The Role of Narrative Methods in Sociology: Stories as a Powerful Tool to Understand Individual and Society

Abstract

The purpose in the article is to understand the role of the stories as well as storytelling in sociology.Rather than focusing on the significance of textual data based on narrativity, the author aims at underlining the role of the genres such as story, myth, irony, parable, drama, and aphorism, which are used in everyday life narratives. Sociology, as a discipline offering analyses at different levels of social life can borrow from these textual data in various different ways. In this sense, the ways in which narrativity and sociology come together would be related to the way we understand sociological methodology. Just as the lullabies are outcomes of collective references relatively independent of mothers' personal preferences, meta-narratives also have a characteristic of a multilayered texture embedded in our social and historical memory. In sum, firstly, the article will enlighten the intersection between the sociology and the narrative theory, second, examples of brief insights into popular cultural texts will be provided.Keywords: Narrative, Storytelling, Sociology.

Narratives of cooperation, resilience and resistance: workers’ self-recovery in times of crisis

“…The adoption of a narrative approach in this research is methodologically consistent with an ontological and epistemological position that considers society made of meaningful actions and interpretation as the principal mode of inquiry. As “knowledge by interpretation assumes that there are multiple realities that are socially constructed” (Erol Işik, 2015, p. 120), narratives provide a dense account of the reality perceived by the actor himself and how structure and agency are interrelated.…”

Lending Voices to the Marginalised: The Power of Narratives as Alternative Sociological Discourse

“…Erol Işik (2015, p. 103) highlights the linkage between narratives and sociological theorisations. To him ‘sociology and narrativity have become interrelated in terms of revealing the voices of the subjects as they talk about their experiences.…”

“…Even if they attempted to speak, their talk was dismissed as ‘story telling’. This is also the typical attitude of the dominant discourse model, which fails to recognise that stories could contain a wealth of sociological information (Erol Işik, 2015). One of the reasons for women’s experiences and perceptions being ignored in mainstream discourses is their inability to communicate in a textual language.…”

Several Conceptual Clarifications on the Distinction between Constructivism and Social Constructivism

“…In other words, the constructionist approach puts the idea of social reality and the possibility of objective knowledge in brackets, focusing on the significance that individuals attribute to the world and the social facts to which they are part. Constructivism in the manner proposed by Kennet Gergen (2005) is at the same time a social ontology -the world is a product of negotiating the meanings that social actors attribute to the social phenomena (Sandu, 2012;2015;2016). The meanings that individuals assign to the world may differ from one social actor to another, but the process of deconstruction-reconstruction of meanings (Sandu, 2016) makes individuals identify common meanings of the terms by which the social reality is defined.…”

“…Antonio Sandu sees both social constructionism and constructivism as postkantian theories, and discusses the classical new-phenomenon relationship. For knowledge of the social phenomenon, constructional sociology is directed to methods such as social phenomenology (Creswell, 2007), narrative sociology (Franzosi, 1998;Erol Isik, 2015) and Constructionist Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1994;1998;Mills, Bonner & Francis, 2006).…”