Making sense of lived experiences through narratives

Understanding home deathcare through narrative.

Sam Hooker, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath

My PhD project used a narrative methodology to capture people’s experiences caring for the dead at home. Two interviews were conducted with participants. The first consisted of asking them to tell me their experience, while the second was used to ask questions to fill in gaps in the narratives. Then, in the participant’s own words, a chronological narrative of the event (core story) was formed, which reads like a short story of their experience. This process was an emotionally taxing experience for me as a researcher, due to the depth of immersion in the data. The core stories are included in the thesis, allowing the data to remain situated, capturing the complexity of a very personal and challenging experience for participants. While additional analysis is included, the core stories allow the reader to draw conclusions from the data itself. They also provide a valuable resource for people who wish to take care of their own dead to learn from.

Putting a light in the window: using creative writing to focus analysis in relationally engaged research

Luci Gorell Barnes, PhD researcher in Education at UWE Bristol

My PhD investigates how relationally engaged arts-based research methods can support minoritised children to express, reflect on, and amplify their lived experiences and perceptions. I understand meaning-making as happening through the process of engagement, and gathered data to consider the ‘double hermeneutic’ (Smith and Eatough, 2021) of not only what the children expressed, but how they did this through their conversations, interactions, and demeanours.

This study focuses on the children’s unique experiences and I wanted to examine what I had learned from each child, foregrounding how they had ‘got under my skin’. Having familiarised myself with the data I then drew on less conscious or orthodox ways of knowing (Hammond and Fuller, 2024) to write what I think of as ‘fictional portraits’ of my encounters with individual children. These were informed by the issues that child explored, the metaphors and images they used, and how they had interacted with me and each other. Using this process helped me get close to each child’s ‘internal narrative’ Mannay (2010, p.10) and I came to understand each ‘portrait’ as being like a light in the window guiding me through the dark woods of data, focusing my analysis and supporting me to write interpretive accounts that kept the relational nature of the study at their heart. McNiff (2019) suggests that fact and fiction can work together to deepen our understandings, and by engaging with my data in this highly subjective and ‘interruptive’ way (Clark, 2024, p. 3) I brought a level of relational accuracy to my analysis that I might not have otherwise found.

This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811