Narratives and accounts: their collection and analysis

A great deal of contemporary research in education, and in the social sciences more generally, is conducted through interviews. Interview-derived accounts and narratives have been used as data for many decades. We argue that, despite their popularity and their long history, such data are not always subjected to rigorous analysis. Researchers too often treat interviews as sources of insight about informants’ experiences and feelings, but pay insufficient attention to the forms and functions of such accounts. We argue that they need to be approached through the analytic lens of accounting devices and narrative structures. We exemplify this approach through ‘academic’ narratives: scientists’ discovery accounts and accounts of doctoral supervision. We emphasise how such accounts need to be examined in terms of the discursive construction of reality. Such an approach is an important corrective to the selective reporting of ‘atrocity stories’ about postgraduate education.