1.

Overview

24a Princes Avenue, London N10 3LR, UK

Interviewing for life-histories, lived situations and personal experience: The Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM). Shortest Short Guide to BNIM interviewing and interpretation
August 2006. version 6.8 25/07/06 (21,000 words) Tom Wengraf London East Research Institute, University of East London, UK with Prue Chamberlayne Open University, UK This Shortest Short Guide to BNIM contains the first section of the standard (Longer) Short Guide to BNIM but without any of its footnotes. It contains none of the second Discussions section, nor the full Bibliography. . If you can ignore footnotes for a first reading, then it makes more sense to not to carry on reading this Shortest version. If you find that footnotes distract you, then use this text (at least to begin with), rather than the longer one.

1. Overview and brief accounts........................................ Error: Reference source not found

The BNIM three-subsessions interview- brief account......................Error: Reference source not found The BNIM two-track interpretation procedures brief account........Error: Reference source not found

2.

BNIM interviewing in more detail....................... Error: Reference source not found

2.1. Framing the interview................................................................. Error: Reference source not found 2.2. The 3-subsession structure.......................................................... Error: Reference source not found 2.4. The principles of free-associative SQUIN interviewing............. Error: Reference source not found

3. BNIM interpretation in more detail......................... Error: Reference source not found

3.1. Reconstructing two decision-making flows................................ Error: Reference source not found 3.2. BNIM procedures for oing this reconstructing............................ Error: Reference source not found 3.3. Conclusion......................................................................................................................................41

Bibliographies.................................................................... Error: Reference source not found

Bibliography A: short list by topic area............................................. Error: Reference source not found

Diagrams............................................................................ Error: Reference source not found BNIM Trainings................................................................ Error: Reference source not found
A 3+3+3 9-day staged course in 2007?................................................................................................ 59 Summary............................................................................................ Error: Reference source not found Sample teaching scheme for 5-day intensive training.......................................................................... 62

Table of figures and diagrams Figure 1 BNIM in the CRQ-TQ structure 0........................................................................... Figure 2 BNIM in the CRQ-IQ structure 2.3......................................................................... Figure 3 Classic SQUIN and the 3 (sub) Sessions.2.............................................................. Figure 4 Curly diagram nine topics in order2 QRI p.139............................................. Figure 5 Nine topics and four subtopics in gestalt order...................................................... Figure 6 Squin design sheet - menu of possibilities.............................................................. Figure 7 The D-A-R-N-E Textsorts....................................................................................... Figure 8 Triangulated multi-method 'psycho-societal' methodology....................................

1. Overview and brief accounts This methodology for exploring lived-experiences through biographic narrative interviews has been used over the past fifteen or more years in a variety of collective research projects, either more or less directly (e.g. Rosenthal 1998, Chamberlayne et al 2002, Froggett et al 2005) or in a modified version). It has also already started to be used in individual PhDs completed UK PhDs include Lisanne Ackermann (Oxford University), Tanya Campbell-Breen (University of East Anglia), Kip Jones (de Montfort University), Emma Snelling (Plymouth University), Margaret Volante (University of East London). Others are now close to completion (e.g. Elvin Aydin, Essex University) and we know of another 14 or so in process (Universities of Auckland, Dublin, Central Lancashire, East London, Exeter, Leicester, Kings College London, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth). Training and introductory courses have been run in at different places in the UK, in New York and in Auckland. Sessions have been run under the aegis of departments or research centres in several universities (Middlesex, Open University, Central Lancashire, East London and Plymouth) and under the aegis of the UK National Council for Research Methods (NCRM). This year (2006) training courses are planned for London in June (see p. Error: Reference source not found), for Sydney (September), and (supported by the British Council) for Slovenia (November). Assuming that narrative expression is expressive both of conscious concerns and also of unconscious cultural, societal and individual presuppositions and processes, BNIM supports research into the lived experience of individuals and collectives. It facilitates understanding both the inner and the outer worlds of historically-evolving persons-inhistorically-evolving situations, and particularly the interactivity of inner and outer world dynamics. As such, BNIM lends itself particularly to both psycho-dynamic and socio-dynamic approaches, serving specialists of both the psycho and the societal, but especially those researchers wanting a tool that supports a fully psycho-societal understanding in which neither sociological nor psychological dynamics and structures are neglected or privileged, and in which both are understood not statically but as situated

1.Overview

historically. This can provide a firm basis for policy. The methodological focus on biographic-narrative-based research does not mean that the research product has to take the form of a collection of accounts of individual biographies or experiences; it may do, but at least as often it doesnt. Exploring the particularity of individual experiencing and mutating subjectivity in unique historical and societal locations and processes through biography-based research lays the basis for systematic later whole case comparisons, yes, but it also lays a basis for comparisons of situated practices and processes of different interest to the researcher, thus enabling grounded description and theorisation about a frequently different object of study. Consequently, the object of study, this focal unit of research, analysis and presentation, can be that of multi-generation families (Rosenthal; Brannen), organisations (Sostris Phase 2; Froggett et al), learning cultures (Volante), relationship patterns between clients and/or service professionals (Bolton, Snelling; Curran and Chamberlayne), informal cultures of caring (Chamberlayne and King; Jones, Jones and Rupp), effects of formal interventions (Hopkins and Higgins) modes of cultural transmission of patterns of feeling and behaviour as well as of individuals experiencing historical changes and transitions between regimes at the micro and the macro level (Rosenthal; Sostris Phase 1; Breckner et al.; Chamberlayne and Spano; Ackermann; Semenova, Humphrey et al and many others). Collective projects using BNIM-type procedures in whole or in part with other datacollection and interpretation methods or without so far include: [from the Berlin Quatext group], a long collective project looking at multigenerational studies of the families of Nazi victims and of Nazi perpetrators (Rosenthal et al) a research project comparing cross-nationally regimes of caring and the informal cultures that the different regimes give rise to (Chamberlayne and King) another comparing the social strategies of disadvantaged groups coping with increasingly risky societies in Europe and of innovative agencies that have tried to measure up to such new challenges of what is euphemistically called and ideologically labelled as modernisation (SOSTRIS Chamberlayne et al) a four-generation 12-family study of work and caring in the UK over the 20th century (Brannen et al) a study of professionals immigrating to New Zealand (Firkin, Dupuis and Meares) a study of the interaction between front-line professionals and their clients in agencies dealing with the homeless (Curran and Chamberlayne); 3

ethnic entrepreneurship and a new professionalisation as twin gendered strategies among immigrant minority groups in Europe (Apitzsch, Kontos, Kupferberg), and migration studies more generally (Breckner et al) more recently, a multi-method psycho-societal evaluation of one innovative agency, a Healthy Living Centre in a deprived part of East London, using BNIM biographical interviews, institutional observation, and participant action research (Froggett, Chamberlayne, Buckner and Wengraf). a currently ongoing study of the habitus of Slovenian managers between 1960 and 1991 with historians and economists exploring the context in which the managers operated, and with researchers with specialist expertise and narrative-researchers eliciting accounts and exploring the narratives the managers told, and the relation between the two (Fikfak, Princic, Turk and Sensar as yet no publications). A currently ongoing study at the Glasgow Centre for Integrative Care using BNIM biographical interviews with intervention professionals and with people suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in order to evaluate the design and effects of a particular therapeutic intervention (Hopkins and Higgins as yet no publications)

