Small Stories Approach Research Articles

Narrative Care and Engagement in Social and Health Care: Enhancing Identity with a Small Story Approach

<p>Narrative care, an approach developed from the larger concept of narrative gerontology, considers the importance of stories as a source of identity. A type of person-centered care, narrative care in care settings encourages care workers to elicit stories to gain a more wholistic understanding of the person. Drawing on personal experience in the field, I argue that although “big” story approaches (e.g., grand life narratives) have typically been used in social and healthcare settings, “small” story approaches (e.g., snippets or moments) are more practical for care workers. The expansion of the concept of narrative care to include “narrative engagement” will be explored, which if applied in meaningful ways can promote citizenship, shift power dynamics, generate empowerment, and create systemic change in social and health care settings. Finally, newly developed train-the-trainer narrative care training will be discussed, which is designed to meet the needs of diverse social/health care workers, with a focus on meaningful methods of adopting narrative care and engagement in practice.</p>

Narrative Analysis in English Language Teachers’ Professional Identity Research: A Review

Amidst the escalating emergence of generic methodological articles on narrative inquiry, this article critically reviews diff erent narrative analysis approaches and their application in English language teachers’ professional identity research. For this purpose, we reviewed currently available methodological books and articles on narrative inquiry in general and narrative analysis in particular. Additionally, we reviewed twenty purposively selected empirical articles published since 2015 thatemployed narrative inquiry to explore English teachers’ professional identities. A review of methodological articles revealed that the narrative analysis and analysis of narrative dichotomy are blurred as a certain level of interpretation occurs during the co-construction of stories, transcribing, translating, restorying, and fi nally, the consumption of the reports by the readers. Consequently, many researchers have considered paradigmatic analysis as the first step of narrative analysis. In contrast, research practices showed that the interpretation of stories begins only after story generation. Besides, amongst diff erent narrative analysis approaches, positioning analysis underscores how tellers represent themselves through narratives, whereas the small story approach of Barkhuizen accentuates analyzing content and context; however, narrative forms and linguistic features and their motives are rarely investigated. Though the small stories approach of Georgakopoulou (2007) advocates explicitly for considering ways of telling (linguistic features and communicative how), it is rarely evident in practice. This article, therefore, identifies a need for a comprehensive narrative analysis approach that considers what (content), where and when (context), how (form), and who and why (agency and discourse) of the story.

Clients’ and social workers’ stories about discretion in social work with persons with disabilities

This study explores discretion in social work with persons with disabilities. By drawing on a narrative social work approach, the study acknowledges narratives crucial for conducting social work. The research question was as follows: How do persons with disabilities as clients and social workers as professionals consider discretion and its consequences? The data consisted of clients’ and social workers’ written accounts about discretion and were analysed by deploying narrative inquiry with small stories approach. The grand narrative was about getting adequate services through appropriate discretion. Three small stories about everyday life, in/equality and the economy were told against the grand narrative. The study argues that discretion in social work with persons with disabilities is constructed through the available narrative resources.

Ufrivilligt barnløs i et samfund, der fokuserer på børnefamilien

This study explores how fertility treatment without children influences a woman's identity construction. This study draws on a social constructionist perspective, where a narrative approach creates the framework for exploring identity construction. The study design is qualitative. Six Danish women were interviewed. The empirical data is analyzed through Michael Bamberg’s narrative small story approach to identity. The findings reveal that there are very few alternative identities to the mother identity in Danish society. Thus, loss of the possibility to be included in the biological mother identity has emotional consequences such as grief, exclusion, anxiety, anger, frustration, envy, shame, fear, etc. The findings are discussed in light of current master narratives in society and may contribute to an enhanced understanding of identity construction in women who cannot have biological children.

