Episodic Narrative Interview: Capturing Stories of Experience With a Methods Fusion

Abstract

Episodic narrative interview is an innovative, phenomenon-driven research method that was developed by integrating elements from several qualitative approaches in a methods fusion. Episodic narrative interview draws on critically oriented theoretical foundations and principles of experience-centered narrative and includes features from narrative inquiry, semistructured interview, and episodic interview. The purpose of episodic narrative interview is to better understand a phenomenon by generating individual stories of experience about that phenomenon. As such, an episodic narrative interview participant provides nested narrative accounts of their experiences with a social phenomenon, within the context of a bounded situation or episode. In this article, the author details the foundations of the episodic narrative interview approach and describes how the method is designed and implemented. The significance of episodic narrative interview is also explored, especially in terms of the ways in which it produces tightly focused, phenomenon-centered narratives that are reflective of particular bounded circumstances.