An increasing proportion of the studies using biographical methods deals with applied issues; researchers explore how professionals (such as health workers and social workers) do or dont intervene effectively with people in difficult situations and how policy and practice in respect of actual or potential service-users should be developed accordingly (Chamberlayne et al 2004). A key feature of biographical research into peoples lived experience of their lives and situations is concern for the variety of past and present, dominant and less dominant perspectives that they currently hold on those experiences and that they held before and during those experiences. As opposed to other methods (such as attitude surveys and interviews) that elucidate mostly dominant and explicit and official press-release present-time perspectives, BNIM, through its focus on eliciting narratives of past experience rather than (just) explicit statements of present or remembered position, facilitates the expression and detection of implicit and often suppressed perspectives in the present as well as the expression and detection of earlier perspectives (and counternarratives) that are no less contradictory and emotional. Consequently, BNIM is particularly suited for longitudinal process studies, since it asks for retrospective whole stories and particular incident experiences prior to the first BNIM interview. It can access vanished and mutated times, places, states of feeling and ways of living. Subsequent BNIM interviews can then be used: such later interviews may elicit later retrospectives from potentially new perspectives on the same period up to the first

1.Overview

BNIM interview, as well as on the subsequent period since the first BNIM interview. BNIM can thus be used as part of before-and-after particular intervention studies, as in the ongoing study of a particular therapeutic intervention programme in Glasgow for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients. Below, I give a brief five-page account of BNIM interviewing and interpretation. Then, in the next two sections, I look at each in more detail. There are then two extended bibliographies, pp.Error: Reference source not found-Error: Reference source not found; a number of diagrams to illustrate certain points in the text; and then finally (p. 57) a note on BNIM trainings. This Guide (updated two or three times a year) therefore should be of interest to those with no knowledge and experience of the method. The function of the companion (Longer) Short Guide to BNIM with footnotes and its Discussions section (both omitted here in this Shortest Short Guide) is to serve those who want to go beyond the basics in their understanding and use of BNIM.

A note: You might wish to think about the relation between the BNIM interviewing procedure and the BNIM interpretation procedure. The BNIM method of narrative interviewing is one which, if followed, will provide you with a relatively coherent whole story or long narration with a relatively large number of recalled particular incident narratives (PINs) inserted within that long narration (in the first of 2 subsessions) or brought up afterwards (in the second of 2 subsessions). This provides rich material for any method of narrative interpretation. There are many methods of interpreting narrative material: the BNIM procedures are just one. It is perfectly possible for you to generate material by way of the BNIM interview, but then decide to use a non-BNIM way of interpreting some or all of that material. The opposite is not quite as true. To work at its best, the BNIM method of narrative interpretation requires such long Whole Story + Particular Incident Narratives improvised narrative material. If you have narrative interviews in which there is a lot of guidance and a lot of structuring and micro-management by the interviewer at the beginning and/or especially during the course of the interview, then such material is not best interpreted using BNIM procedures (which is not to say that no value can be gained by using them). In BNIM terms, the text is too much of a co-production of the interviewee and interviewer to be a clear guide to the expression of the interviewee on their own. In addition, it should be said that researchers using polished biographical narratives (written out and corrected) are not likely to benefit from BNIM, since exploring the improvised nature and vocal and embodied expression of interview narratives is crucial to the understanding of subjectivity.

We think that in terms of understanding subjectivity-in-historical-situation we could as well say a flow of historical situations as witnessed and experienced by a particular subjectivity -- the BNIM interview interpreted with the BNIM procedures is a powerful and delicately sensitive tool (though by no means the only one or the best for all purposes and conditions). The BNIM interview can also be interpreted perfectly well using other interpretive procedures, but the BNIM interpretive procedures for understanding subjectivity in situation works best when applied to the material generated by improvised BNIM interviews. Why will become apparent in the rest of this Short Guide.

2. BNIM three subsessions interview brief account

The BNIM three-subsessions interview- brief account For any BNIM interview, you should schedule preferably three hours (but a minimum of two) with the interviewee and a further one hour for your own subsequent instant debriefing, preferably as close as possible to the place/time of the interview. Wengraf 2001 (ch. 5 and pp. 184-206) gives general guidance on sampling and interviewee selection and on preparing for a qualitative research interview. In each BNIM interview run, there are always two subsessions [and sometimes three] (Wengraf 2001, ch.6). These are taped and transcribed. In the first, the interviewer offers only a carefully constructed single narrative question (e.g. Please tell me the story of your life, all the events and experiences that have been important to you personally; begin wherever you like, I wont interrupt, Ill just take some notes for afterwards) and sticks to the promises given in the question. In the second subsession normally following straight on from or pretty immediately after the first -- sticking strictly to the sequence of topics raised and to the words used, the interviewer asks for more narratives about some of them. These first two subsessions typically are planned to take place in the same (first) interview slot of two-three hours. After these first two subsessions have been transcribed and thought about, sometime later in a separate interview a third subsession can follow in which further narrative questions can be posed but also in which non-narrative questions and activities can be designed. Much BNIM research does not use the third-subsession option, but it is always there. For more detail about BNIM interviewing, see p. Error: Reference source not found below. The point of having three distinct subsessions is to ensure that the initial narrative in subsession one is as uninfluenced as possible by the question-putting activity of subsession two, and that as much narrative material as possible is collected in subsessions one and two . before other types of question get put in the always-sometime-later and optional subsession three.

The BNIM two-track interpretation procedures brief account A full verbatim transcript of the interview is then made. The transcript is first systematically processed and then interpreted along two distinct tracks (the results of which are then later brought together). You reconstruct the experiencing of the interpreting and acting subject (a) as he or she lived his or her life; and (b) as he or she interpreted events in the interview, telling his or her story. There are therefore two distinct lines of interpretation, separate tracks: the objective event lived-life-living track, and the subjective account told-story-telling track (see diagrams of the two tracks lived life and told story -- on pp. Error: Reference source not found and Error: Reference source not found). You do this following a particular method. It requires the researcher to go forward through the events (of the interview, and of the lived life) as did the subject: future-blind, moment by moment, having intentions and predictions but like all of us -never knowing what will actually come next or later. How does this happen? For the first interpretive track, a chronology of objective life events is first constructed. Objective life events are characteristically those that could be independently checked (e.g. using official documents) such as records of school and employment and other organizations. Each item of the Biographical Data Chronology (e.g. failed exams at age 16), stripped of the subjects current or previous interpretation (e.g. disappointed at failing exams at age 16, or failed exams because of X-factor) is then presented as a separate chunk to a research panel, which is asked to consider how this event might have been experienced /interpreted at the time called an experiential hypothesis -- , and, if that experiential hypothesis were true, what might be expected to occur next or later in the series of life-event chunks(following hypotheses). Counter-hypotheses and alternative hypotheses are always sought for whatever experiential hypotheses are initially put forward. After many hypotheses and counter-hypotheses have been collected and recorded, the next life-event chunk is presented. Its implications for the previously-generated experiential and following hypotheses are considered, and then a new round of hypothesizing commences. A process of both imaginative identification and critical understanding is sought: previous hypotheses are constantly to be corrected and refined by reflection on the emergence of future event-chunks as they are presented one-by-one. After three hours of panel work, the researcher then proceeds on their own to complete work on any remaining chunks (separately or bundled together): panel processes are further discussed in a Discussion not included in this Shortest Guide). A brief account of the evolution of the lived life is then constructed by the researcher, considering alternative structural hypotheses that make best sense of the data considered in this way. The second interpretative trackalways subsequent to the first -- is focused on the evolution of the subjective account as the interviewee improvises their performance in

