A brief note on narrative interview: for Housing Studies students

A brief note on narrative interview: for Housing Studies students (information from perplexity.ai)

My question: "Highlight the main ideas of narrative interview in the context of Housing Studies research."

The reply: "Narrative interview in the context of Housing Studies research centers on eliciting detailed personal stories to understand individuals’ lived experiences, perceptions, and meanings related to housing. Its main ideas include:

• It uses a basic narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end that organizes events sequentially, allowing participants to tell their story naturally and fully.

• The interview unfolds in phases: initiation, free narration, probing questions for clarification, and closure, minimizing interviewer control to capture authentic perspectives.

• Different narrative structures (classic story, heroic journey, three-act, etc.) provide varied frameworks to understand the flow and emphasis of stories.

• Narratives include both content (what is said) and performance (how it is said), reflecting the participant’s meaning-making through storytelling.

• Narrative interviews invite storytelling as a sense-making method, connecting personal housing experiences to broader social and cultural contexts.

• Open-ended initial questions encourage uninterrupted narration, followed by focused prompts to deepen data richness.

• Advantages include capturing rich, nuanced insights into housing realities, while challenges include time consumption and dependence on participant storytelling skill.

• Analysis focuses on identifying thematic elements, key life events, turning points, and social meanings within the stories, often linking individual experiences to structural housing issues and policies.

In Housing Studies, narrative interviews reveal the complexities of housing needs, satisfaction, stress, homelessness, or life changes by exploring how people construct and communicate their housing-related life stories with emotional and social depth. This approach supports more empathetic, context-sensitive housing research and policy formulation."

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