Vindrola-Padros, C; Johnson, GA; (2014) The Narrated, Nonnarrated, and the Disnarrated: Conceptual Tools for Analyzing Narratives in Health Services Research. Qualitative Health Research , 24 (11) pp. 1603-1611. 10.1177/1049732314549019.

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Abstract

While analyzing the narratives of children receiving pediatric oncology treatment and their parents, we encountered three ways to look at their narratives: what was narrated, nonnarrated, and disnarrated. The narrated refers to the actors (characters) and events (scenes) individuals decided to include in the narration of their experiences, the nonnarrated are everything not included in narration, and the disnarrated are elements that are narrated in the story but did not actually take place. We use our reflection to illustrate how an integrative analysis of these different forms of narration can allow us to produce a holistic interpretation of people’s experiences of illness. This approach is still in the early stages of development, but we hope this article can promote a debate in the field and lead to the refinement of an important tool for narrative analysis. Storytellers shape the world according to the narratives they tell. In health services research, these stories describe the complex constellations of beliefs, values, emotions, intentions, identities, attitudes, and motivations that research participants use to express themselves as individuals and embed themselves within the illness narratives they enact and tell. The research we present here is based on narrative data collected from pediatric oncology patients and their families in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We analyzed the interviews by identifying the primary actors within the illness narrative (i.e., characters) and dominant scenes of activity, organized thematically, based on treatment trajectories. During the analysis process, we encountered three ways to analyze the narratives of the children and their parents. These included searching for the following: (a) who and what is present in narratives (i.e., narrated), (b) who and what is not present within the story (i.e., nonnarrated), and (c) what is alluded to in the text, yet did not actually happen (i.e., disnarrated). This article presents a reflection of this approach, the contributions it made to the interpretation of the data collected in this study, and its potential application in other research projects.

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