The Performative Narrative Interview: A creative strategy for data production drawing on dialogical narrative theory

Abstract

This article presents a novel methodological approach to data collection/production: the Performative Narrative Interview (PNI). This approach was developed as part of an empirical study on the processual construction of the sexual identity of sexually diverse men* in Santiago de Chile. By drawing upon narrative-dialogic theoretical frameworks of subjectivity, the PNI makes explicit three aspects of narrative interviews that tend either to remain unaddressed or are treated separately within narrative inquiry: the performative, the creative and the intersubjective. The PNI utilizes these three aspects to generate a creative interview framework, detailed here, in which multiple versions of subjectivity can emerge. We suggest that methods like the PNI, which support this multiplicity to surface, lead to the production of deeper and more complex narrative data on subjectivity than traditional narrative interviews are able to produce.

Evaluating a nurse-led narrative interview intervention with cancer patients with a first diagnosis: A feasibility study

“…This element represents a starting point for reflection worthy of deepening through further studies. Other innovative elements of this study include the proposal to use an NI as a tool that experienced nurses can use to help patients talk about themselves in the face of an unfavourable diagnosis and not instead, as the literature mentions, used for research [ [68] , [69] , [70] , [71] ], or as a therapeutic intervention proposed by specialists [ 72 , 73 ].…”

From sense to meaning: Narrative Function Coding System for the experience of illness

“…By accepting the hypothesis of a transformative function of narration, we can try to organize this function into specific tasks, that is to say we can try to identify the different trajectories along which narration operates its role of the transformation of the experience of illness, and the different dimensions which, through its unfolding over time, it discretizes, connects and organizes (Collado and Boden-Stuart, 2022; Watson, 2008).…”