what's the difference between social constructionist psychology and narrative psychology?

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Could you please explain to me the difference between these two approaches? As I understand it, narrative psychology grew out of general social constructionist theory, but evolved away from it in important ways. Your help would be greatly appreciated, Anna Shnayder.

-- Anna Shnayder (annashnayder@hotmail.com), October 12, 2003

Answers

Hello Anna,

These approaches are often indeed complimentary, but I wouldn't say that narrative approaches grew out of social constructionist ideas, although the use of narrative approaches by researchers with this view of knowledge is quite common. Some of the distinctions I would make here would involve understanding social constructionist thought more as an epistemology--a way of thinking about 'knowing' and knowledge itself in a very fundamental way (rather than a method per se). 'Narrative' often refers to a group of methods that rely on first person accounts, and that attempt to express the experience of the narrator. However, there are different epistemologies and theories that use narrative approaches. In some forms of qualitative research, a narrative method could be seen as quite consistent with a social constructionist epistemology: in many forms of feminist research, for instance, there is an attempt to understand various discourses on things such as 'power' and 'gender,' for example. It is assumed that such discourses are 'socially constructed,' and that, say, 'gender', is far from a real 'thing' in the world that is untheorized. Other forms of qualitative research would NOT assume that all knowledge is socially constructed: many forms of empirical phenomenology, for instance, believe there are pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic structures of meaning (Husserl thought of these as 'essences'), and the meaning found in language is often itself based on these. "Learning" for example---some have argued that the experience of learning entails certain perceptual changes that are meaningful in a way that would lie outside the networks of language and culture. Most phenomenologists will accept that many meanings are socially constructed, but not all. Again, a narrative account would be useful for analysis here, but the assumptions behind it are quite different.

I think another 'sticking point' to keep in mind when comparing these is the so-called 'correspondence theory of truth': does one assume that there is some object, meaning, or some 'thing' outside the discourse (the narrative) to which statements in the narrative correspond; in other words, does the narrative point beyond itself to an un-narrated space, or does it simply point to other narratives (the latter would be the social constructionist position).

Hope this made sense and was of some help.

-- Scott Greer (sgreer@upei.ca), October 13, 2003.


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