Two Narrative Research Approaches in NVivo

Whilst it is accepted that qualitative data analysis software is useful for doing narrative research, the term narrative itself has myriad meanings across the social sciences, which can make it difficult to design and implement narrative research projects. This paper addresses this difficulty by specifying narrative research from a sociological perspective before going on to show what NVivo offers to such narrative research. The paper opens with an overview of how NVivo can help to realise two approaches to narrative research in the social sciences: analysis of narrative where we code and classify text segments and whole texts; and narrative analysis, where we construct a narrative report from various source materials.