Free Custom «An Artistic Work» Essay Paper

A narrative is an artistic work such as writing, film, video game or photography among others, which gives a description of account of fictional or non-fictional events. It basically gives an orderly account of happenings that are the foundations on which storylines are created. In the area of social sciences, as well as in psychology, narrative analysis has largely been applied as a valuable technique. It helps understand other people’s accounts of their own lives. Though clearly very popular, the distinction from other ways of qualitatively looking at psychology remains unclear. Nonetheless, the manner in which narrative analysis examines the interrelations between people and the society is at least partially cognizable. (Norrick 2000)

The different levels of narrative analysis have often found use in psychology. The personal level of narrative analysis often involves looking at the personal experiences of the narrator or the victim, as in the case of psychology. The narrator has to feel comfortable in order to get information that is useful for the psychologist. More often than not, this feeling of being comfortable is only achieved through creating an environment of equality, so that they don’t feel intimidated with “big man’s” presence. This is because if the narrator feels coerced, ambushed or intimidated, he or she may give information that is quite unrealistic and unreliable. In this respect, every attempt has to be made to ensure that the narrator feels absolutely comfortable with the listener. (Bal 1985)

 

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The interpersonal level has the whole analysis done in the course of a conversation or a dialogue. This largely depends on the way the two relate and the extent to which they may recognize that their speech is analyzed for other purposes. Psychological texts actually recommend that the listener to be as secretive as possible, so that they don’t make a fool out of themselves. This is because it could be disastrous when someone realizes that something sinister is being done behind their back. However, modern psychologists propose that it would perfectly befit if the narrators understand that their speech is undergoing analysis and the actual purpose is to analyze the speech. This could be as crucial as the analysis itself. (Stone 1979)

The narrative analysis can also be at the positional level. This basically involves looking at the social position of the narrator as it relates to the listener. In this case, success is largely pegged on the personal bias that may exist in the mind of the listener and can cause them to make prejudgments. This is always possible due to the fact that the persons involved belong to different social statuses. It’s a common thing to have the socially privileged find it hard to understand the experiences of the socially underprivileged, as they seem to belong to two different worlds. (Gloag & Beard 2009)

The societal level of narrative analysis is basically concerned with the evaluation of the socially shared stories that are unique to those communities. It is largely acknowledged that the listener must first have a brief information about the society from which they wish to obtain a narrative analysis. However, this type of analysis is not always so hard, because the persons involved belong to the same society that they have at least some brief information about it. (Hyden & Brockmeier 2009)

It is widely accepted that narrative analysis has the advantage of helping get the correct information from a narrative that may otherwise be of no use. However, this psychological technique has the disadvantages of bias on the study design, questionable credibility as these may get into the final data. (Sulik 2010)