Odum Institute: Narrative Analysis for Qualitative Researchers

This one-day course will be offered via Zoom only. Course schedule is 9:00am – 3:00pm, with a 1 hour lunch and (2) 10-minute breaks. Attendance is required as it will not be recorded.

This course features Dynamic Narrative Inquiry – theory and principles for narrative research design and analysis drawing on the richness of expressive language. With this approach to qualitative inquiry, researchers can build on communication in daily life where diverse practices for sharing experience, making sense of experience, and imagining social change occur in personal narratives, sociocultural communications, and institutional policies.

This course involves a sequence of presentations and practical workshops with narrative analysis strategies applicable to small or large studies that sample verbal and/or visual discourse. We begin with an introduction to dynamic narrative inquiry, followed by modules with three analysis strategies that yield findings to a wide range of relevant social science research questions. Using examples from prior published studies, rationales and methodology are presented, including character mapping (to identify meaning in narrative actors, actions, and relationships); plot analysis (to identify how narrative structures express logics and intentions); and values analysis (to identify speaker/author/ purposes). The final hour of the day is devoted to discussing course participants’ insights from the workshops and implications for future research, practice, and policy.

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