summaries to find evidence of similar themes.

Miller defines a narrative as a story based on an adolescent’s personal experience, such as a relationship or a particular event. The story may have a beginning, a middle, and an end, or it may be a history of a relationship without a clearly definable beginning, middle, or end. The summary of the narrative is meant to be a condensation of the story. Miller suggests using direct quotes in the summary in order to maintain the “flavor of the story.” There may be many narrative summaries created from a single interview or only a few, depending on the number of stories the adolescent tells the interviewer. When exploring common themes across the narrative summaries, one can look within an interview, across interviews (if longitudinal), and across individuals.

For my analyses, I created narrative summaries for each topic discussed during the interviews (e.g., self-perspective, relationships with best friend, mothers, fathers, etc.). For example, when Eva spoke about her relationship with her mother, she told me that she and her mother do not get along, and she provided various explanations for these difficulties. I summarized the entire discussion of her relationship with her mother, quoting her as much as possible in my narrative summary of this topic (see Appendixes for an example of a narrative summary).