Analysis of narrative vs. narrative analysis

We’re busy with a project in the education field requiring that we dip ourselves into a lot of academic research on the topic. Suffice it to say that I’ve not read as many journal articles since I graduated 😉

Surprisingly (or not) there’s been a lot of narrative work done in the education field regarding how people learn.

One of the pertinent thoughts that I’ve found so far is the difference between the “analysis of narrative” and “narrative analysis. They are not the same thing apparently.

Donald Polkinghorne has written that there are two ways narrative can be analysed: ‘analysis of narrative’ is a scientific mode that attempts to identify common themes across a series of narratives (this is the way we work when usingSensemaker and mass narrative collection), whereas ‘narrative analysis’ attempts to analyse the narrative on its own terms i.e. taking an in-depth look at one narrative to identify the aspects of narrative processes, cognition, tools and language used.

I guess the two are not mutually exclusive, and I have my doubts about the usefulness of the distinction, but in a global economy that is rather naive about the use of narrative, it is an easy distinction to understand and should probably be utilised.