How do individuals interpret their actions, those of others, and their surrounding world? This is the subject of narrative psychology, to which Brian Schiff devotes an ambitious essay.
Brian Schiff’s book brings a real breath of fresh air to the world of psychology research. It highlights the risks of current research, particularly in cognitive, social and personality psychology, which is essentially focused on quantitative approaches that strictly follow a hypothetico-deductive approach. It brilliantly demonstrates that a qualitative and more inductive perspective, such as that advocated by the narrative approach, can lead to a detailed understanding of the meaning of individuals’ behaviors and emotions. The aim is therefore very ambitious, but at the same time legitimate. Isn’t the purpose of psychology to understand human behaviors, beyond a series of observations of global behaviors or a detailed analysis of micro-behaviors? The narrative approach necessarily contains a subjective part (but what approach could claim to be perfectly objective?), but its scientific foundation is based on a constant testing of data in light of existing theories.
Even though narrative approaches are still underrepresented today, many leading psychologists such as Allport, Erikson, Maslow or Piaget have been interested in the narrative dimensions of individuals. For the past 30-40 years, we have witnessed a return of these approaches in several fields of psychology thanks to the influence of the narrative turn in disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy or history.
Listen to the individual
The primary goal of the narrative approach is to arrive at an understanding of how individuals interpret their actions, those of others, and their surrounding world. Cohler (1982), one of the pioneers of the narrative turn, insists on the importance of considering individuals’ lives as texts narrated and modified in response to moments of crisis or rupture and produced by developmental transitions and personal experiences. Each individual attempts to make sense of his or her past, but can only do so from his or her perspective in the present. Each situation is therefore constantly restructured into a past in light of the present (a presently understood past). The narrative approach attempts to make sense of our experience in interaction with others. It attempts nothing less than to understand what certain significant experiences lived in a given place and time mean to each individual. In addition to being a method of analysis, the narrative approach is also a type of intervention that can have beneficial effects by organizing our past, establishing certain causes, giving relief and color to our lives, or creating new links between the events of our past.
Classical quantitative approaches, in which the psychologist demonstrates that a variable is linked to a series of others and under certain specific conditions, are insufficient. It is necessary for the researcher to be able to understand what people say and do. To do this, he must observe the relevant environment in detail, and listen to the experiences, memories and reflections of the actors involved. He must be able to locate who these actors are, where and when they speak. The approach is essentially qualitative, but does not neglect the contributions of quantitative methods, which brings it closer to the mixed methods increasingly advocated in psychology (eg, Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2010).
An object in the garden
With his fluid writing, Brian Schiff leads his reader quite easily into his reasoning. The first part of the book highlights the limits of classical quantitative approaches while identifying their contributions and arguing for closer collaboration between them. This is certainly a great merit of this book. The author indeed recognizes the contributions of classical experimental approaches. His aim is above all to rectify the current enormous imbalance between quantitative and qualitative approaches in many fields of psychology.
Nor does he evade the criticisms made of an approach that would be judged too subjective and therefore unscientific. Chapter 6 argues for the adoption of an interpretative approach in psychology. However, interpretation is seen by this discipline as a non-scientific approach, and should therefore be avoided at all costs. Brian Schiff restores hermeneutics to its former glory. Despite certain inevitable preconceptions when beginning research, the researcher involved in a narrative analysis tries as much as possible to begin his work with a systematic observation of the field. Then, he examines the relevance of an explanatory theory, develops, refines or revises his conceptions and then submits them to the scrutiny of his colleagues. The narrative approach is thus similar to inductive sciences such as archaeology or botany. Schiff compares the work of the researcher using the narrative approach to someone who finds a mysterious object while gardening. He will begin by examining the shape of this object, its composition, the place and the manner in which it was found. He will ask his neighbors about possible similar discoveries, consult geology experts, and of course examine the existing literature on this object. The narrative approach is therefore in no way an invitation to pure speculation.
