Whats and Hows? The Practice-Based Typology of Narrative Analyses

Abstract

The nature of qualitative research practices is multiparadigmaticity which creates coexistence of different research and analytical approaches to the study of human experience in the living world. This diversity is particularly observed in the contemporary field of narrative research and data analysis. The purpose of this article is a methodological reflection on the process of developing typology and a proposition of new data-driven and practice-based typology of narrative analyses used by qualitative researchers in the lived experience research. I merge the CAQDAS, Corpus Linguistics, and Text Mining procedures to examine the analytical strategies inherited in a vivid language of English-language research articles, published in five influential qualitative methodological journals between 2002-2016. Using the dictionary-based content analysis in the coding process, hierarchical clustering, and topic modeling – a text-mining tool for discovering hidden semantic structures in a textual body – I confront Catherine Kohler Riessman’s heuristic typology with the data-driven approach in order to contribute the more coherent image of narrative analysis in the contemporary field of qualitative research. Finally, I propose a new model of thinking about the typology of narrative analyses based upon research practices.