Doing Narrative Research

Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, Maria Tamboukou, Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, Maria Tamboukou

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781446252666, 9781446252659
• eBook ISBN: 9781446286722
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written by an international team of experts in the field, the second edition of this popular text considers both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of narrative research. The authors take the reader from initial decisions about forms of narrative research, through more complex issues of reflexivity, interpretation and the research context. Existing chapters have been updated to reflect changes in the literature and new chapters from eminent narrative scholars in Europe, Australia and the United States have been added on a variety of topics including narratives and embodiment, visual narratives, narratives and storyworlds, new media narratives and Deleuzian perspectives in narrative research. 

This book will be invaluable for all students, researchers and academics looking to use narrative methods in their own social research.

1

Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations

Wendy Patterson

This chapter introduces the seminal work on personal experience narratives by sociolinguists William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. In the first part of the chapter, Labov’s model of the structure of the personal experience narrative is presented, his method of analysis is described and its advantages explored. In the second part, some limitations of the Labovian approach are identified and discussed.

The Labovian approach

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Now over 40 years old, the influential work of Labov (1972) and Labov and Waletsky (1967) has become paradigmatic in the field of personal narrative research. Labov’s model of the structure of the personal experience narrative has provided the starting point for a wide range of studies that utilize narrative, and the merits and limitations of the model continue to be debated.¹

Labov’s work on narrative is but a small part of his highly influential socio-linguistic work on the varieties of English. In his book Language in the Inner City (1972), Labov presented a developed version of his model of the structure of the personal narrative. However, the most important aspect of the book was not this model, but rather Labov’s groundbreaking scholarship, which argued that black English vernacular (BEV) should be recognized as a language in its own right, rather than as an incorrect or stunted version of standard English. His defence of BEV was fully supported by his analysis of BEV speech data, which showed that BEV speakers were just as skilful, expressive and effective in their use of language as any other speech community. As part of the data analyses, Labov focused on stories told by young, male BEV speakers, and it was from this data that he formulated his model of the personal experience narrative.

Labov and his colleagues provided us with a method that produces structural analyses of specific oral personal experience narratives. Within Langellier’s (1989) classification of different approaches to the personal narrative, the Labovian approach is part of the category that treats personal narrative as story text, as distinct from approaches which understand personal narrative as storytelling performance, conversational interaction, social process or political praxis. In Mishler’s (1995) typology of narrative-analytic models, the Labovian model is a subclass of the general category focused on reference and temporal order, as distinct from those focused on textual coherence and structure, or narrative functions. Mishler also presents Labov’s model as the exemplar of approaches that see narrative as ‘recapitulating the told in the telling’ (1995: 92), rather than as ‘reconstructing the told in the telling’ or ‘making a telling from the told’.

These two contextualizations of the Labovian approach within the field of personal narrative research highlight its fundamental premise and key characteristic. It understands the personal narrative primarily as a text, and that text’s function is to represent past events in the form of a story, as expressed in Labov’s description of the oral personal experience narrative:

one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred.

(Labov, 1972: 359)

We can see, therefore, that the Labovian approach is event-centred, in that it defines narrative in terms of the representation of events. It is also text-centred, in that it embodies an understanding of the personal experience narrative as a text and takes little account of context.

This focus on events, and the premise that narrative’s primary function is the recapitulation of events, is widespread in definitions of narrative from different academic fields. Consider, for example, Genette’s characterization, in linguistics, of an:

oral or written narrative statement that undertakes to tell of an event or events.

(Genette, 1980: 25)

Onega and Landa’s definition, within literary criticism, is that:

a narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way.

(Onega and Landa, 1996: 3)

Within narratology, Toolan’s account of narrative is of:

a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events.

(Toolan, 1988: 7)

Later in this chapter I will discuss how approaching oral personal experience narratives as though they are primarily about events, rather than experience, gives rise to a range of theoretical, methodological and interpretational problems.

Analysing transcripts using the Labovian approach

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Using Labov’s criterion for what constitutes a minimal narrative, ‘a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered’ (Labov 1972: 360), and his analytic method, narratives can be extracted from other language data, and parsed into numbered clauses. Each clause can then be assigned to one element of Labov’s six-part model: abstract (A), orientation (O), complicating action (CA), result (R), evaluation (E), coda (C). The following ‘Lift Story’ example of a personal experience narrative is presented and analysed according to the Labovian method.

This story is an ‘ideal type’; while the experience happened, the transcript is not taken from a spoken narrative but rather acts as a demonstration text for Labov’s method.

The Lift Story

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1 Did I ever tell you	A
2 about the time I was stuck in a lift?	A
3 Well, it was about five years ago	O
4 when I was working in London	O
5 I was the last one to leave the office late on a Friday night	CA
6 and the lift just stopped between the eighth and seventh floors	CA
7 I was terrified, terrified	E
8 I mean I really panicked	E
9 I thought there was no one else in the building	E
10 and I would be stuck there until Monday morning	E
11 It really was the most awful feeling	E
12 anyway I frantically pushed the alarm button for about ten minutes	CA
13 which seemed like hours	E
14 Then I heard someone calling	CA
15 and then suddenly the lift started moving down	CA
16 and vibrating and rattling and sort of juddering	CA
17 I screamed ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE’	CA/E
18 I thought the lift was going to plunge down into the basement	E
19 and then suddenly the doors opened in between two floors	CA
20 and the caretaker was there	CA
21 and he helped me climb out	CA
22 I was free at last!	R
23 I burst into tears	CA/E
24 I was so relieved	E
25 there is no way	C
26 I ever get into a lift on my own now	C
27 so that’s why	C
28 I’ve just climbed ten floors	C
29 to get to your flat	C

Labov recommends the ‘question method’ for the categorization of clauses. This is based on the idea that a narrative can be understood as a series of answers to the underlying questions that all narratives address. The clauses within a narrative thus function to answer different questions:

30	Abstract – what is the story about?
31	Orientation – who, when, where?
32	Complicating action – then what happened?
33	Evaluation – so what?
34	Result – what finally happened?