The author rightly points out that what constitutes a scientific approach is not the choice of its methods or measurements, but a particular attitude towards investigation. The following paragraph probably best sums up what a scientific method must prove and provide (p. 214):
A scientific attitude requires an intentional approach to describing the world and discovering something beyond the author’s own, often narrow, conception that can be accepted by others with similar perspectives and activities. The choice of tools is flexible and pragmatic, open to the contingencies of what we would like to know. The quest for knowledge sometimes requires logical construction or deconstruction, sometimes empirical observation, allowing for more information to be gathered, sometimes quantification, and sometimes a qualitative exploration of meaning. But in all cases, the scientific attitude is skeptical, critical, and attempts to recognize the limits of its own capacity to reveal the world. Such a definition of science is open to multiple methods and perspectives.
This definition is precise, inclusive and ambitious, and should allow us to recognize the legitimacy of the narrative approach in psychology.
The book aims to present the theoretical and epistemological implications of the narrative approach for psychological sciences. Its purpose is also to show that theory and methods are closely linked. Methods constitute theoretically anchored propositions that themselves configure theoretical models. Each method sheds new light on a certain reality, but at the same time obscures other aspects, which justifies the use of complementary methods.
The objects of study of narrative analysis in psychology are varied. For example, they focus on the longitudinal analysis of the development of narrative abilities from adolescence to adulthood. These studies highlight the distinct conversational styles of parents when they address their daughter or son (eg, Reese & Fivush, 1993). These will then be internalized according to gender and will produce differentiated ways of processing life experiences and communicating them to others. Other studies from social and personality psychology highlight major narrative styles of “redemption” or “contamination” (eg, Mc Adams et al., 2001). In the first, the story moves from an affectively negative situation to an affectively positive situation. In the case of contamination, the transition operates in the opposite order. Interestingly, the redemption style is associated with better indicators of well-being and health. In clinical psychology, storytelling is seen as an approach to making meaning about important events in the past and present (eg, Freeman, 2010).
Multiple identities
Let us take a concrete example that illustrates the contribution of narrative approaches and their complementarity with quantitative approaches. Schiff is particularly interested in understanding multiple and complex identities, and in the way in which individuals manage to negotiate between the multiple combinations of competing identities. He describes a study in which he conducted in-depth interviews with Palestinian students living in Israel. He relates the case of Lana who, coming from a Muslim village in northern Israel, settles in Jerusalem. The interview highlights the parallel development of a more pronounced Arab and Palestinian identity following her move, with that of a relational and social identity following her exposure to new ways of life more in line with her aspirations. The integration of these two identities is particularly problematic for Lana because they sometimes convey antagonistic goals. Schiff shows in particular that Lana feels closer to her Israeli friends with whom she shares more interests and ways of life, while maintaining proximity with her Palestinian friends with whom she shares the same mother tongue made up of better understood implicits and common references to past moments of life. He analyzes with finesse how Lana’s different identities collide in her different places of life. He also shows the complementarity between his narrative analysis and quantitative data which underline that a larger part of Palestinians living in Israel define themselves by multiple affiliations such as “Palestinian Arab from Israel”. Such figures are interesting, but they do not allow us to understand the complexity of these multiple affiliations, which a detailed narrative analysis of cases, such as that of Lana, allows.
Despite my appreciation of the book, I would have some criticisms to make. I regretted that the detailed analyses come quite late in the book. The first chapters remain abstract and only a few brief examples are provided. Fortunately, the last chapters largely compensate for this abstraction by presenting several detailed analyses by the author. For example, he reports on a study on the interpretation by survivors of the Holocaust concentration camps and their own survival. Another study focuses on the meaning given to being in a couple for a Jew and an Arab. I would therefore advise, after reading the first chapters, to read some of these detailed analyses before going back into the conceptual and epistemological developments.
Sometimes, the acceptance of the category of narrative studies seemed too broad to me. I was surprised, for example, that Pennebaker’s studies were considered to fall within narrative approaches. This American social psychologist developed software for analyzing the emotional content of texts (the LIWCPennebaker et al., 2015), which provides tools for understanding discourse, but remains confined to a strictly quantitative approach and based on a priori categories which remain very general.
The book ends with a vibrant call for a narrative shift in psychology in order to meet the challenges of our present and future. Students or researchers in psychology, this book is likely to shake up many of your presuppositions and perhaps shake some of your certainties about what a good method of approaching human behavior is. The chance that you will come out of it transformed is high because Brian Schiff brings as many questions about the current dominant approaches in psychology as about the complementary contributions of the narrative approach.