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judgements might be accompanied by some complex reasoning, but in other cases
might come out of previous experience, or simple assumption.
Finally, with the identified contexts and scope judgements in mind, the narrative
elements can be identified and coded. This is the more straightforward stage, since
these are those 'foreground' elements that people commonly talk about - those that
they consciously bring to mind. There might be a whole menu of constructions that
an analyst might look for, but not all narrative elements will fit these and thus a
flexibility in terms of allowing new constructions should be maintained.
Any imposed structure or theory can limit and/or bias subsequent analysis, but on
the other hand being completely theory/structure free is impossible. I am suggesting
that the CSNE structure is relatively 'benign' in this respect to the degree that it is
rooted in how humans think. However this also suggests the sort of approach as
championed by Grounded Theory [20] since this seeks to avoid constraining analysis
by high theory (where possible) but rather letting the evidence lead. As in GT, I
would expect that the emerging analysis will need to be repeatedly confronted with
the data to check and refine it. For example, if the analysis assuming a particular kind
of social context for some text seems to result in a bad 'fit' for several elements of the
identified scope and narrative elements then this may suggest revisiting and
reconsidering the context identification (in contrast to a single 'oddity' which might
indicate a lower level of misfit).
6
An Illustrative Example
The examples of narrative data are lifted from [3] - they are a series of excerpts from
an interview with a particular farmer on the various farming decisions he is faced
with. I don't take them in the same order as in [3] and I number them in the order I
chose. Obviously I am selecting them to illustrate different aspects of the CSNE
approach.
The first considers the effect of people switching from rice to wheat and thus an
emerging change in the world market for wheat.
(Quote 1) “The one conundrum here is that there are more people in the East
who want to get away from rice and gradually upgrade to more wheat allied
products, that may alter the value of the end product to us. You see the worst
thing that has happened to us worldwide is the collapse of the Eastern economy...
over the past 4 or 5 years, but it is coming back again now and that actually may
help us again. It is a great shame because we were getting into the Eastern
markets and it was beginning to grow and suddenly it collapsed.” ( [3] p.113)
From reading the complete selection of quotes in [3], I would guess at the following
cognitive contexts by imagining the sort of situation that the farmer is talking from.
Clearly these are merely hypotheses and could be wrong, but they are a starting point.
•
“
survival
” - things are continually getting worse and the primary goal is to keep in
farming, battle against nature