‘No more secrets, it’s over!’: small stories about late adoption disclosure of Chilean adults

ABSTRACT Today there is broad consensus that adoptive parents should initiate open communication early and continue talking about adoption throughout their children’s lives. However, a significant group of adopted adults do not know their adoptive origin and learn about it late in their lives, especially in Latin American countries where closed adoption systems dominate. Within a broader narrative study carried out in Chile, in this article we analyse a subset of 14 narrative interviews of people adopted domestically who underwent processes of late adoption disclosure. We draw from a small stories approach (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and identify a narrative structure for accidental and late disclosure experiences. We focus on three dimensions of the communicative experience narrated by participants: (1) the spatio-temporal situatedness of disclosure, (2) the construction of family emotions, and (3) the issue of the ‘right age for disclosure’. Focusing on these dimensions is particularly relevant because the narratives of adult Chilean adoptees seem to depart significantly from current master narratives on how families should talk about adoption. Finally, we discuss our findings in relation to adoptive identity construction processes, current debates regarding communication in adoptive families and origin search processes, and the implications for specialized professional interventions in this area.

A conversational, small-story approach to narrative care for people with dementia living in care institutions: Strategies and challenges

The aim of the paper was to define what narrative care is and identify and discuss everyday conversational narrative care strategies regarding people living with dementia in long-term care institutional settings. To do so, we differentiate between two approaches to narrative care: a big-story approach (reflecting on life stories) and a small-story approach (enacting stories in everyday conservations). The paper is focused on the second approach, which appears to be particularly fit to be used with people living with dementia. We identify three main strategies to implement this approach in everyday care: (1) prompting and sustaining narratives; (2) valuing non-verbal and embodied cues; and (3) constructing narrative environments. Finally, we discuss some training, institutional and cultural barriers and challenges for providing conversational, small story-based narrative care for people living with dementia in long-term care institutions.

The stories that tell us: smartphones and discursive reconstitution of transnational intimacy among migrant mothers

The growing phenomenon of transnational families where the mothers work abroad has reinvigorated the debate on the fluidity of contemporary families. Family is no longer defined as household-bound, and family obligations are constantly negotiated. Research shows migrant mothers utilize communication technologies, most recently smartphones, to (re)constitute family intimacy and maternal identity from afar through everyday family practices. However, most research has focused on the material reconfiguration of family practices, essentially sidelining the discursive workings of intimacy and identity via mobile media. To address this gap, this ethnographic study draws on the narrative theories, particularly the small stories approach, to examine the narratives of Indonesian mothers in Hong Kong as embedded in their smartphone communication. The participant observation and narrative interviews with 25 migrant mothers revealed that maternal storytelling on smartphones is routine, eclectic, and personalized. These enable migrant mothers to craft and tell family stories to (1) rationalize distance and (2) bolster family resilience. This article concludes by reflecting upon the authorial privilege in constructing family narratives on mobile media. The implications on our understanding of the contextualizing power of narrative and power dynamics underlying mediated family communication are discussed.

Omaa paikkaa etsimässä: edistyneisyys suomea toisena kielenään puhuvien kokemana

This article takes up a central question of Kirsti Siitonen’s dissertation – how advancedness in Finnish as a second language can be characterized – and investigates it from the perspective of research terminology as well as the lived experience of language users. We first discuss how and with what implications advanced learners of Finnish have been referred to in the research literature, i.e. whether they have been regarded as learners, speakers or other kinds of language users. Applying a small stories approach to interview data from different research projects, we then explore what advancedness means to such language users themselves. We conclude that advanced learners navigate a complex sociolinguistic context in which their place is not self-evident. Insights into their experiences contribute to debates about the migration – or recruitment – of highly educated professionals who need very advanced Finnish skills in order to work in their field in Finland.

