Analysis of Personal Narratives

Abstract

valuable input into my analysis of Gita’s narrative. It is a common experience for investigators to carefully craft interview questions, only to have participants respond with lengthy accounts—long stories that appear, on the surface, to have little to do with the question. I became aware of the issue in the early 1980s while researching the topic of divorce. After completing a household interview with a divorcing spouse, I would note that a respondent had gone “on and on. ” Asking a seemingly straightforward question (e.g. “what were the main causes of your separation”), I expected a list but, instead, got a “long story. ” Those of us on the research team interpreted the stories as digressions. Subsequently, I realized that participants were resisting our efforts to fragment their lived experience into thematic (code-able) categories—our attempts to control meaning. There was a typical sequence to the moments of resistance: the “long story” began with the decision to marry, moved through the years of the marriage, paused to reenact particularly troubling incidents, and ended often with the moment of separation (Riessman 1990b). Although participants resisted our efforts to contain their lengthy