2. BNIM

two-track interpretation brief account

the interview interaction, the telling of the told story. First, the transcript is processed into segments. A new segment or chunk is said to start when there is a change of speaker, of topic, or of the manner in which a topic is addressed. The procedure of dealing with the interview chunks is the same as that just described for dealing with the life-event chunks. Each segment is presented in turn to a research panel that attempts to imagine how each such interview event and action might have been experienced by the subject at that moment of the interview. Experiential and following hypotheses are sought, as are counter-hypotheses and also hypotheses that are tangential to those initially put forward. The hypotheses generated are then subject to subsequent correction and refinement as further segments are presented later. As in the case of biographic data, after three hours of panel work, the researcher continues on their own enriched by the panels recorded deliberations. [In addition, a similar future-blind procedure of panel interpretation is also carried out usually towards the end of the interpretive process -- for puzzling and potentially illuminating segments of the verbatimtext (microanalysis), see p. 35 for details]. Throughout the examination of each series the living of the chronologically-lived life; the unfolding telling of the interview-told story -- separate structural hypotheses are sought. Only afterwards in a process of knitting together -- are structural hypotheses sought that relate the lived-life findings to the telling-of-the-told-story findings in a question about the dynamics of the case which can then be addressed: Why did the person who lived their life like this, tell their story like that?. Alternatively: Given he or she now tells their stories like this, what does that suggest about how they came to live their life like that?. And for your particular research interest: What does all this tell us about my object of study? (see p.Error: Reference source not found for more detail about BNIM interpretation processes). Subsequently, the results of the lived-life analysis and the telling-of-the-told-story analysis are then brought together, and the researcher works to produce a case-account that describes the dynamics and significance of the case. Once a number of cases have been analysed (say between three and six), then a systematic panel-based procedure for comparing the dynamics of these whole cases can be used to lay the basis for case-based theorisation). The method of comparative interpretation typically used is certainly grounded and emergent from within the case. However, it points simultaneously both to the generalities and typologies characteristic of Grounded Theory Research, but also to the accounts of particular dynamics of particular cases (of people, organisations, whatever) characteristic of Case-Study Research. It is both generalising and particularising (each to do the other better), even if explicit generalising is for good reasons -- deliberately delayed (Wengraf 2001: p. 231-312; 2002). See the companion (Longer) Short Guide to BNIM for a further discussion of GPT (generalising and particularising theory).

The very basic basics laid out above are now spelled out in greater detail below in the next two sections of this document. If, after reading the rest of the Guide, you wish for further information beyond this, you should consult chapters 6 and 12 of Wengraf (2001) and other reading to be found in the bibliographies (p. Error: Reference source not found onwards). In the fourth Discussions section of the companion Longer Short Guide (not included in this Shortest version)) I put forward my current personal take on some areas of persistent (or do I mean perpetual?) interest and debate. Do join in. I very much welcome any comments and questions and suggestions for improvement (however basic, especially if basic) you may be prepared to make and share! This version has benefited greatly from discussions and trainings in London and in Auckland in mid2005, by the freedom from distraction provided by a camper-van holiday in New Zealand and from a workshop on comparative biographical research run by Julia Brannen for the UK National Council for Research Methods and by the BNIM Review Day held in July 2006 at the University of Central Lancashire. Mark Twain (cited somewhere by Maxine Greene) says: Your judgement may be flawed if your imagination is not in focus. . : Learning from experience is at the heart of our method, because it enables a particular quality of knowledge without which the quality of our interventions will be shallower and more attenuated than they might be (Cooper and Lousada 2005: 9-10)

From told story analysis to interpretation of the telling of the told story: a note A major modification and clarification of terminology has emerged from recent discussions in 2005 with a number of people and in particular with Prue Chamberlayne and Carina Meares (NZ), to whom many thanks. Namely, the following: In my textbook Qualitative research interviewing and in previous accounts, I identified the two tracks of BNIM interpretation as being that of the lived life and that of the told story. I now refer to the second track as being that of the telling of the told story, and have tried to specify more clearly how BNIMs Thematic Field Analysis (despite its name) is very different from that which might emerge from a formal-textualist literary analysis of the basic theme of a given text Why the difference? In such a textualist analysis, the subjectivity of the Real Author is often held to be a matter of indifference. In BNIMs TFA procedure, on the other hand, the telling is as important as the told, since we are concerned with reconstructing the subjectivity (the 10

2. BNIM

two-track interpretation brief account

Real Author) that is struggling to tell and not-tell over the duration and through the process -- of the telling of the told. The significance of the telling can lie as much or more in the asides, in patterns of apparently trivial idiosyncratic expression, as it can in the formal exposition of the story or the theory on which the speaker is focusing their self-presentational attention. We are looking for the basic theme not of the text but of the person behind the text (subjectivity in historical situation). Jameson has very appositely remarked that in narrative analysis what is most important is not what is said, but what cannot be said, what does not register on the narrative apparatus (Jameson 2005: xiii). Obviously, more formalist narratologists would disagree: they are doing something else. A formal-textualist narratologist (300 variants of the story known to some as Cinderella) is interested in the deep structure of the story. In Wengraf (2001: pp.368-77) I provide an example of a critical linguistics narrative analysis that of Harold the miner, ignoring the significance of its telling in an eminently narratological way, and this formal-textual told story analysis has a lot to offer. However, elsewhere in Wengraf 2001, the telling of that story is analysed in BNIM terms as clues to the subjectivity of Harold as he told that story: see two variations of me-as-researcher-told story about Harold, one more sociological and one more psychological (Wengraf 2001. 363-65). BNIM researchers are more interested in the deep structure of the subjectivity-insituation telling that story (or partly or even totally failing to tell it). As is obvious from the example of most politicians and confidence tricksters, the Implied Author of the telling of the story may well be far from identical with the Real Author who lived the life. In comparing the subjectivity inferred from the analysis of the telling of the story with that inferred from the living of the life, we are interested in the deep structure (and mutations) of the subjectivity that generated both. Somebodys life may show them as battling to succeed and succeeding over and over again; they may tell the story of that life as a perpetual victim story. What is the nature of the evolving- subjectivity-in-evolving-situation that gave rise both to the real-life battling indicated in the lived-life pattern and to the implied victim indicated in the story? The telling-of-the-told-story pattern helps us understand this. An interest in the biographical data of the lived life and some research of the historical context(s) of that life can often suggest the nature of a possible difference between the real author and the implied author. Hence the value of a two-track approach to understand semi-(defended) tellings as products of semi-defended lives in semirepressive societies.

