Narrative Analysis: Read Accounts as Stories

What Is Narrative Analysis?

Narrative analysis studies accounts as stories. Instead of cutting interviews into coded fragments and regrouping them by topic, it keeps an account together and asks how it is told: what events are placed in what order, where the turning points fall, who acts, and what the teller says explains what happened. Sandelowski describes narrative as a way of understanding interview data, contrasts it with other qualitative analyses, and raises the question of what "truth" means in a told story.

This is different from reporting a story in an evaluation. Narrative reporting, impact stories and most significant change collect or present stories. Narrative analysis is the disciplined reading of them.

Decision This Supports

Use it when the question is about how people understand a change, not just which changes occurred. For example: how do graduates of a skills program describe the moment they decided to stay or leave? The answer informs how the program frames its early weeks. It will not tell the board how many people left or how much the program changed employment.

Before You Start

• Interviews or written accounts that allow the person to tell events in their own order, with minimal interruption.
• A decision about the unit of analysis: the whole account, an episode, or the telling itself.
• A plan for consent that covers detailed quotation. Whole stories can identify people even when names are removed. See do no harm.

Working Steps

1. Read each account whole before breaking it into parts.
2. Summarize its sequence: start, turning points, outcome as the teller presents them.
3. Note how the teller frames events (as luck, effort, someone's help, an obstacle) and who is given agency.
4. Compare accounts, keeping each one intact as you do. Compare structures as well as topics.
5. Record in a memo where your own reading may differ from the teller's. See analytic memos.

A Small Worked Example

This example is fictional.

A participant in a hypothetical evening learning program says: "I almost didn't go back after the second week. Then the facilitator saved me a seat and I thought, fine, one more." A topic code such as "facilitator support" captures part of this. Narrative reading adds the structure: a near-exit, a small act by someone else, and a decision framed as "one more," not a commitment. A second participant's account has no such turning point; she describes a steady habit and an early decision to attend. Rather than merge them into one theme, the analyst writes two short sequences and notes that the program may need to support two different kinds of staying. That is an interpretation to check with more cases, not a finding about all participants.

Limits and Cautions

• A told story is shaped by the setting, the audience and the interviewer's presence. It is not a transparent record of events. Check factual claims against other sources where they matter.
• Compelling stories invite selection of the best ones. Say how accounts were chosen and report ones that do not fit. See negative case analysis.
• Do not count stories as if they were survey responses.
• Translation and transcription choices can change structure. Keep the original wording where permitted.
• An AI summary of a story flattens sequence and framing. Check any summary against the full account; see checking AI-assisted qualitative coding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Narrative Analysis the Same as Thematic Analysis of Stories?

No. Thematic analysis looks for patterns across a dataset and may cut accounts into pieces to do so. Narrative analysis keeps each account whole and studies how it is organized. They can be combined, but say which question each answers.

Can I Use It in a Short Evaluation?

A small number of accounts can be read closely in a short study. Choose it only if the evaluation question is about meaning or sequence, and state the limits.