Critical Narrative Analysis in Psychology

In psychology and other social sciences, narrative analysis has become a widely used technique for understanding people's accounts of their lives. Yet, the difference between narrative analysis and other forms of qualitative psychology is not always clear, and the way in which narrative analysis can throw light on the relationship between personal and social concerns is often only partially recognised. This book presents an approach to narrative analysis from a critical social perspective. It describes the background to discursive and narrative approaches and then takes the reader through a variety of analyses at different 'levels'. These focus on narrative texts from a boy labelled as 'sexually abusive', analysed sequentially from micro- to more global levels. Through this extended and powerful example, the book demonstrates how narrative analytic procedures can make sense of complex experiences, and shows the different effects produced by different levels of analysis.