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Part III. Digital Media and Storytelling in Research | 87
CHAPTER 1.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES AS RESOURCES
IN SOCIAL SCIENCES
Autobiographical narratives in the social sciences, especially in history,
sociology, cultural anthropology, and psychology, give researchers the
opportunity to explore complex social contexts through analyzing individual
perspectives through qualitative research methods.
In autobiographical narratives, time is divided into smaller or larger
intervals, such as hours, days, weeks, seasons, years, decades, or generations.
Each story has a protagonist, an antagonist, and episodes that present
challenges to be solved and their solutions or failures. The narrative structure
provides a familiar code system for all recipients, and researchers can develop
a better understanding of socio-historical problems through the everyday
events relayed through stories (Pisco Costa, 2021).
Narratives can be primary sources, such as texts from life story interviews,
family photographs, letters, diaries, case studies, and social media posts, or
can be drawn from secondary sources such as biographies written by others
and newspaper articles. The analysis of narratives as artifacts can be carried
out using discourse analysis, linguistic or narratological approaches, grounded
theory coding, source criticism, or content analysis.
One such approach, known as social representation theory, has been the
basis for a number of empirical mixed-methods studies. Individual stories
are determined by shared social experiences and story frameworks, but at the
same time stories created and told from different individual perspectives of
an event become part of the social dialogue. Narratives, the social constructs
of social reality, can thus become objects of study.
The content analysis of sources — be it dialogues reflecting on social
situations, texts recorded through interviews or audiovisual oral history
narratives — allows for a complex analysis of socio-political phenomena. In
a narrative, it is possible to visualize the frequency of the manifest textual
elements and the emergence of certain patterns. The annotated motifs become
quantifiable and can be analyzed by mathematical-statistical methods in
narrative psychology and sociology. Political narratives, discourses and,
more broadly, cultural-political-social discourses can be explored through
content analysis of newspaper articles, interviews, or social media content.
A learning diary in education studies is a specific, problem-focused narrative
in which students or teachers reflect on their own learning process in relation
to skills development or methods. The content analysis of the learning diary
also provides detailed information about the difficulties individuals face, their
coping strategies and the applicability of learning techniques. Studying the
teaching profession requires a complex research approach. To explore the
development of teacher identity, it is most appropriate to do so through the
lens of teachers’ own professional narratives (Szabolcs, 2012).