The sixth element, the Coda, functions to sign off the narrative as it returns to the present time of the telling, to hand the ‘floor’ over to the hearer(s). Rather than answering a question, it ‘puts off a question’, signalling that questions 3 and 4 are no longer relevant’ (Labov, 1972: 370, emphasis in the original).

Abstract

This is optional; depending on the context in which the story is told, narrators may or may not provide a summary of the story to come. For example, the question ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I got stuck in a lift?’ (lines 1–2), provides a summary of the story to come and is also a bid for an extended speaking turn. It provides a clear indication to the listener that if they give a negative response to the question, they are implicitly agreeing to listen to a story. In an interview situation, where an interviewer asks a question in order to elicit a narrative, the question itself may be seen to constitute the abstract, negating the need for the narrator to produce one. For example, Labov and his researchers used the question, ‘Have you ever been in danger of death?’ to elicit personal experience narratives from young, black American males; the resultant narratives made up the primary data-corpus used by Labov and Waletsky to develop their model. In response to the question, an interviewee might respond ‘Yes, this kid once tried to stab me’ (Abstract) or might go straight into the story ‘Yes, it was about five years ago when I was at a party and … (Orientation). The abstract, if it is present, will be at, or very near, the beginning because its main functions are to introduce the story and, depending on the context, to make a bid for the floor.

Orientation

Orientation clauses, in a personal experience narrative, function to answer the questions ‘who is the story about?’, ‘when did it happen?’, ‘where did it happen?’, thereby providing a setting in which the events of the story will be told. For example, ‘Well, it was about five years ago when I was working in London’ (lines 3–4). Although orientation clauses usually occur early in the narrative text, it is not uncommon for narrators to insert extra background information at later points.

Complicating action

Sometimes referred to as the ‘skeleton plot’ (Mishler, 1986: 237) or the ‘spine’ of the narrative (Linde, 1993: 68), the complicating action clauses relate the events of the story and typically follow a ‘then, and then’ structure which gives a linear representation of time and permits an open-ended series of events to be related. The series can be added to, indefinitely, as if in response to ‘and then what happened?’ as long as the events are related in chronological order. For example, ‘and then suddenly the doors opened in between two floors and the caretaker was there and he helped me climb out’ (lines 19–21). Any deviation from chronological order must be accompanied by explanatory clauses which clearly indicate the actual order of events, for example, ‘But before that happened …’.

Evaluation

Labov describes evaluation as ‘perhaps the most important element in addition to the basic narrative clause’ and one which has been neglected by other accounts of narrative (1972: 366). It is evaluation that, in Labov’s terms, mediates the crucial ‘point’ of the story, thereby justifying its telling, and it reveals the narrator’s perspective on the events being told. The ‘so what?’ question, with which a story without a point could be dismissed as not worthy of telling, is preemptively answered by the inclusion of evaluation clauses that tell the listener what the point is by conveying the narrator’s experience of the events at the time they took place and his or her feelings about the experience at the time of the telling.

Labov (1972) identifies three main types of evaluation: external, embedded and evaluative action:

External evaluation is overt. The narrator stops the complicating action, stands outside the story and tells the listener what the point is, for example ‘It really was the most awful feeling’ (line 11).

Embedded evaluation preserves the dramatic continuity of the story as the narrator tells how she/he felt at the time, for example, ‘I was terrified, terrified’ (line 7) and ‘I was so relieved’ (line 24).

Evaluative action stays firmly within the story by reporting actions that reveal emotions without the use of speech, for example ‘I burst into tears’ (line 23).

Labov further categorizes the evaluative elements in a narrative text into different types of device. These include:

Intensifiers, which include expressive phonology [I screamed ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE’ (line 17)]; quantifiers [the most awful feeling (line 11)]; and repetition [I was terrified, terrified (line 7)].

Comparators, which compare what did occur to what did not, but might have done. For example, ‘I thought there was no one else in the building and I would be stuck there until Monday morning’ (lines 9–10) and ‘I thought the lift was going to plunge down into the basement’ (line 18).

Explicatives, which often involve causality and explain why something happened. For example, ‘I burst into tears [because] I was so relieved’ (lines 23–24).

In Labov’s and Waletzky’s original (1967) model, evaluation was regarded as a discrete element occurring at one place in the narrative text. In Labov’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: What is narrative research?
• 1 Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations Wendy Patterson
• 2 From experience-centred to socioculturally-oriented approaches to narrative Corinne Squire
• 3 Analysing narrative contexts Ann Phoenix
• 4 A Foucauldian approach to narratives Maria Tamboukou
• 5 Practising a rhizomatic perspective in narrative research Gerrit Loots, Kathleen Coppens and Jasmina Sermijn
• 6 Bodies, embodiment and stories Lars-Christer Hydén
• 7 Seeing narratives Susan E. Bell
• 8 Doing research ‘on and through’ new media narrative Mark Davis
• 9 Approaches to narrative worldmaking David Herman
• 10 Looking back on narrative research: An exchange Phillida Salmon and Catherine Kohler Riessman
• 11 Never the last word: Revisiting data Molly Andrews
• 12 Narrating sensitive topics Margareta Hydén
• 13 The public life of narratives: Ethics, politics, methods Paul Gready
• Concluding comments Catherine Kohler Riessman
• Afterword: The monkey wrenches of narrative Jens Brockmeier
• Index