A brief teaching note on narrative interview

A brief teaching note on narrative interview (information from perplexity.ai)

My question  1: "Highlight 8 main ideas of narrative interview as a research method."

The reply: "The eight main ideas of the narrative interview as a research method are:

1. Minimizing Interviewer Influence: The narrative interview aims to reduce the interviewer's imposition by avoiding pre-structuring the interview through set questions, allowing the interviewee to freely express their perspective in their own language.​

2. Storytelling and Listening: This method uses everyday communication of storytelling to elicit rich, meaningful narratives that reveal how interviewees make sense of their experiences.​

3. Phased Structure: Narrative interviews generally follow phases—initiation to start the narration, main narration without interruptions, focused questioning mainly like "What happened then?", and concluding talk where deeper questions may be allowed to clarify the story.​

4. Temporality: Narrative interview considers the dimension of time in stories, understanding that events have a past, present, and future, making the phenomena a continuous process.​

5. Sociality: It accounts for both individual feelings and social contexts affecting experiences, emphasizing the relationship between participant and interviewer.​

6. Contextual Place: The physical and situational context is crucial, and the narrative interview does not decontextualize experiences because context strongly impacts meanings.​

7. Participant Control: Participants control the narrative’s direction, content, and structure, often positioned as storytellers rather than respondents, which shifts power dynamics and enriches data quality.​

8. Rich, Complex Data: Narrative interviews generate rich, detailed, and contextual data filled with characters, subplots, and personal meaning, but can be time-consuming to analyze and dependent on participants' verbal abilities.​

These ideas collectively define narrative interviewing as a qualitative method focused on eliciting rich, authentic personal stories in context, with minimal interviewer imposition, to understand how people construct meaning from their experiences."

My question 2: "Recommend 4 preparations that a researcher-interview needs to make for the conduct of the narrative interview."

The reply: "Four key preparations a researcher-interviewer needs to make for conducting a narrative interview are:

1. Familiarize with the Field and Topic: The researcher must conduct preliminary research to understand the field or event under study. This includes reviewing documents, informal accounts, and background knowledge to grasp the main issues and formulate an initial central topic that will trigger the interviewee’s narrative.​

2. Develop Exmanent Questions and Translate Them: The researcher prepares a list of exmanent questions reflecting their research interests. These questions are intended to later be translated into immanent questions using the participant’s own language during the interview to elicit rich, authentic narration without imposing language or interpretations.​

3. Prepare the Interview Setting and Materials: This includes obtaining consent for recording, ensuring technical equipment works well, and preparing to explain the interview process (uninterrupted storytelling, phases of questioning, concluding talk) so the participant feels comfortable and informed.​

4. Plan to Maintain a Non-intrusive Listening Role: The researcher must prepare to keep interruptions minimal during the storytelling phase, using non-verbal encouragement and attentive listening only, then systematically moving to focused questioning using only "what happened next" type questions in the questioning phase, avoiding ‘why’ or leading questions to preserve narrative authenticity.​

These preparations help ensure a narrative interview that respects participant agency, captures detailed stories, and yields rich qualitative data for meaningful analysis."

** note: "Exmanent" is an adjective used in qualitative research, particularly in narrative interviews, to describe questions or interests that come from the researcher's background or research goals. These questions are external to the interviewee's narrative and are used to explore topics that the interviewer deems important to the research but have not been brought up by the participant yet. The goal is often to get the interviewee to reflect on and theorize about the material they have already shared. 

A collection of blog notes on using chatgpt for research purpose.