The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions.

The sixth volume in this series provides: guides for doing qualitative research; analysis of several autobiographies; hints on how to interpret what it not said in narrative interviews; discussion on how cultural meanings and values are transmitted across generations; and illustrations of the transformational power of stories.

Using a new model for the classification of types of readings, this book shows how to read, analyze and interpret life story materials. The authors introduce four models: holistic-content reading; holistic-form reading; categorical-content reading; and categorical-form reading.

How do we derive concepts from stories and then use these concepts to understand people? What would have to be added to transform story material from the journalistic or literary to the academic and theoretically enriching? Addressing these and other issues such as the interface between life as lived and the social times, distinguished contributors explore this emerging new field in this unique volume.

Beginning with the philosophical framework that underlies the study of narrative, the book covers such questions as: what makes people want to preserve the stories of their past? What...

How does a narrative serve as a way to uncover and construct a person's identity? How do life and life-story influence each other? Addressing these and other issues related to the place of narratives in understanding human lives, this volume focuses on identity and gender.

Chapters explore such issues as: how women construct the lives of other women in biographical work; how individuals conduct their life episodes in patterns similar to the plots of stories; how the women's movement influenced three women's adult lives; and how girls' sense of themselves change as they move into...

The focus of this book is on the role of narrative analysis in the social sciences and in increasing our understanding of human lives and experiences. Contributors address such questions as: Should in-depth interviews become occasions in which to ask for life stories so as to enhance a study of social phenomena? Can a richer approach to psychological understanding be reached by studying how experience, conscious and unconscious, is organized, interpreted and reshaped throughout the life cycle? How can biographical work be used to shed light on the social construction of individual lives?...

In Narratives of Positive Aging, Amia Lieblich presents a qualitative study that explores the life narratives of elderly men and women who engage in practices of "positive aging." They belong to a spontaneous community that assembles daily, early in the morning, on a beach near Tel-Aviv, Israel. At the seaside, the elders practice various outdoor sports, and converse over coffee at the local cafe. Based on their narratives, procured by individual open-ended interviews, and the author's participant observation, the book explores the impact of routine, physical activity, and social...