Book Review

摘要

I recently attended a workshop on narrative research methods run by Catherine Kohler Riessman, the author of this important new text. The workshop was well attended by postgraduate students, academics and researchers from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds. Some attendees were very new to narrative research, and their questions to Riessman revealed commonly held assumptions about what constitutes "research" as well as the inevitable anxieties that arise when exploring hitherto unfamiliar approaches. This book will appeal to those attendees, and others, new to the narrative field. It presents a broad but thorough overview of the range of narrative research methods used in the "human sciences" and has been "purposely crafted for beginning investigators" (p. 17). However, the book will also appeal to experienced researchers who have been in the narrative paddock for a much longer time. It is not only an introduction (perhaps even enticement) to narrative research, but it is also an expertly crafted survey of approaches to narrative analysis, and a timely reminder of the important contribution narrative methods make to understanding the social world.