Pictorial Narrative Mapping as a Qualitative Analytic Technique

Abstract

Qualitative analysis is often a textual undertaking. However, it can be helpful to think about and represent study phenomena or narrative accounts in nontextual ways. In this article, we share our unique and artistic process in developing and employing pictorial narrative mapping as a qualitative analytic technique. We recast a nontextual, artistic–analytic technique by combining elements related to narrative mapping and narrative art. This technique involves aesthetic attunement to data and visual representation through pictorial design. We advanced this technique in the context of a narrative study about how arts-informed dissemination methods influence health-care practitioners’ delivery of care. We found that the Pictorial Narrative Mapping process prompted an aesthetic and imaginative experience in the analytic process of qualitative inquiry. As an analytic technique, Pictorial Narrative Mapping extends the inquiry process and enhances rigor through artistic means as well as iterative and critical dialogue. Additionally, pictorial narrative maps can provide a holistic account of the phenomenon under study and assist researchers to make meaning of nuances within complex narratives. As researchers consider employing Pictorial Narrative Mapping, we recommend that they draw upon this technique as a malleable script yielding to an organic process that emerges from both their own data and analytic discussions. We are further curious about its imaginative capacities in social and health science literature, its possibilities in other disciplinary contexts, and the prospects of what Maxine Greene refers to as becoming more wide awake—in our case, in future research analytic endeavors.