Anna Maria Sools

Narrative health research: Exploring big and small stories as analytical tools

In qualitative health research many researchers use a narrative approach to study lay health concepts and experiences. In this article, I explore the theoretical linkages between the concepts narrative and health, which are used in a variety of ways. The article builds on previous work that conceptualizes health as a multidimensional, positive, dynamic and morally dilemmatic yet meaningful practice. I compare big and small stories as analytical tools to explore what narrative has to offer to address, nuance and complicate five challenges in narrative health research: (1) the interplay between health and other life issues; (2) the taken-for-granted yet rare character of the experience of good health; (3) coherence or incoherence as norms for good health; (4) temporal issues; (5) health as moral practice. In this article, I do not present research findings per se; rather, I use two interview excerpts for methodological and theoretical reflections. These interview excerpts are derived from a health promotion study in the Netherlands, which was partly based on peer-to-peer interviews. I conclude with a proposal to advance narrative health research by sensitizing researchers to different usages of both narrative and health, and the interrelationship(s) between the two.

Narrative Research in Clinical and Health Psychology

1. Introduction: Qualitative Research in Clinical and Health Psychology Poul Rohleder and Antonia C. Lyons PART I: ISSUES IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH 2. Epistemology and Qualitative Research Kerry Chamberlain 3. Ethical Issues in Qualitative Research Poul Rohleder and Charlotte Smith 4. Thinking about Culture and Language in Psychological Research and Practice Leslie Swartz 5. Ensuring Quality in Qualitative Research Gareth Treharne and Damien Riggs 6. Approaches to Collecting Data Antonia C. Lyons PART II: QUALITATIVE METHODS: EXPLORING INDIVIDUAL WORLDS 7. Thematic Analysis Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke and Gareth Terry 8. Grounded Theory Alison Tweed and Helena Priest 9. Narrative Research Michael Murray and Anneke Sools 10. Phenomenological Psychology Michael Larkin 11. Psychoanalytically Informed Research Kerry Gibson PART III: QUALITATIVE METHODS: EXPLORING SOCIAL WORLDS 12. Conversation Analysis Chris Walton and Mick Finlay 13. Discourse Analysis Jane Ussher and Janette Perz 14. Ethnography Juliet Foster 15. Participatory Research Cathy Vaughan PART IV: COMBINING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE DATA 16. Q Methodological Research Wendy Stainton-Rogers 17. Mixed Methods Research and Personal Projects Analysis Kerryellen Vroman

Mapping letters from the future: Exploring narrative processes of imagining the future

This article uses Letters from the Future (a health promotion instrument) to explore the human capacity of imagining the future. From a narrative perspective, letters from the future are considered to be indicative of a variety of forms through which human beings construct and understand their future selves and worlds. This is consistent with an interpretive approach to understanding the human mind, which offers an alternative for the current dominant causal-explanatory approach in psychology. On the basis of qualitative analysis of 480 letters from the future, collected online from a diverse group of Dutch and German persons, we first identified five narrative processes operating in the letters: imagining, evaluating, orienting, expressing emotions and engaging in dialogue. Second, using comparative analysis, we identified six types of how these processes are organized in the letters as a whole. These types differ regarding functionality (which of the five processes was dominant); temporality (prospective, retrospective and present-oriented); the extent to which a path between present and future was described; and the vividness of the imagination. We suggest that these types can be used in narrative health practice as ‘pathways’ to locate where letter writers are on their path to imagine the future, rather than as a normative taxonomy. Future research should focus on how these pathways can be used to navigate to health and well-being.

Theorizing the Narrative Dimension of Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Big and Small Story Approach

In this article, we develop a theoretically substantiated narrative framework for assessing psychotherapy practices, based on a big and small story approach. This approach stretches the narrative scope of these practices by making explicit and advancing small story counseling. We demonstrate how this framework can be a reflection tool by systematically applying six story dimensions to an example from army counseling. Small story dimensions one (multiple storytellers) and three (ways of ordering experience) draw attention to which persons and stories we do not engage with in counseling practices. Small story dimension two (future and on-going temporal orientation) marks a shift towards language of (future) potential, rather than a language of deficit. Small story dimensions four (low tellability) and five (fluent moral stance), reinstate the art of listening to client words, and remind us to resist the inclination to interpret these too easily in terms of a specific counseling theory or moral framework. Finally, small story dimension six (embeddedness) encourages counseling-on-the-move. Finally, we discuss the implications of widening the narrative scope of psychotherapy and counseling, such as the need to develop small story competence and to assess the therapeutic quality of everyday talk.

