Building the data gathering and data analysis process.

The narrative and life history research is in fact a large and inter-disciplinary set of methodologies or ‘genres’ of research (Portelli, 1997: 4-5). The difference between ‘genres’ is often not so much at the stage of finding and recording narratives or life histories but at the stage of analysis of the findings. The main difference here is that in some types of research the biographical narratives are often treated as sources of data to be taken more or less at face value, whereas many narrative researchers are predominantly interested in how the stories are made, their structure and the way of knowing this produces. Polkinghorne (1995) distinguishes between the ‘analysis of narratives’ that focuses on paradigmatic inquiry similar to qualitative interview analysis, relying on coding transcribed material and resulting in typologies, categories and taxonomies (that is analytical categories and results) that hold across the stories, and ‘narrative analysis’, which relies on synthesis of data more than its analysis; and results in stories, case studies, histories or episodes (that is, also narratives of some kind). In the case of ‘narrative analysis’, many researchers in social science have taken life narrative research closer to literary analysis by employing literary dimensions and categories of analysis or arguing for their usefulness (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995: 28-31).

Others distinguish between the use of ‘narratives for other research purposes’ (that is for qualitative research of various kinds) and the ‘narrative analysis proper’ where the narrative itself is the focus of research (Lieblich et al., 1998: 3-6). From the point of view of narrative methods used ‘for other research purposes’, the narrative is treated similarly to interview data and the researcher either deducts some categories of analysis from theories or inducts them from the empirical material of the narrative itself. In the case of ‘narrative analysis proper’, Lieblich (et al.) propose two dimensions of analysis: the preoccupation with the whole story (holistic) or its parts (categorical), as one dimension of analysis, and preoccupation with content aspects of the story versus aspects of its form as the second dimension. This may be understood as producing four analytical orientations: holistic-content, holistic-form, categorical-content, categorical-form options of analysis.

My own research interest lies on the side of ‘analysis of narratives’ more than ‘narrative analysis’ in the sense of a preoccupation with narrative form in itself. The focus on the whole story seen through the lens of literary forms (‘holistic-form’ analysis) does not seem the most appropriate because there a clear focus in this research on identity and practice derived from experiences of internationalisation. In the case of my research project both the ‘holistic- content’ and ‘categorical-content’ approaches to the narrative data are useful, as they allow me to focus on both the explicit and the implicit meanings produced within the narrative, and on the overall stories as exemplars of a certain type of identity formation for which the entire life construction has to be considered.

In fact, narrative analysis can be usefully combined with some additional qualitative interviewing techniques, if the narrative itself has not addressed specific related topics of interest, such as current professional practice, evaluations of concrete processes going on in the environment, specific dimensions of past experiences or thoughts for the future. In this sense, the narrative can be built up with the help of the interviewer. This of course may no longer be narrative research in the strict sense of analysing the totality of a particular narrative in whatever format this narrative is generated; it becomes instead a methodology of qualitative research focused on specific experiences that can be accessed as stories or narratives. In many oral history researchers however, this is not unusual: the interviewer is responsible for asking relevant questions about the historical moment or the life that is being investigated, often over and above the conversational support or clarification questions. Therefore, in the interview, the generation of a coherent narrative can lead to a situation where additional questions are asked and the material generated thus is used to build a case study of individual professional progression.

In my own interview construction I decided to focus on the following interviewing stages: 1) warm up and introductory questions focusing on gaining basic information about

current work position, main projects or preoccupations, main activities of the past academic year, etc.

2) Narrative-eliciting questions, asking for the interviewee to recount in as much detail as possible, as a story, the process of academic professional formation. This was to be elicited by asking about the most important or defining stages of educational and professional development, or by asking the interviewee to think of main events or

turning points in their professional autobiography. Sometimes an explicit story- making prompt was used.

3) Additional qualitative questions- these questions were used to elicit more reflection regarding key thematic interests of the research questions, such as the person’s concrete research and teaching practices, relationship with colleagues in the department, evaluations of national and institutional reform process.

These interviewing approaches resulted in life narratives of varied lengths, which were not usually interrupted by specific questions, other than by basic clarification questions and general supporting statements.

In my own research approach, after the interview generation, came the stage of initial data analysis based on work done on the complete interview transcript. Firstly, this means that I took the data of a biographical narrative and turned them into a ‘narrative case reconstruction’ or simply a complete narrative whose purpose was to capture some of the most significant identity work (Bornat, 2003: 42- 43). I have called this first stage ‘holistic synthesis’ stage in which I tried to reconstruct the overall progression of each narrative, linking as much as possible of the transcribed text to the emerging story. This meant that issues recalled later on in the interview, related to earlier events, were put in more or less chronological or thematic order thus extending the story as a life narrative with me as the researcher already making analytical choices of what material from the transcript was to constitute the whole case. The intention here was to make initial sense of the case and make it as extensive and coherent as possible in terms of using the available transcript.

Following this early data reconstruction, two strategies of data analysis were used:

1) holistic analysis where I tried to make sense of the whole story in relation to other stories,