Exploring Narrative Competence of Persons with Severe Intellectual Disabilities: Insights from Complementary Inclusive Analytic Frameworks

Abstract

Narrating personal experiences can be challenging for persons with intellectual disabilities. However, they can, and do, participate as narrators in co-constructed stories. Our choice of narrative frameworks will influence how their skills are perceived and developed. When narrators have severe intellectual disabilities, a preoccupation with linear structure is likely to disadvantage them, and approaches designed for monologues, that focus on verbal linguistic elements, emphasise impairments rather than competence. Personal narratives told in everyday interactions have received little attention in this context. Two complementary perspectives, event structure and ethnopoetics, were used to analyse a small story shared between tenants and staff, highlighting different aspects of both narrative competence and conversational scaffolding. This analysis demonstrates that individuals with severe intellectual disabilities can make effective narrative contributions, using a range of patterned and evaluative strategies when stories are co-constructed within appropriately scaffolded interactions.