Skating through pregnancy and motherhood: A narrative analysis of digital stories of elite figure skating expectant mothers

ObjectivesAlthough research on elite sport and motherhood is growing, more research is needed to understand the narratives that shape their identities and lives. We sought to build on sport psychology research centralizing the media as naturalistic data resources to explore elite athlete mother identity in cultural context. The specific aim was to explore how elite athlete identities are portrayed during pregnancy on Instagram. DesignTwo high profile elite figure skating expectant mothers’ (i.e., Meagan Duhamel and Aljona Savchenko) Instagram posts were the focus of a dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) grounded in relativist narrative inquiry. Two research questions were explored: 1. how do expectant athlete mothers portray themselves in big and small stories, and 2. what are the implications (e.g., psychosocial, behavioural) of identity meanings portrayed in digital stories? ResultsDNA of 122 posts (n = 82 for Duhamel, n = 40 for Savchenko) identified a key big story: (re)configuring ideal pregnancy. Four small stories fed into fluid meanings of ‘ideal pregnancy’ and ways of ‘doing pregnancy’ linked to self-identity portrayals: documenting the growing life, baby bumps on display, Olympic dreams/journeys and living the good life through leisure. Consumerism was shown to thread small stories. These findings show contradictions of motherhood meanings and body ideals (e.g., feminine, athletic) vs realities (e.g., tired, sore), linked to actions (e.g., skating during pregnancy, promoting products or athlete brand), in good mother and biomedical narratives. ConclusionsA big and small story approach grounded in narrative inquiry holds value to learn more about the digital landscape’s role in shaping athlete expectant mother self-identities. Future research exploring social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) may expand intertextual understanding of athlete mothers' identities and lives.

‘I’ll always have black hair’ – challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in Finnish schools

ABSTRACT This article discusses raciolinguistic ideologies in the Finnish educational context. Ethnographic interviews and observational data gathered during 2015–2020 from two young males who came to Finland from the Middle-East in autumn 2015 as unaccompanied minors were analysed applying the small stories approach. The research questions were: 1) What kinds of racializing discourses are circulated, negotiated, and resisted in the participants’ self- and other positionings? 2) How is valuation of their language and literacy skills and participation in education reflected in these positionings? Critical linguistic ethnography was used to identify the racializing discourses. The results indicate that structural raciolinguistic ideologies repeatedly impacted the participants’ educational paths: notwithstanding their good command of Finnish they may have been judged as deficient language users, weakening their chances of equal participation in classroom interaction and access to further studies or practical training. However, outside the educational context, they may successfully deploy their multilingual repertoires for networking and entrepreneurship. While intersecting factors such as race, gender, or religion influence participation, they are treated as language issues in a politically correct but vague way. This calls for a critical discussion of how students’ struggles with participation should be situated within broader structural biases.

Positioning with master and counter-narratives

AbstractNarrative studies have witnessed a growing interest towards positioning analyses and the analysis of master and counter-narratives. While the former tends to prefer a small story approach and to draw on Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, the latter engages in a variety of methodological approaches and works with narratives of several sizes, often within institutional and political contexts. Counter-narrative is a positional category by name, and it has recently been brought together with positioning analysis in the study of oral narratives. However, the narrative nature of master narratives, as well as their conceptual distinction from dominant discourses, remains largely unaddressed. This article aims at placing master narratives within narrative theory. To that end, we consider the three analytical levels of narrative positioning in terms of master and counter-narratives. By analysing an interview with a 92-year-old Finnish woman, we argue for the empirical relevance of master and counter-narratives within positioning analysis.

Gestures of closure: A small stories approach to museumgoers' texts

AbstractMuseums are familiar public institutions whose primary mode of mediation is narration. They are geared toward narrating collective stories that are authoritative, linear, and grand in scope. Yet with the historical turn museums have recently taken from collection-centered to audience-centered institutions – coupled with a participatory mode of mediation – more than ever museumgoers are now invited to participate in these grand narrations. This article examines the institutional interaction between museums and museumgoers, and the texts that the latter produce in situ. It analyzes over 3000 texts that visitors wrote at the Florida Holocaust Museum, between 2012 and 2015. It employs the “small stories” framework to explore the interactional narrative structure and features within which museumgoers' written comments are elicited and displayed in museums. The analysis highlights the narrative functions and authorial roles that museumgoers are ascribed institutionally, and whether and how they discursively occupy them. Three main narrative strategies of/for participation are discerned, through which museumgoers variously perform gestures of closure of their visit. These narrative gestures index ways, in which visitors signal the approaching end of the museum's narration, employing diverse discursive resources, while adding a coda or a resolution to the institutional narrative.

Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

AbstractDrawing on a corpus of 100 authentic telephone-mediated interactions from a British credit union, this paper is the first to examine narrative practices in debt collection encounters. It demonstrates that the credit union’s debt collector routinely invites and supports indebted individuals’ narratives using alignment and affiliation. Through a small stories approach, the paper therefore highlights that an organisation’s core values and principles can be seen “in action” in the ways that a professional orients to lay-people’s stories in professional-lay discourse. In this case, the collector’s narrative practices are emblematic of the credit union’s consciously ethical, responsible, and debtor-centric approach to collecting debt. The analysis also shows that indebted individuals perform important interactive work through their narrative accounts in terms of mitigating responsibility for their debt, constructing blameless and acceptable identities, and implicitly encouraging (or explicitly instructing) the collector to affiliate with their stance.

Mixed methods on Instagram research: Methodological challenges in data analysis and visualization

In this article, we will present our insights on key methodological challenges emerged from the Selfiestories project, focused on selfies as personal narratives on Instagram. In this research, we approached the selfie practice in the context of user’s personal narratives (Georgakopoulou, 2016, From narrating the self to posting self(ies): A small stories approach to selfies. Open Linguistics 2(1): 300–317.) embedded in the everyday. We opted for a mixed methodology (Creswell and Creswell, 2017) resonating on the notion of remix (Markham, 2013, Remix cultures, remix methods: Reframing qualitative inquiry for social media contexts. In: Denzin N and Giardina M (eds) Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry. pp. 63–81.), thus combining fieldwork and ethnographic techniques with quantitative data obtained through an Instagram data extractor. This approach proved to be challenging in the process of establishing a dialogue between data sets of different nature. At this stage, we considered visualization as a valuable technique for analysis and communication, particularly in those case studies where fieldwork and data extraction from Instagram were conducted simultaneously. Decisions made regarding visualization processes posed different challenges regarding the intermingling of qualitative and quantitative data and the layout of our results. After a contextualization of our research and methodology, we will analyze the challenges and limitations of visualizations in our research. Taking into account the time-based dimension of personal narratives in Instagram, emphasized in some of our case studies, such as events, we will document our own process in looking for the best possible ways to present a more balanced account of our synchronous qualitative and quantitative data. We will do so against the temporal background of the experience of the first day of the Primavera Sound 2016, where we conducted fieldwork while extracting data from Instagram. After carrying out different tests with alternative visualization tools and formats, we chose to work with timeline tools, particularly those who offered a narrative layout against the backdrop of experience time. In a research where time and synchrony play a pivotal role, we suggest that adding a temporal dimension in visualization could be a way of connecting both perspectives, thus allowing to present different sources and types of data together, while also expanding the role that storytelling can play in visualizing data.

Mobilizing Grief and Remembrance with and for Networked Publics: towards a Typology of Hyper-Mourning

The past decade has seen an intense mobilization of grief and remembrance on social media linked to the injunction to inscribe, share, and curate life and death in the here-and-now. This article navigates the heterogeneity of these practices, using the term hyper-mourning to point both to the conditioning of mourning by the affordances of hyper-connectivity and to debates around these emerging forms of mourning as being emotionally hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ reactions to death events. Based on the discussion of select examples, I sketch out a typology of hyper-mourning, depending on the different story positions of teller, co-teller, or witness from which such performances are produced. As I argue, these different performances become typically associated with particular modes of affective positioning made available to the recipients of these shared stories—namely positions of proximity or distance to the death event and the dead, the networked recipient(s), and the emotional self. This typology proposes a small stories approach to hyper-mourning practices, which are organized around the mobilization of grief and remembrance for connecting networked audiences around identities, affect, and moral values dis/alignments. The article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of digital cultures of memory, affect, and identities.