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Having at this point completed your reading of the brief accounts of BNIM interviewing and BNIM interpretation procedures, you might wish to stop here and look at some case-study material (see bibliography A on p. Error: Reference source not found for examples) , BNIM finished products. you might wish to go on to more detailed discussions of BNIM interview procedures (next page onwards) or of BNIM interpretive procedures (p.Error: Reference source not found onwards).

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2. BNIM Interviewing in more detail

a. BNIM interviewing in more detail This section (pp.Error: Reference source not found-Error: Reference source not found) deals with BNIM interviewing practice in more detail (the practice of BNIM interpretation is dealt with from p. Error: Reference source not found onwards). I first describe BNIM interviewings three-subsession structure in more detail than before and then consider its principles, especially that of properly-sequenced narrative-pointed questioning and of active listening. First, though, a quick point about framing the BNIM interview.

2.1. Framing the interview In order to ensure relative freshness of the story to be told, there is an argument for not informing the interviewee in advance as to how the life-story interview will proceed. Obviously in your negotiating for a 2-3 hour interview slot you will have let them know in carefully general terms what your research project is and that you will be asking them about their life and experiences, but you dont raise their anxiety and preparation-level by telling them in too much detail how you are going to do it. A counter-argument is that informed consent requires that you do tell your informant that you will be asking questions in a very open way and that answering them may take the informant and the interviewer in directions that cannot be predicted by you or by them. Wengraf (2001: 188-93) deals with some of these issues; see also Hunter 2005, Hollway and Jefferson 2001, and the discussion of ethics (especially the difficulties of informed consent to the interpretation process) at the end of the companion (Longer) Short Guide.

2.2. The 3-subsession structure I briefly indicated its nature above (p. 7). There are always subsessions 1 and 2 (usually in one main interview) and there may be a later second interview (subsession 3). [See diagram on pp. Error: Reference source not found below].

2.2.1. The main interview (subsessions one and two) (2-3 hours) There are two subsessions in the main interview: a single-question initial subsession and the follow-up subsession. The single-question initial subsession one The initial narrative subsession starts with a single question designed to elicit all or part of the life-story and lived experiences of the informant as he or she chooses to tell it. This single question is referred to as a SQUIN (Single QUestion aimed at Inducing

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Narrative).The important thing is that, after that initial narrative question, the SQUIN, you ask no new questions in that section, but just support your informant as they respond to your SQUIN. This initial narrative question the core of which is tell me the story of your life, all the events and experiences that were important to you, personally, though see p. Error: Reference source not found for the rest of the full version,) may lead to an account of highly variable length: the response may last anything between 5 and 55 minutes or more. You take very brief notes on the topics they refer to using the cuewords that they use. In the companion Longer Short Guide, I say that this can be called but dont try to remember this -- SHEIOT-MM-HIATH noting, and briefly explain why. See Wengraf 2001: 134 for an (early) version of this. Dont paraphrase; use only their words. Dont try for exhaustive noting as if the tape machine werent there: just two or three of their keywords/cuewords around each topic as they pass by is all you need. More will not just be redundant; it will be actively unhelpful when you review your notes for subsession 2. In subsession 1, you should help the informant continue their life story telling for as long as they wish, but aiming for a typical minimum of 30-45 minutes. Leave it to them to tell you when they think they have finished: dont rush to help them conclude. When they do tell you theyve finished, still leave a decent amount of silence so that they have space to revise their decision to conclude. Kazmierska (2004a: XXX) has conveyed Schtzes concern for enabling and interpreting the significance of the coda, a term derived from music, the small end-section with which the speaker attempts to tie things together or correct a misapprehension that they on reflection realise you might be under. They cannot do this, unless you at the end give them a surprisingly long time to reflect and adjust. Dont worry if the initial account dries up unexpectedly quickly, say, after ten minutes. Provided they have completed what they want to say, and you have SHEIOT-noted their cuewords, their short account may well be as useful as a basis for subsession 2 in its way as a fuller account might be in another. Not infrequently, the first subsession is likely to be dominated by a broad story report with a lot of self-theorising and with only one or two narrative accounts of particular incidents. Though there will almost certainly be several places where potential particular incident memories are indicated, it will be up to you in subsession 2 to get the interviewee both to expand further any particular incident narratives (PINs) generated in subsession 1 but mostly to move towards PINs that were implicit but not delivered in subsession 1.This will facilitate a deepening of the process of recall. Once the initial session has been firmly concluded by the interviewee, you need to decide whether you have used up more than half of the available time. If you have used up more than half the time, then, if you can, ask permission from the interviewee to postpone subsession 2 to a later date. A good subsession two needs usually more time to develop than was used in subsession one. A typical proportion would be that subsession 2 needs between two-thirds and three-quarters (or more) of the total time. If enough time is not

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2. BNIM Interviewing in more detail

left at the end of subsession 1 for a good subsession 2, then postpone the subsession 2 to some other long-enough time slot within the next four weeks or so.

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The second subsession: narrative follow-up questioning (internal questioning) After the initial account has been concluded by the interviewee, unless subsession 1 was absurdly short, there should be space for a small interlude for you both to catch your breath, go to the lavatory, get a cup of tea or otherwise make a break in which you can select for subsession 2 the particular topic-cuewords on which you want to focus. In this interlude you are likely to (a) select out some of the topic cue-words that you noted and (b) decide that some of those that are left are more promising than the others, and might need to be given more time in your intuitive time-plan This interlude work on your SHEIOT-notes for beginners requires a little time. No more than 15 minutes, though, and avoid chat and discussion that could de-potentiate the next subsession. Stay in role. In subsession 2 on the basis of your SHEIOT notes, and continuing to make further SHEIOT notes -- you ask further questions about the topics you have selected, but with a lot of restrictions. First, with a slight qualification, you aim to ask only narrative-pointed questions, not any other type of question. Second you ask only about the topics raised by the interviewee, and not any others that might interest you more [the questions are internal to the interviewees account, not brought by you externally]. Third, you ask about the topics raised only in terms of the cue- words used and only in the order raised: you never put two topics together; you can miss out topics; but you can never go back to earlier topics, once youve gone past them in the list. Otherwise you run the risk of breaking the gestalt (see the example on p.52 below for the principle of never going back to an earlier topic).You make further SHEIOT-MM-HATH notes in the second session to enable you to go on asking further narrative-pointed questions in that session but always in the appropriate sequence -- so as not to break the gestalt ordering. In your subsession two, you have to do a constant multi-tasking operation. You are paying attention to the responses of the interviewee to your narrative-pointed questions. You are taking further SHEIOT-MM-HATH notes on those responses so as to enable you to follow up their answers with further questions if you so decide. You are thinking about where you are in the time-slot allotted for the interview, making sure that you will be able to cover all the cue-word-topics you think you ought to cover, leaving enough time for the last topic and any follow-ups that might arise from then. To do this, you are getting a sense of how long the typical response of the interviewee to your questions, how long it takes you on particular topics to get to one or more PINs, and re-revising your

