Making Sense of Making Sense of Time: Longitudinal Narrative Research

Abstract

Narratives, like the people who tell them, are fluid, changing through time and in response to context. Longitudinal narrative interviewing enables researchers to explore the meaning of stability and change in narratives over time. Despite much attention to and application of longitudinal narrative interviews in recent years, the ways that time is conceptualized and the ways it is applied are markedly different. In this paper the authors present a scoping review to examine the methodological and empirical literature on longitudinal narrative interviewing in health-related research. This research is used to highlight a methodological tension between narrative theorizing of time and analytic practice in research involving longitudinal narrative interviews. Longitudinal narrative research struggles to acknowledge time as both chronological and interpretative, and in doing so misses an opportunity to examine interviews as both multiple data collections and as multiple instances of narrative re-configuration. The authors suggest that future theorizing and empirical work can strive to bridge an onto-epistemological gap by intentionally foregrounding theoretical orientations to time within narrative analytic approaches using repeated interviews.

Makeup Artist Communication Mix Model in Jakarta

“…The phenomenon of the makeup artist's communication mix is explored and understood through transcendental reduction, which is a wende zum subject or shift to the subject. This transcendental reduction focuses on the occurrence of its own appearance from the perspective of the subject involved in for the purposes of discover the meaning and construction of knowledge contained in the practice of the makeup artist's communication mix (Cudjoe, 2023).…”

“Once Again It Becomes a Friend in Times of Adversity”: A Qualitative Exploration of Interrelationships between Anorexia Nervosa and Trauma over Ten Years

“…The combination of thematic analysis and emplotment has been utilised in recent narrative research as a way to analyse narrative in both its cross-sectional and longitudinal forms [45]. The combined analysis assisted the researchers in constructing themes both within each narrative or telling, as well as in positioning themes across the tellings as a way to shape and construct broader and more contextualised participant narratives [45,46].…”

“…To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to apply a longitudinal qualitative methodology to the topic of AN and trauma. This approach allowed for the construction of broad shifts in the women's narratives and, in doing so, was able to better capture the resilience of the participants beyond what would have been possible using a single-point, cross-sectional design [44,46]. Furthermore, to our knowledge, the current study is the first to identify shifts in AN functionality over time and outline how these functions inter-relate with both childhood and adulthood traumas.…”

“…The current study will extend the existing research on this topic by exploring the narratives of a sample of women who reported AN and trauma longitudinally over 10 years. By prioritising the voices of lived experience and adopting a qualitative, narrative approach [43], this paper aims to offer valuable insights into perceived inter-relationships between AN and trauma and identify shifts and changes in the meanings of these inter-relationships over time [44,46]. By adopting a broad definition of trauma that encompasses both "big T" and "little t" traumas, the researchers sought to flexibly explore AN in the context of a diverse range of life experiences [22] (p. xxii).…”