Beyond a protagonist bias in narrative identity research: methods for identifying master narratives in interview data

This article advances a methodological shift in narrative identity research by addressing the field’s protagonist bias – the tendency to rely on first-person autobiographical accounts as the primary evidence for identifying cultural master narratives. We integrate Erikson’s psychosocial identity framework, Vygotsky’s ‘tool and result’ methodological insight, and sociolinguistic approaches to narrative to develop a three-stage analytic logic: (1) identifying small-n narratives through scenes conveyed in discourse; (2) grouping these into Big-N narratives that cohere thematically across scenes; and (3) assessing candidate master narratives. We demonstrate this approach through a case example from an interview-based study on rural youth outmigration. Our approach broadens narrative sampling beyond first-person accounts, avoids assumptions about parallelism between personal and cultural narratives, and offers a method for tracing how master narratives circulate, gain normative force, and shape identity beyond protagonist storytelling in autobiographical interviews.