Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences. Katherine Bischoping
and a supportive basketball program, as well as by experiences prior to becoming paralyzed that he was able to transpose onto his new reality (see 2008: 327).
Finally, following from another of the central theoretical principles of the life course perspective, we can probe how individual experiences are linked with what transpires in the lives of others (McDaniel and Bernard, 2011). For example, Amber uses a life course perspective in research on how ‘families by choice’ manage their low income through the instrumental and expressive supports that they give and receive from one another. In this research, participants did not define ‘family’ in strictly kin terms. Rather, their perception of others as family, especially others who were not kin, was informed by having shared specific kinds of life experiences (Gazso and McDaniel, 2015). In families by choice comprised of groups of lone mothers who were not blood relations, the mothers’ senses of one another as ‘family’ stemmed from how their life courses had followed similar and interconnected paths, including disruptions such as divorce and alcoholism in their childhood homes, and experiences of teen homelessness and poverty as lone parents. Says one such mother: ‘because we all are the strays, so we are just kind of family to each other. So that’s basically where my family that I have created kind of comes around, we’ve all been the black sheep of our family [of origin].’
Textbox 2.3: A Summary of Strategies for Analyzing Life Course Processes
Establish whether a group of respondents experiencing the same transition are following one/a few conventional plots.
See whether your data support or dispute a plotline that another researcher has already found.
Examine how research participants speak of the events they regard as epiphanies/fateful moments.
Probe how individual experiences are linked with what transpires in the lives of others.
Studying the Self as Essence or as Narrative Process
In addition to illuminating the courses of lives and their interconnection, stories about experiences can shed light on a longstanding philosophical puzzle about the self. How can the self be thought of as responding to change in ‘a perpetual state of becoming’ (Chandler, 2000: 211), and, yet, as continuous over time, as somehow identical from one day to the next? A light-hearted example is that of Helen, a Brisbane, Australian interior designer who is positive that she is changing, in that she expects her tastes to become ‘less cottagey,’ at the same time as she’s confident that she’ll always love the cream-colored cottagey chair in her bedroom, meaning that it will always reflect her sense of self (Woodward, 2001: 126). The question is also a serious one. It’s only because your self is understood to have continuity that people can lay plans with you and hold you accountable for your deeds. Otherwise, as Craig (1997) points out, a war criminal could give a ‘That wasn’t really me’ defense. What, then, is the basis of this continuity?
As Chandler (2000) discusses, one tradition of Western thought would reply that the self is an essence. That is, we each possess some inner core, whether it be a soul, a destiny, a Cartesian ego who declares ‘I think therefore I am,’ or a bundle of persisting personality traits. Such a reply does not explain how Helen can foresee herself becoming ‘less cottagey.’ It fails to capture the sense that time or change matter. A contrasting reply posits that the self is not so much a noun as a verb, a process of narration. This reply builds on the thought of sociologist and symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead (1934) and philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1984). Mead says that the self has two components, a me comprised of the attitudes and meanings we perceive others to hold of us, and an impulsive I that makes sense of the me. Meanwhile, Ricoeur says that the past is always understood from the perspective of the present and with an eye to the future. Douglas Ezzy (1998) fused these two theories to propose that a present-day narrative self continually updates its own unfinished story. The I strives to interpret the meanings of the me’s history and to project that me into a future. It is through this process that Helen can both affirm her past acquisition of the cream-colored chair and coherently project a future in which her tastes will change.
An initial analytic strategy arising from all this is to ask whether research participants think of their selves as essences or as processes of narration? ‘I made one of my participants cry,’ Jodi Kaufmann (2010: 104) writes at the outset of her article about how Jessie, a male-to-female transsexual, had responded to a draft analysis depicting her gender as fluid, as a narrative-in-progress that disrupted binaries of sex and gender. Jessie responded, ‘You have taken away the identity I have worked all my life to build … Who am I if you take this away?’ (p. 104). Although Jessie had spent nearly 80 percent of her life history interview speaking of how she had been mistakenly born in a male body – i.e., of her self as having a female essence – Kaufmann had initially considered these passages less relevant because they seemed to her to reproduce heteronormative expectations and the criteria by which psychiatric gatekeepers decide who is eligible for sex-reassignment surgery. Jessie’s desire to live her female essence would repudiate any outsider’s notion of her gender as fluid.
Note that, with the above question and example, we have shifted into research with a fully constructionist orientation. Even though Jessie, war criminals, and other individual selves may be understood to be anchored in continuity in a realist sense, we have let that anchoring slip, and are engaging more fully with our narrators’ self-constructions. We now mark a second shift, into strategies concerned with the connection of narratives to wellbeing or psychological adjustment.
A first such strategy asks how respondents are affected by the view of self as a narrative or by particular narratives about their selves. Can thinking of the self in narrative terms offer them resilience in the face of an uncertain or foreshortened future? Chandler et al. (2003) observed that among adolescents in a Canadian psychiatric unit, those who spoke of the self as a narrative process were at lower risk of committing suicide than those who spoke of the self in essentialist terms. Studies of people diagnosed with life-threatening or chronic conditions have similarly explored which kinds of narratives about the future give them the most hope. Ezzy’s (2000) landmark study of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Australia found that they narrated their experiences in three ways. In what Ezzy called ‘linear chaos narratives’, PLWHA expressed the belief that ‘there is no future’ (p. 612). In ‘linear restitution narratives’, they denied the inevitability of death and expressed hope by attempting to ‘colonize the future’ (p. 615) by making long-term plans such as home-buying. Finally, in ‘polyphonic narratives’ that were full of contradictions, PLWHA embraced uncertainty and expressed a hope that it could enrich the present, as in this interview excerpt:
It’s a bit cliche maybe that it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Something like a sentence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. … Previously I was wasting a lot of time in that you can, you can always find heaps and heaps of things to do in your life to avoid the, the larger issues. (p. 614)
What happens when the process of narration is disrupted by a past trauma that has breached the self? Here, the psychotherapeutic model for addressing trauma through narrative holds tremendous sway. In it, trauma is understood to disrupt comprehension, remembrance, and the ordinary forgetting required for narration to occur. In the flashbacks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), memories too painful to be accessed verbally thrust themselves cruelly, vividly, and uncontrollably to the fore, transforming what had been ‘there and then’ into the ‘here and now’ (see BenEzer, 1999; Kraft, 2004). If a person with PTSD can externalize a traumatic experience by expressing it verbally to a trustworthy listener, the argument goes, then a narrative can be formed that permits the past and present meaning of the experience to be considered, and that will reduce its intrusions into the future.
Exciting work is being done that inquires into the generalizability of the psychotherapeutic model. Such work assesses whether healing need always be language-based (Gheith, 2007; Kidron, 2012), questions whether the communal and enduring injuries of mass political violence are best remedied by treating trauma as an individual pathology (Kagee,