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2. BNIM Interviewing in more detail

implicit planning of time, topics and priorities accordingly. The good news is that there is one task you dont have to do , that you should stop yourself from even starting to do: that no-no is the task of interpreting the significance of the responses given, of thinking about whether your hypotheses are being answered, and then getting ready to ask future questions to bear on that. You need to put all that right out of your head. You should be rather mechanically asking narrativepointed questions to the agenda set by the list of topics and keywords given by them to you in their initial narrative. The rest you leave till after subsession two. This means that although you give some weight to your central research question in selecting which topic-words to forget about and which ones to probe in greater depth, you give more of your personal attention to thinking about what is relevant to the person and which phrases and emphases are more pregnant with PINs (a nasty concept) than others. You are focusing on their system of relevance. At any given moment, you are always balancing between probing a particular item in the subsession one list a little more (moving horizontally) and leaving the current item and moving down the subsession one list towards the final item (vertically). See diagrams on pp .52. When you have completed your last question on the last topic raised, you can conclude subsession 2 by saying Thats all my questions. Thanks very much. Is there anything else you would like to tell me before we end the session?, and give them a lengthy time to reflect on whether there is or not and to say whatever they want, narrative or not. The interview must be taped. The tape is the record; your SHEIOT-MM-HATH notes are few and must be different. They should be no more than is required for cueing the interviewee to go back to the point in the initial subsession where they made whatever point it was. Learning to stick to the above rules and recognising when you havent -- in subsessions 1 and 2 is as easy as learning to ride a bicycle: not at all (no less difficult than learning the rules for handlng quantitative data as in SPSS!). Careful coaching (by yourself or somebody else) is crucial to recognising when and how you havent succeeded (Wengraf 2001 ch.6 gives examples). Immediately after the interview and before doing anything else, you should make brief notes on the experience of doing this first narrative interview. (Wengraf 2001: 142-4). These experiential instant-debriefing notes are as important for your personal learning as the interview tapes. You should keep writing about anything and everything as it comes into your headwhether it seems relevant or not until nothing else comes to mind. [See Riemann (2005) on the importance of field-note-making for an understanding of the experience and of your own practice].

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Just as you should allow up to one hour (or more) in the interview for the interview informant to exhaust what he or she finds that they need to say in the order and in the way they wish to say it, so you should allow a full hour after the interview of instantdebriefing time for you to exhaust what you find you need to write in the order and in the way that it comes to you. The same principle -- the free associative method-- governs the logic of you getting your interviewees to express themselves freely in their interview and you getting yourself to do the same in your self-debriefing immediately after the interview. So make the right space and take enough time for this crucial but often stupidly-neglected practice. Final Note on subsession 1 and 2 Unhurried subsession 2s usually produce key new material and different perspectives. Interviewee accounts and narrations in subsession 2 tend to give a different picture from that of subsession 1, qualifying and enriching them often in significant ways. You may need to leave a gap of a day, or even several days, between subsessions 1 and 2, but I strongly suggest that you always do have a subsession 2. As said before, if by the time you have finished subsession 1 you are running out of time, dont try to do a rushed subsession 2 but just arrange another time for it. A rushed subsession 2 is a waste of the potential generated by your unhurried subsession 1. The functioning of the first two (both unhurried, please!) subsessions vary. Often subsession 1 provides the interviewer with something rather prepared like an official press-release, (slightly or strongly anticipated) with a simplified first approximation to a fuller truth. It tends to produce an overall story of a broad sort with not much in the way of detailed accounts of particular incidents. Knowing that it is a lifestory interview, the interviewer is not completely unprepared to give such a thing, may indeed have done something like this before. Your questions in subsession 2, though, cant be anticipated so well by the interviewee, and they often release unexpected material and often PINs that significantly go counter to those of subsession 1, enriching and subverting its simplicities and sometimes unexpectedly clarifying its contradictions, confusions, and absences Hopefully, by subsession 2 you have won more trust from your interviewee who may feel more confident about going more deeply into matters that they preferred to skate over in subsession 1, seeing if you would pick them up or not. In response to the focused narrative questions in subsession 2, the broad story-report (plus a few PINs) characteristic of subsession 1 gets complemented by more particular incident narratives (and usually more spontaneous reflexivity) evoked in subsession 2. The (optional) follow-up interview: Subsession 3

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2. BNIM Interviewing in more detail

Once you have completed the first interview (subsessions 1 and 2), looked at your material and have considered the research questions that the interpretation process has raised, should you have a further (subsession 3) interview? It will vary. Many biographic researchers find that for many interviews material generated by subsessions 1 and 2 plus a couple of phone calls or conversations provide all that they need, and that a subsession 3 is not required. However, for certain research projects or certain interviews, such a subsession 3 often largely of a semi-structured or very-structured variety or a mixture of both is very necessary indeed. Can anything general be said about subsession 3? Remember that questioning in subsession 3 tends to be primarily determined by the system of relevance of the researcher. Consequently, dont try to do this in the same mindset or the same time-slot as subsession 2. Arrange it after a definite gap: a month, two months. Usually, you will have wanted to look at the transcript first (and even complete a provisional interpretation according to BNIM protocols) in order to determine what further questions you wish to ask in what sort of subsession 3. Sometimes you may wish to test out some early interpretative hypothesis this does NOT necessarily mean confronting them with your actual hypotheses as such. The sequence in any subsession 3 needs to be thought about carefully. Here is a general rule you might wish to consider. In the first part of subsession3 (2nd interview), if you have any narrative questions, you should ask them first, sticking to BNIM subsession-2 rules). If there are other sorts of questions, non-narrative ones, that arise from what was said in the first interview or arise from what was not said in the first interview but to which you want to have answers (there are examples of third subsessions in Jones 2001, in particular, his case of Sheila where photographs are used as stimulus material), then ask these after the narrative ones. Acknowledge to the interviewee that this is a different sort of interview from the previous one(s), and one in which you will be asking a lot of your own questions (which they are perfectly entitled not to answer). Ensure that you dont make the interviewee feel bad about their previous self-expression in subsessions 1 and 2 by shifting to aggressive demolition interviewing by attacking them for internal contradictions, for things missed out, etc. Otherwise, after such a hard policeman performance by you, they will feel resentment at your earlier luring of them into relaxed confiding in subsessions 1 and 2.. Maintain humility and respect, and accept any refusals to respond as their right: after all, their response is a gift to you and they must decide what they wish to give. In the latter case of research questions that require non-narrative material, the ordinary rules of semi-structured depth interviewing would come into play. Quite the opposite from subsessions 1 and 2, in subsession 3 (the follow-up interview) you are typically asking the interviewee to orient themselves to the concepts and questions that are important to you. See Wengraf (2001 ch. 4) for a discussion of how to translate research

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questions (called there theory-questions) into semi-structured depth-interview questions that will work for your different informants.

Note: Depth interviewing = super-unhurried and super- unhassled You need a minimum of 2 hours interview time to make it likely that any depth will be achieved in an interview. I personally would go for 3 hours (with time afterwards of a further hour for myself to be equally un-hurried/un-hassled in my free-associative debriefing notes), but accept a 2-hour slot. Dont accept a time-slot of less than two. A hurried interview will not go into depth; one that is hassled by lots of interventions by the interviewer or by actual or feared interruptions from outside (phones, comings-intothe-room or into the house) will not go into depth either. Both parties must want such an interview and provide time and appropriate conditions or it wont happen in the right way. If either is watching the clock or listening out for possible interruptions, the conditions arent right for a depth retrieval of past experiences and a contained and thoughtful review of them, and its better to postpone the session so as not to waste an interview or interviewee. As a slogan, you might consider: if hurried or worried, no depth, and for depth, no hurry!