Performing curriculum and constructing identity: small stories as a framework for studying identity and learning in classroom discourse

ABSTRACTThis classroom discourse study examines how curriculum becomes a resource for identity performance in one ESL classroom. Conceptualizing identity as performance, I adopt a small stories approach to analyze how one routinized vocabulary instructional activity was appropriated by classroom participants to perform identities and construct the classroom moral order. Through analyses of two excerpts of classroom talk, I show that the ESL teacher narrated her story into teaching as an instructional example and performed a dominating teacher identity rhetorically portrayed in a morally positive light. A Taiwanese immigrant boy appropriated the language practice for displaying a funny, nonlearner masculinity. His identity-displaying narrative, however, ran counter to the moral expectation of being a “good learner” embedded in this language activity, leading to his social identification as a problem student. This analysis illustrates that the identity categories in the language curriculum provided linguistic resources for the classroom participants to perform identities that worked to perpetuate or challenge dominant discourses of being. The process of teaching and learning is deeply intertwined with identity negotiation and moral positioning. This analysis also illuminates the theoretical and methodological affordances of a small stories approach to examine the emergence of identities in language classroom discourse.

Young Children’s Narrations of Relational Recovery: a School-Based Group for Children Who Have Experienced Domestic Violence

In the UK, domestic violence (DV) is one of the most common safeguarding concerns children and young people report (CAADA, 2014). However, little is known about how children experience participation in interventions that aim to support their recovery if they have been affected by DV. This study aims to understand children’s experiences of participating in a group programme facilitated by a DV organisation in the UK. Interviews were conducted with four children (aged 7–10) using a flexible, creative and child-led approach. A thematic narrative analysis was used, using a small story approach to narrative data. Results indicate that issues of children’s agency, choice and intersecting identities are central to not only how children experience DV but also how they experience recovery. Findings highlight the experiential and relational aspect of therapeutic spaces that can enable children to form relationships and construct meaningful identities. Conclusions suggest that children need to be consulted in inclusive ways in order to contribute to the development and accessibility of services designed to support them when they have been affected by DV.

Browne, T.K.Depression and the Self: Meaning, Control and Authenticity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018.

Browne, T.K.Depression and the Self: Meaning, Control and Authenticity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018.

Work-related language learning trajectories of migrant cleaners in Finland

Cleaning is often the survival employment that migrants can get in their new home country. Ideally, the workplace can be a site for integration and language learning. This article explores how two migrants working as cleaners in Finland narrate their work-related Finnish language learning trajectories. The research is designed by applying nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), which focuses on social action in the intersection of interaction order, participants’ life experiences, and discourses in place. The social action in focus here is investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015), which means a commitment to developing language skills to achieve one’s aspirations. The article also analyses how language learners position themselves and are positioned by others, because positioning affects access to meaningful learning opportunities. Positioning analysis by Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) in a small stories approach is applied to analyse the key participants’ oral narratives told in the context of ethnographic research interviews. Follow-up interviews conducted a year later are analysed to show how positioning changes over time. The study illustrates that investment in work-related language learning is meaningful when occupational development and language learning can be purposefully combined. However, migrants are positioned as a potential workforce in low-level jobs and their expertise is often ignored, which means that investments in language learning might not pay off in career development. Supporting educated migrants in finding appropriate employment would facilitate goal-oriented language learning.

Story sequencing and stereotyping

Abstract Over the last decade, sometimes violent conflicts have erupted between generations in China over who should have a seat on a crowded bus. Through a small story approach to an extended sequence of Chinese bus stories, this study examines how elder-blaming comes to be instantiated in talk-in-interaction. The analysis elaborates Deppermann's finding that cooperative in-group bonding is not the sole reason that out-group stereotypes are instantiated: competition among interactants as they “top” one another’s stories also plays an important part. We nuance this, first, by pointing to actions that are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. Second, we foreground how the interactional troubles of our storytellers fundamentally revolve around issues of epistemic accountability and, in turn, are assuaged by cooperative epistemic acts, in which stereotyping and story "topping" entwine.