The role of desired future selves in the creation of new experience: The case of Greek unemployed young adults

This article uses data from a qualitative case study to help support and further develop an argument about the uses of futuristic-hypothetical narratives of self as a tool to educate desire through imagination. First, existing research about the role of the future in the creation of new experience in narrative approaches to history, psychology, and sociology will be brought into dialogue. Via such interchange, the claim will be made that: (1) the creation of new experience requires seeing a difference between past and future selves, (2) for this difference to have motivating force in the present it has to be perceived as experientially close, and (3) experiential closeness is a cultural as much as personal matter that depends on the perceived believability of desired future selves. Second, we explore how this tension between difference (distance) and closeness (proximity) is discursively and narratively constructed by young unemployed people in Greece who wrote and shared narratives of desired future selves. Finally, we propose that the intricacies of an education of desire as constructed by these young people may represent a need of the modern world.

Emotional expression in oral history narratives: Comparing results of automated verbal and nonverbal analyses

Audiovisual collections of narratives about war-traumas are rich in descriptions of personal and emotional experiences which can be expressed through verbal and nonverbal means. We complement a commonly used verbal analysis with a nonverbal one to study emotional developments in narratives. Using automatic text, vocal, and facial expression analysis we found that verbal emotional expressions do not correspond much to nonverbal ones. This observation may have important implications for the way narratives traditionally are being studied. We aim to understand how different modes of narrative expression relate to each other, and to enrich digital audiovisual interview collections with emotion-oriented tags.

Wonderful Life: Exploring Wonder in Meaningful Moments

In this article, we bring the study of meaning together with the emerging field of study focusing on the emotions of wonder: wonder, enchantment, awe, and being moved. It is in meaningful moments that these two meet, and in our empirical study, we used the emotions of wonder as a lens to investigate meaningful moments. We applied a novel intervention, the Wonderful Life question, to elicit narratives of meaningful moments from 100 participants varying in age, profession, and social status. Using characteristics of wonder retrieved from the wonder literature to qualitatively analyze these narratives, we identified five types of meaningful moments: opening up to life, facing the precarity of life, celebrations, countering the negative, and familiar routines. The study deepens insight in the way meaning is discovered in different types of meaningful moments. It supports the premise that there is potential meaning in any moment in life, and the mind-set of wonder enabling the discovery of meaning. Finally, it pleads for the use of the Wonderful Life question as a means to elicit a wide spectrum of meaningful moments.

Who Am I? A Life Story Intervention for Persons with Intellectual Disability and Psychiatric Problems.

This article describes an innovative intervention based on narrative and life review therapy that is tailored to people with intellectual disability (ID) and psychiatric problems. The current study provides a first evaluation of the intervention. A symptom checklist (SCL-90) was used in a pre- and post-follow-up design, and a qualitative evaluation of the intervention was carried out with 25 participants. Results showed large changes in psychiatric symptoms, in particular on depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and interpersonal sensitivity. Participants were mainly positive in their general explicit evaluations of the therapy as well as on personal learning points, intervention-specific, group-related, and therapist-related aspects. It is concluded that the intervention is promising for the treatment of people with ID and psychiatric complaints.

Exploring "Letters from the Future" by visualizing narrative structure

The growing supply of online mental health tools, platforms and treatments results in an enormous quantity of digital narrative data to be structured, analysed and interpreted. Natural Language Processing is very suitable to automatically extract textual and structural features from narratives. Visualizing these features can help to explore patterns and shifts in text content and structure. In this study, streamgraphs are developed for different types of Letters from the Future, an online mental health promotion instrument. The visualizations show differences between as well as within the different letter types, providing directions for future research in both the visualization of narrative structure and in the field of narrative psychology. The method presented here is not limited to Letters from the Future, the current object of study, but can in fact be used to explore any digital or digitalized textual source, like books, speech transcripts or email conversations.

Narrative health psychology: Once more unto the breach: editorial

In this editorial, we position narrative health psychology as a variety of narrative psychology, a form of qualitative research in health psychology, and a psychological perspective that falls under the interdisciplinary term narrative health research. The aim of this positioning is to explore what are the most important features of the proposed approach and how they are relevant. We illustrate each positioning with the scope and diversity of narrative health psychology brought together in this special issue. Finally, we reflect on where narrative health psychology is now and how it could develop in the future.