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

2.4. The principles of free-associative SQUIN interviewing principle of helping the person to become open to themselves by being not worried about you principle of conceptual open-ness: prior to subsession 3, there are no prior hypotheses to be tested. principle of communication: some of the rules of every day communication are followed, but moderated by a concept of active listening discussed below you facilitate the free development and closure of a 'Gestalt' by the interviewee. You may not understand during the interview why the interviewee is responding as he or she does but, above all, dont interrupt to find out why, dont interrupt to clarify for yourself. If you interrupt the gestalt of a joke before the ending, the joke is weakened or destroyed. If you interrupt an initial narrative, the narrative interview is weakened or destroyed. Do not interrupt with questions or responses. Keeping to the cuewords used in the first session, you use them but only in the order in which they were raised -- in your subsession to formulate narrative-pointed questions: such questions do not just permit a narrative response, but actively ask for and point at a narrative response. You are pushing towards PINs (Particular Incident Narratives) related to some or all of the events referred to and the points made in subsession 1.

This sounds easy but usually in practice requires a lot of unlearning and coaching to achieve. Should you do BNIM training, learning the habit of asking narrative-pointed questions will be a key achievement, taking not a little time and unlearning (BNIM trainings are discussed on p .Error: Reference source not found). See Wengraf (2001: 126-7, 140-2) for details and an exercise. Learning to distinguish a narrative-pointed question from other sorts of question takes everybody a lot of hard work, and being able to spontaneously improvise such questions (and not other types of question or response that to begin with come much more easily to our minds) needs a lot of practice. The more one has practised other forms of interviewquestioning, the more ludicrously difficult you will discover it is to restrict yourself to narrative-pointed questioning!

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Summarising the main interview (subsessions 1 and 2): Three basic rules 1. As far as possible, [where appropriate recognise emotional expression, and then,] ask only for narrative . (In subsession 1, one SQUIN only, see p.51 and 54) . Though you may need sometimes to provide emotional support and pro-narrative nudges, these should be as minimal as possible, and always directed to getting back to narrative]. 2. Never interrupt the response wait till they get to their point of their story, until they feel that they have completed what they want to say, till they have what counts as closure for them. Dont destroy their Gestalt (their wandering line). Sing with Lee Marvin My insights were born from their wandering gestalt. The less you understand their wandering (to you) line, the more eventual value you will get from not having interrupted while it was flowing and (to you) meandering. This often involves severe self-restraint by you. Because you dont yet understand their system of relevancy, your sense of relevance can make the flow of what they say which fits their to-you-unknown system of relevancy feel irrelevant to you. What feels like meandering and irrelevancy to you is crucial news of difference about how they think and work things out. Only if you let them finish their to-you-irrelevant wandering and meandering response line (gestalt line) can you subsequently discover their system of relevancy, and so learn about and even from their system of personal culture. 3. Stay in unobtrusive emotional contact with them so they are freed to stay in emotional contact with their own unexpected feelings and memories of lived past experiences. The rather technical and dry set of rules for interview suggested above have as their philosophical basis the notion that being able to think and remember (in an interview as in life) depends on a freeing up of feeling by the person trying to think and remember. This means providing an emotionally safe space for less pleasurable and possibly emotionally-painful memories and their feelings to emerge. To do this depends on the quality of the emotionally-supportive space that you manage to construct with the interviewee in which they can feel safe to speak and to listen to themselves. Cooper and Lousada in their discussion of borderline states of mind and society refer to the instinctual conflict between making or breaking contact (OShaughnessy 1999: 868) as being inherent in every one of us and is never fully mastered (Cooper and Lousada 2005: 28), and this is also true in the jerky and complex and often contradictory movements of feeling, recall and (non)-narration in the biographic narrative interview. You should avoid by being overwhelmed by any feelings that arise, but you must let yourself register them and handle them in a creative not destructive or alienated mode.

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

Contrariwise, especially in subsession 2, there is a danger of your getting so emotionally involved with the person and the story and stories they are telling that you may (a) forget to note down their cuewords for further questioning, and (b) forget that you are a narrative-eliciting researcher struggling to stay in task, doing the work that good BNIM interviewing requires you to do. You need to maintain emotional contact but you need also stay in touch with your primary task.

Some points to guide you Start subsession 2 by asking a narrative-pointed question about their first topic of subsession 1 whatever it was. Then later topics, but only in order (see p. 52 below for a curly diagram of topics and subtopics). Always end subsession 2 with asking about the last topic with which they concluded subsession 1 whatever it was. When you ask about topics in subsession 2, keep trying to get them to move towards providing the narrative of a particular incident (PIN). This may take two or three followup questions, especially if they are used to evading experience through generalities and arguments. For really abstract informants, you might have to work very hard on their first response to get them to eventually provide a PIN; if you persist, they learn consciously or unconsciously that particular incident narratives (examples) are what youre looking for and typically start to provide more of them. You may have to start by nudges towards narrative: Can you tell me what it was like at that time/in that situation? or Do you remember anything or anyone from that time? . Their answer to that non-narrative question may enable you to then ask a narrative-pointed one. You may need to go back even further in the pro-narrative nudge, and ask first about any thought, or image, or feeling that comes to mind Answers to such a question may then allow an at that time, in that situation question, and so on towards a genuine narrative-pointed question and a PIN or PINs. If it becomes absolutely clear at some point that you arent going to get a PIN, then dont push after all, they have a perfect right not to answer all or any of your questions. Ask subsession 2 narrative-pointed questions on topics that were raised in subsession 1 with either a stronger than average or a weaker than average level of expressed emotion or emphasis. Ask subsession 2 narrative-pointed questions that suggest particular potential for your personal Research Projects Central Research Question (Wengraf 2001: 51-72) and the research question that you particularly want this interview (or type of interview) with this

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informant (or type of informant) to provide material for. Bear in mind, though, that you are exploring not your but your informants system of relevance and try to be surprised! It should be said that it is difficult to learn the habits of non-interruption of a narrative flow, non-directiveness about the direction of the narrative flow, and the art of getting --by way of pro-narrative nudges -- towards asking narrative-pointed questions (Pushing towards PINs). In the first round of training practice, the average failure rate in asking narrative-pointed questions can be between 80-100%; the novice finds themselves asking questions that permit narrative (rather than point at it) for example, you said X, tell me more about it or even questions that point away from narratives for example, you said X happened, how do you feel about it?, or you said X, why do you think that was the case?. Recording ones subsession 2 improvisations and learning to recognise the wrong sort of questions takes time and pin-(PIN)-pointed attentiveness. See Wengraf 2001: 124 for a set of illustrations of narrative-pointed and not-narrativepointed questions. It is also important in your subsession 2 narrative-pointed questions to use only the actual cue-words used by the interviewee in subsession one and to presume nothing. If the informant talks of going to college and your subsession two question goes You said you were going to university you might get it completely wrong and break the gestalt. If he says I cant remember anything about my dad and you say You said you couldnt remember anything about your father; can you tell me a story of when you spent time together, you may have broken the gestalt twice: he refers to his dad and you talk of his father, and you assume that he has met his father when he may never have done so. Change no cue-words. Presume nothing! The main rule to remember is this: therapists and others may ask story-questions to get to feelings; BNIM narrative interviewers ask feeling-questions (or thought-questions or any other sort of questions) as pro-narrative nudges to get to narratives and push towards PINs!

