This paper addresses methodological questions that arose during a doctoral study which had used a narrative interview technique to collect rich personal accounts from the life stories of research participants. It reports an approach to resolving the dilemma of how to ‘listen’ to the data.

The researcher used an interview style which avoided imposing structure on participants’ responses. Structuring within the interview was led by narrator-participants, reflecting two beliefs held by the researcher: that people will recall and recount what is most important and salient to themselves, and that in general people find it easier to describe their experiences through life events that have meaning for them, rather than to give abstract explanations of their actions. The resultant data comprised rich narratives describing the careers of careers advisers and descriptions of their work with individual clients.

As people relate their experiences, their stories are framed by ‘meta-patterns of thinking’ (Cherry, 2005: 59) that are not in conscious awareness. Information that is implicit in personal stories demands more of the researcher is identifying what is relevant and what meaning can be attached to utterances. It is at this point that methodological literature tends towards generalization, urging a process of ‘sensitisation’ or ‘dwelling with’ the data (Ashworth and Lucas, 2000) or ‘total immersion’ in the transcripts (Bosley at al., 2009). This was scant help in seeking to develop meaning, to understand contradictions and to recognize ‘double-think’ (El-Sawad et al., 2004).

The Listening Guide (Gilligan et al, 2003) offered a way to engage with the multilayered character of individual stories. The guide proposes a sequence of ‘listenings’. The first listening focused on the main narrative themes in each personal story, with reflexive attunement to the researcher-listener’s own reaction and engagement with the narrative. Subsequent listenings focused on the ‘I’ of the participant who was speaking, with particular attention to the verbs used; then on contrapuntal voices of significant others within the participants’ stories; and finally for themes of structured power relations and dominant ideologies within the stories.

The process of listening was grounded in an understanding of the interview data is talk-in-interaction (Watson, 2007), related by a specific participant to this particular researcher at a specific location and time. Implicit is a view of identity as relational and contingent to the situation, as part of a continually constructing enactment of selfhood. The researcher’s understanding of the Listening Guide was extended by aligning it with Hermans et al’s (1992) proposal of the dialogical self, with multiple, embodied ‘I-positions’. 

Transcription is inherently an interpretive step (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009). The richness of narrative data requires careful ‘listening’ (retaining the spoken word in preference to the partially-interpreted transcript as far as possible) to find the multiple, sometimes conflicting, voices within it. Then full regard can be paid to the complexity of human experience.

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