THE TELLER, THE TALE, AND THE ONE BEING TOLD - THE NARRATIVE NATURE OF THE RESEARCH INTERVIEW

Narrative structures are readily available in our culture and people a utomatically draw on them in most meaning-making activities. The resea rch interview is one of many such activities. Narrative structures inf luence how informants remember their experience and subsequently tell researchers about it in an interview. Researchers also draw upon narra tive structures because they hear and understand in narratives. Inform al or implicit interpretation as opposed to explicit interpretation ar e discussed. The ''iceberg'' metaphor is used to describe the two kind s of interpretation. The tip of the iceberg is explicit interpretation , which is what researchers write in their research reports. The bigge st part, however, is informal interpretation. It is out of sight and u sually unexamined because it is built into the strategies researchers employ to make sense of data.