PSY430 Narrative Psychology:

Interviewing and Narrative Analysis

Spring, 2016

Gary Gregg

During the last decade and a half, social scientists have increasingly employed interviewing methods and analysis of narrative data to investigate basic psychological processes. Many now argue that memory, identity, and social cognition -- and human cognition generally -- are fundamentally organized by metaphoric and narrative structures. This seminar will provide an introduction to several interviewing and narrative analysis strategies. In particular, it will cover:

· phenomenological and discourse analysis approaches to meaning

· research on “cultural models,” especially as encoded in metaphors and key symbols

· Grounded Theory, as a general method of qualitative data analysis

· plot-structure theories of narration

· structuralist theories of narration

Students will conduct, transcribe, and analyze one focus group and three life-history interviews. They will work collaboratively in small groups to critique interviewing styles and to analyze transcripts.

The course is designed to provide a practical familiarity with semiotic strategies, so students can both use and critically evaluate narrative analysis techniques in literary and aesthetic criticism. It is also designed to prepare interested students to use interviewing and narrative analysis methods in SIP research. For psychology majors, the course will provide an introduction to an emerging branch of cognitive science.

Electronic Reserve Readings

Many of the readings are on electronic reserve and are highlighted links on the syllabus below: click to open I.D. dialog box, and provide your “K” I.D. & password. Adobe Reader will open and then the reading. K computers have Adobe Reader installed – you’ll need to have it on any other computer you use.

Narrative Psychology Syllabus

Spring, 2012

Section I	Cultural Models and Focus Group Methods
	Topic	Reading
1 Tuesday	Introduction	focus group
1 Thursday	Foundations	McAdams, What do We Know When We Know a Person? Bruner, Acts of Meaning Ch. 1: The Proper Study of Man Ch. 2: Folk Psychology…
2 Tuesday	Focus Group Methods	Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research Ch. 1-4 Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists Chapts. 1 excerpts
2 Thursday	Cultural Models	Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By Ch. 1-6
3 Tuesday	Cultural Models transcript analysis	Lakoff & Kovecses, “The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English”
3 Thursday	Metaphor and Cognition transcript analysis	Ohnuki-Tierney, “Embedding and Transforming Polytrope: The Monkey as Self in Japanese Culture”
Section II	Stories and Life Stories
4 Tuesday	Life Histories & Key Symbols	Gregg, Self Representation Ch. 5 “Tofu and Junk Food” Bruner, Acts of Meaning Ch. 4: Autobiography and Self
4 Thursday	Life Histories	Harding, “The Afterlife of Stories”
5 Tuesday	Interviewing Strategies	Josselson, Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry  Ch. 4 & 5 McAdams, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story Ch. 1 &2
5 Thursday	Identity & narrative	Josselson, Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry  Ch. 7 & 8 McAdams, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story Ch. 3
6 Tuesday	Identity & narrative	McAdams, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story Ch. 5 & 6 Habermas &Bluck, “Getting a Life: The Emergence of a Life Story in Adolescence”
Section III	Plot Structure Theories
6 Thursday	Life History Analysis	Ewing, "The Illusion of Wholeness" (e-reserve)
7 Tuesday	Life History Analysis	Wiersma, “The Press Release: Symbolic Communication in Life History”
7 Thursday	Mythic Structures	Propp, Morphology of the Folktale Ch. I-III & IX excerpts Gregg, Culture and Identity in Morocco Ch. 3: Mohammed
Section IV	Structuralist Theories
8 Tuesday	Discourse Analysis	Gee, “A Linguistic Approach to Narrative” McAdams & Logan, Creative Work, Love, and the Dialectic in Selected Life Stories of Academics
8 Thursday	Dialogical Self	Hermans & Kempen, "The Dialogical Self" Ragatt, "Multiplicity and Conflict in the Dialogical Self"
9 Tuesday	Structuralist Model of Self	Gregg, “The Raw and the Bland”
9 Thursday	Structuralist Model of Identity	Gregg, Self Representation   Ch. 7, "A Diamond in the Rough"
10 Tuesday	Discussion / Presentations
10 Thursday	Discussion / Presentations

Assignments

1) Focus Group Interviews: working in groups of three, conduct a focus group during Week 2 (that is, each student conducts one group, with the other two members attending as observers). Transcribe the tape of the discussion you conducted, and give copies to your two collaborators. Meet with your colleagues to analyze the three transcripts, and write an individual 6-8 page paper on the topic you’ve chosen, focusing on the “cultural models” your respondents use to describe it.

2) Individual Interviews: Conduct two or three interviews with a single respondent, totaling 3 to 5 hours. Proceed in two stages. First, conduct and transcribe your initial interview, give copies to your two collaborators, and together analyze each of your texts. Write an individual 5-8 page paper summarizing your preliminary analysis. Focus your discussion on your respondent, but use material from your two colleagues’ respondents to support your inferences and to provide comparisons and contrasts. Second, conduct and transcribe your second interview (and third, if you do three), and engage in group analysis of these texts. Write an individual 12-20 page paper on your respondent’s interviews, using both plot structure and structuralist methods.

On Collaboration: It will be absolutely essential to collaborate on analyses of your focus group and interview transcripts, for three reasons. First, your text will necessarily take on a Rorschach-like quality for you, and you will invariably “project” your emotional meanings and life-themes into ambiguous features of it. You will need other readers to help confirm those inferences which are not just projection, but also probably in the warranted by the text, and to help disconfirm inferences you reach primarily through projection. Second, your own emotional meanings and life-themes inevitably will limit what you can recognize in the text, and you will need other readers to show you relationships and help you make inferences you can’t make on your own. Third, your focus group paper must be written about an “N” of 3, and your life-narrative paper must use comparison material from your colleagues’ interviews. So you will need to make use of your colleagues’ narratives, and of their insights about their material.

The quality of your work will directly reflect the extent to which you take these two limitations of individual analysis seriously, and work collaboratively with your two colleagues on your and their narratives. It will therefore be essential to be well-prepared for your group analysis meetings: read and re-read each transcript carefully, and make detailed notes on it before you arrive. Plan for your group to spend a minimum of an hour on each transcript.

It may help to think of your work as like that of a paleontologist, locating and painstakingly extracting a Veloceraptor fossil from a cliff side. You need to pay incredible attention to minute details of the bone you’re freeing from the soil, but at the same time carefully map the larger configuration of the skeleton. Cut any corners, and it will be like bashing the fossil out with a pick-ax, leaving crucial pieces behind and so damaging the chunks as to guarantee that you’ll mis-identify what you’ve found. Do good science!