Hello Angela, it is possible. The advantage of the thematic analysis is that it can allow you to generate codes throughout the narrative research process. You are free to generate or combine the codes you want according to the purpose of your research. A qualitative software based on grounded theory and mixed methods such as Atlas ti and Nvivo would be useful.

Alonso Burgos thank you so much!

I'm not sure that just eliciting stories would count as a "Narrative Inquiry," but you certainly could use thematic analysis to analyze the stories that your interviews produce.

Hi Angela. I started out proposing this for my PhD. Once I got into interviewing I realised that what I was actually doing was qualitative interviewing. It is possible to use thematic analysis with a narrative approach (Riessman is helpful) but I got caught between the looking at how people saying things - which is more narrative, as opposed to what people say. Depends on your theoretical underpinnings too.

Lesley Pitt thanks for your response, what did you end up doing? Did you say you used qualitative interviewing and thematic analysis ?

David L Morgan thanks for your response

Hi Angela. Yes I did - I used qualitative interviewing and applied thematic analysis and it went well. In the end this described what I actually did and it worked for me. I was researching rural poverty and wanted to write about what people said and this approach allowed me to do that. My interviews had some structure but mostly I prompted people and let them talk about things in their own way - it meant I got good depth to 'my data' and maintained the dignity of participants.

Lesley Pitt ah!! This helps so much! Thank you!!

Welcome. It was a real dilemma and I spent hours thinking about it. Hope you find an approach that works for you.

Seems to me as if narrative inquiry or analysis tries to look at the interview content as a 'story' where the narrative flow, plot, etc is of importance... whereas thematic analysis breaks down the content into themes and then puts these themes together to interpret a new whole... I feel that both strategies involve a very different type of thinking where in the first the interview material is seen as coherent and following a logic in itself -- and one is interested in that logic, and in the second one is interested in the parts that say something about the topic of interest and not in how those parts hang together...

That said, I have not yet come across a very good discussion of how 'narratives' or 'stories' or narrative analysis' may be performed at the analysis stage... which is why I guess we see this confusion where one wants to use narrative inquiry and may use such an approach in collecting data, but one ends up using 'thematic' in the actual analysis which in my limited opinion defeats the purpose of capturing 'stories'...

I agree with Sylvia Dsouza that narrative "inquiry" involves more than just collecting stories. In addition, there are a number of different strategies for doing narrative "analysis" of story-based data. I also agree that those narrative analysis strategies are not nearly as transparent as thematic analysis.

So, as I said in an earlier reply, I think the combination of collecting stories and then using thematic analysis provides a good way to gather high quality data and then understand the overall content of that data.

I did use both for my dissertation. My approach was narrative, so I began my interviews by asking people to tell me their story beginning wherever they wanted. This in itself was revealing - what people chose to say and how they structured their stories was important to understanding what was most important to those participants. I asked clarifying questions in subsequent interviews, not to get at "real facts" or "truth", but to expand and deepen the accounts. Narrative theorists accept that narratives are performative, and will change according to the purpose and audience of their telling, so I was looking for a essence of feelings, important turning points, the voices of others (characters, if you like) that came through in the stories, their degree of agency in their own story , broader discourses they drew on to tell their stories, etc. I was able to see patterns in terms of gender and also whether the 'plot' of their story around the event was resolved or unresolved.

I also did more traditional thematic analysis using themes generated across my 4 participants using Atlas Ti. This was helpful in showing what was important generally to people experiencing the event, and it also gave rise to my practice recommendations.

Yes you can. just be sure to note that what you would be doing is not typically called "narrative inquiry" (see Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Rather, it is a non-structured narrative interview analyzed with thematic analysis.

Now that I gave a decontextualized answer, I may get back to the important part. Whatever you do, make sure that it is congruent with your research question! Do not attempt a narrative inquiry when you are not interested in the story and the way experience is weaved into the different components of a narrative (e.g., plot, characters, relationships, causality, etc.). If you are using thematic analysis, make sure that you set out to seek themes rather than narrative constructions. Use literature that regards, for instance, the investigation of lived experiences (i.e., phenomenology; e.g., IPA, Smith et al., 2009) rather than literature that grounds experience in narrative (e.g., Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986; Josselson, 2011). Also note, that there are many approaches to narrative research and analysis. Get acquainted with that variety. Good luck.

I think you can because according to Braun and Clarke (2013) TA is a method and not a methodology. In contrast I would like to argue that "narrative inquiry" is your methodology. However, I think it is also important what kind of position (regarding ontology and epistemology) you have as a researcher.

I also noticed that Bryman and Bell (2011) as mentioned "narrative analysis" as an option for you.

Good luck

Literature:

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2013). Successful qualitative research: A practical guide for beginners. sage.

Bryman, A., Bell, E. (2011). Business research methods. 3th edition, Oxford university press.

Roland Kaulbars thanks for your reply, my epistemology is social constructionism