Narrative analysis in health psychology research: personal, dialogical and social stories of health

Narrative is a pervasive form in the social world and the analysis of people's stories of illness and suffering has been successfully used to understand their experiences of health and health care. Narrative approaches may also be used to include understandings of the social context of health, inequalities and social justice. Stories are an accessible form which may be interpreted flexibly from a range of theoretical perspectives to provide an integrated approach to the analysis of social and personal life. In this paper, examples of narrative theorising and research from several disciplines are reviewed by focussing in turn on interpretations of personal experience, identity, story telling, culture and social circumstances, followed by a discussion of the integration of these aspects in analysis. Areas of research in health psychology which could benefit from the use of narrative enquiry are discussed, and examples of methods which include talk, texts, pictures and objects as data, are described. Narrative enquiry is a flexible yet accessible approach to understanding health and inequalities in health, which could be used more widely by health psychologists.