Maintaining the Visibility of Participants’ Storied Data in an Interpretative Study Using a Thematic Narrative Analysis Approach

Honouring the agency and intention of participants in research can be difficult. In this paper I discuss my approach to the analysis of data, with a consideration for the narratives and stories of my participants generated through the research process in my study. The stories told by my participants held a considerable amount of emotional attachment and I was wary about ‘decontextualising the data’ through breaking it up into small pieces; that through my interpretative position I was at risk of losing the individuality of the participants in the search for collective understandings.

In my study I adopted a Thematic Narrative Analysis approach, where there is narrative analysis across the stories captured during the interview process. Treating the interview responses as ‘cultural stories’ lends itself to a narrative analysis, which is able to break with the constraints of coding and the risk of decontextualised text which can result from a purely thematic exercise yet allows for development of a themed categorisation to provide a magnified insight into specific areas of commonality and contrast. The Thematic Narrative approach to my analysis is the focus of this paper and I present the process I adopted to analyse the narratives whilst keeping in my mind the themes of the research questions yet retaining a visibility of the participants’ lived experiences in my study.