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

In an interview subsession devoted to enabling the informant to tell their life-history, the role of the interviewer is not to ask questions about the story, but just to enable the story to be told in the way the informant feels comfortable telling it. Your task is to facilitate the narrators telling of story. Any questions you may have about the story should not be asked in the initial narrative session. Such further questions should be kept back. This simple rule just keep asking for more story but never specifying what you may want to know -- is very difficult to follow for beginners. It is crucial, though, that you do keep back all your questions. Very briefly, in the single-question narrative interview, you are helping the informants uncover the life-history that is relevant to them, helping them to follow their systems of relevancy . To do this, you must put your own systems of relevancy to one side until later. You are, in addition, learning the very difficult art of listening and therefore of frustrating your troublesome compulsion to ask. Even if as a private individual you would love to indulge your own system of relevancies and impose them on the speaker, as a professional in such a session you are letting them express their system of relevancy. You are there for that.

Real and fake endings to subsession 1 If you are successful in enabling them to tell their story, they will nearly always spontaneously end their account by saying something like Well, thats it, thats my story, thats how it happened. An informant being silent is NOT the same as an explicit ending as described in the previous paragraph. A silence, or a pause, and it might be quite long, can be aan incubation period in which the narrator is wondering whether to go on, in what way to proceed, or remembering something. Your informants silence should not be interrupted however helpful you think your interruption might be. Dont be pressurised (from outside, but especially from inside) into being the one who ends the initial session! Just stay focused, and in active (but non-directive) listening mode.

How do you do such minimalist narrative-interviewing by embedding such narrativepointed questioning and going for PINs within the techniques and practices of active listening? I deal with this in the next section.

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Active Listening
Active Listening is needed in all interviews throughout their phases. The theory was originally derived from the work of Carl Rogers and those researching and teaching communication skills. It has different forms.

POSITIVE FORMS OF ACTIVE LISTENING Non-verbal supporting Most communication is non-verbal - one scholar has claimed that 93% of communication occurs around the words and only 7% is carried by the words -- and so you will need to learn and practice non-verbal expression of active listening. This is done partly by an attentive listening posture, a moderate degree of eye-contact, and quiet non-verbal sounds like hmm and so forth which indicate that you are listening. In particular, you need to allow the interviewee the length of pauses, of silences, that they need to think through or recall the material they are trying to access. Sometimes they may be watching images or a film in their heads or trying to recapture an internal voice or a certain body-feeling -- which need to be fully and silently accessed before they can start telling you about it. Bad listeners interrupt, or stop attending during, silences. Good listeners dont. They give non-verbal support in a non-intrusive way and dont interrupt silences, showing the interviewee that they can be relied on to stay-interested and stay not-interrupting. Empathetic support of emotional processing involved in recall If strong emotions arise during the interview, we should be prepared to acknowledge them. This will give the interviewee the feeling that we accept them and their expressed emotions and that they do not have to avoid feeling their own emotions for fear of upsetting the interviewer. This means our being very aware of our own emotional response to the unexpected things they say, so that we handle our own emotions reflexively rather than unconsciously let them dominate our response to the interviewee: (awareness of counter-transference, in psychodynamic terms). For example, if somebody starts to cry, we should not rush in to rescue them by quickly changing the topic with a new objective question or in some other way. It is more helpful and accepting to let them cry and afterwards to say Thats still hard for you, its still painful for you to remember that, that makes you sad when you think about it in an empathetic and non-judgmental way. If they express feelings of anger, you might say You still feel angry about it to show that you understand what the emotion is that they are expressing, in such a way that they 26

2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

can stay with the emotion or emerge from it in their own time. If you feel upset by some incident they describe or some emotion theyre feeling, try not to let them get diverted into having to handle your upsetness. Those with counselling training or similar will have developed this capacity; others may find it difficult or (worse) may not even be aware of the problem! Empathetic and un-intrusive acknowledging is an important skill to acquire. If they attempt to communicate their feelings, if you have to say anything at all it is important to use their words-for-feelings rather than use your own: your words may mean something different to them. You have to be very tentative about offering words for their experiencing. Such words might fit or they might be useful by provoking the interviewee into getting a better selfexpression for themselves. You might tentatively offer the words You feel worried about it, perhaps in such a way that, without worrying about you, they move into realising and perhaps saying No, I dont think I feel worried about it; I think what I feel is that I am rather sad about it. Paraphrasing AVOID as far as you can in the initial narration This should only be offered by you if it is clear that THEY want you do this and refuse to go on unless you do. To paraphrase is to summarise the significant aspect of the content what is told in your own words - [not repeating back their words in a mechanical way]. This lets the interviewee see that you have understood what they are trying to say. If you are not certain about what they are trying to say, then offer it as a self-conscious possibility to help them clarify for themselves what they are trying to say. You might say I think I havent quite grasped what you are saying: it might be X, but perhaps its Y, or maybe its something rather different. Dont volunteer paraphrases: they can lead to the interviewee worrying about you rather than about the story they are telling. In the initial narration subsession, you dont have to understand. Paraphrase only briefly, and only if they wont continue without their being sure you have understood what they were trying to say.

NEGATIVE FORMS OF ACTIVE LISTENING Since the main purpose is to enable the speaker to go on speaking because they feel listened to, avoid anything which cuts that flow.

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Dont console as in It cant have been as bad as all that or Things will get better Dont give advice as to how to deal with a problem, how to avoid something, how to do (or have done) something better: (I would have tried to convince the doctor..) Dont interpret: I think your problem may be your father, offering them some hasty instant interpretation of your own Dont intrude with yourself and your experiences with comments like I felt that too or I had a very similar experience. Dont ask for background or clarification. Leave till the end of subsession 2, or (better still) after it. Though in other forms of interviewing, such a request is quite legitimate, in this type of interviewing, you dont have to understand or follow what is being said. Unless you are completely at sea, you leave this till later. Normally things that are initially puzzling get clarified later in the process without you having to interrupt and explicitly ask. INSTEAD, FOR NARRATIVE INTERVIEWING, NOTE THE FOLLOWING: When the interviewee dries up or even tries to get you to define what they should focus upon, DONT lose control by letting them evoke your system of relevancy by asking you to participate or respond or take over or give advice or anything at all TRY TO GET MORE STORYING, MORE NARRATING, FROM THEM by asking, for example, Are there any other things you remember happening? Does it make you think of anything else that has happened? Are you thinking about something else that happened? WITHOUT specifying the content of what the storying should be about, the content of those other things, the content of that anything else. They are thus freed to give it their meaning. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The rules above are mechanical devices to help you get yourself into an emotionally empathic and supportive frame of mind: the frame of mind is more important than the set of rules. Your normally unobtrusive active listening is a way of relating to your interviewee in such a way that they feel enabled and supported in accessing often quite

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

complex and contradictory feelings and memories that they had in the course of the life and lived-experiences they are probing and narratinga-story-about to you. This involves the sometimes difficult task for you of staying engaged with their emotional realities and memories whatever comes up while being ready to help them contain painful confusing and difficult moments that may occasionally occur in them and/or between you.

IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS, SELF-DEBRIEFING FIELDNOTES HOUR You will perhaps find it helpful to imagine that your tape-recording has completely failed it does happen and that anything that you now remember about the interview and record will be the only record of the interview. Given that short-term memory lasts only until the next preoccupation starts, you are writing everything that you can remember down onto paper so that it will not be wasted. You do this before you do anything else (like getting on the bus to go home). You should also make a brief note of the material surroundings of the interview, anything that happened before or afterwards, anything about factual arrangements, including assurances of confidentiality and anonymity and how the next session will be has beenset up. In particular, you should remember points where you felt anxious (for whatever reason) and write down what you remember about that anxiety: when it happened, why it might have happened, what you did (if anything) and what happened afterwards. But start your debriefing notes with whatever comes into your head and dont try to regulate the process. Only when your mind has gone completely blank about the interview should you end this session of self-debriefing. Reckon on 45- 60 minutes of pretty constant writing after you have said goodbye to the interviewee (and before you do anything else). This fieldwork notes activity has a number of functions: 1. to provide a record in the statistically occasional event of some or all of the taping being genuinely unusable 2. to record your instant recall process which involves both what the person said but also your experience of the occasion and the sense you made of it at the time.

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Your first free-associative impressions will not be the same as -- but will provide valuable material for -- your subsequent recollection and interpretation. It has both a descriptive and an interpretive function, the meaning and uses of which will become clear only later. We have considered the key features of BNIM interviewing. You design a SQUIN appropriate for your first subsession and to take the right sort of cue-word key-phrase notes to be able to ask narrative-pointed questions in subsession 2, showing active listening but refraining always from interrupting and from being seduced into directing the future course of the answering. You can leave topics out, but you have gone on to a later topic, you can never go back to an earlier one. And, immediately after subsessions one and two, you make free-associative debriefing notes until nothing more comes to mind.

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

3. BNIM interpretation in more detail [People] truly manifest themselves in the long patterns [and tiny detail] of their acts, and not in any nutshell of self-theory (Iris Murdoch The Black Prince modified) The meaning of any action lies in the foregone alternatives (lots of people)

Any transcript of a biographic-narrative interview can be analysed in a number of ways. What we offer below is just one way. The typical focus of BNIM interpretation procedures is the attempt to generate the best possible understanding of the experiencing interpreting acting subjectivity of the biographical agent in their historically evolving situation: subjectivity in historical location/situation/processes. As researcher, your implicit concept (theory-in-use) of subjectivity is crucial here. I and others use a model that stresses (i) the emotional component of subjectivity, that it is the e/motions that put the agent into life-living and story-telling motion; (ii) that because everybody has many values that cannot all be simultaneously maximised, e/motional ambivalence about any course of action is to be expected, and (iii) that we are all always defended culturally and personally against full self-knowledge and selfunderstanding of our ambivalent e/motions, choices and actions, past present and future. Your theory of situated subjectivity may be different from the above, but you need to know what it is!: not your official theory, but your theory-in-use. What for you counts as a good enough answer to the question What might the interviewee be experiencing?? What would feel like a not quite good-enough answer that would make you feel you need to probe deeper and get a more adequate answer?

3.1. Reconstructing two decision-making flows BNIMs analytical methodology aims to grasp the experiencing of the lifeworldinterpreting and lifeworld-acting e/motional defended subject. It aims to achieve this by attempting to construe (reconstruct) two sorts of flows of decision-making that, after the interview, the subject can be seen as having done. The first is the flow of decisions in their lived life. We try to see what pattern of choices they seemed to be making in the lived-life of objective life events inasmuch as their

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biographic narratives tell us about these events. Clearly, we assume that we have an incomplete record. The second flow of decisions (and here we do have a fuller record of [verbal] outcomes) is the flow of decisions in the telling of their story. What events and topics do they talk about, in what ways do they talk about them, and how do they want us to evaluate the events and topics and phases of that life? How do they present themselves to us? What moral of the (biographical) story do they want us to draw? What moral of the story does their story point away from, might they want us NOT to draw? Why? Above all, what is the significance of the shifts of decision and self-interruptions as the improviser struggles to manage his or her flow of improvisation? See the diagram on p.Error: Reference source not found , elaborated on p. 49. We assume therefore that the flow of events in the lived life provides one very incomplete set of outcomes from which to reconstruct the experiencing subject who did the lived life, and also that the flow of events in the self-presentation in the interview provides a more complete (if short) set of outcomes from which to reconstruct the experiencing subject who at a particular moment of their life -- did the beinginterviewed and did the telling-of-the-told-story in particular. The question then arises: by what procedures is the researchers interpretation of the experiencing/doing subject achieved? The BNIM answer to this question is as follows:

3.2. BNIM procedures for doing this reconstructing We must therefore proceed by an incessant critical reconstruction of the situations in which men (sic) found themselves and of their thoughts about those situations that resulted in a decision to act in such a way and not in another. History is the study of the significance of the foregone alternative, and by focusing attention in this way the past can be made as urgent and as uncertain, as realistic, as our own present A history that does not reveal possibilities in the past will not reveal them in the present either Most people think that nothing but this wearying reality of ours is possible, wrote Nietzsche The particular importance of the imagination in transcending the historically given must be noted.. Whatever the entity whose history it is that we wish to trace and consider, both the emergence of this particular and its development in a particular way must be grasped and exposed as a succession of presents in which, in response to ever-arising needs of the situation, alternative courses of action are continually being considered and rejected (Wengraf 1960b). To understand the experiencing/acting subject as they move (future-projecting, but) future blind though each and every aspect of their life, the essence of the BNIM approach is that the researchers attempt to simulate that future-blind experiencing and selection

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

between alternatives as it occurs through and over time (Rosenthal 1993, 2002, 2006). This is done in a way rather different from most of other interpretive methods. Most users of BNIM but you may be different and thats fine -- use an implicit model of two (interacting) dynamics at work in the telling of the told tale. One is that of the cognitivenarrative effort by the individual to improvise a coherent whole story as requested by the SQUIN despite the difficulties of doing so The second is that of the personal (and cultural and situational) dynamics of the defended subject (Hollway and Jefferson 2000) that constrain and facilitate, shape and interrupt, the telling of that intended (but impossible) completely coherent whole story in which all the parts fit together without a problem and nothing is said that subverts the intended image of reality. We try to get at the interaction of the cognitive narrative project and the defended subjectivity. 3.2.1 Future-blind chunk-by-chunk experiencing

In general, if all the worlds a stage, then all of us are constantly improvising our lives. All our journeys are journeys into uncertainty. At any given moment of our lived lives, we are moving forward having plans, making guesstimates, not knowing how our plans will work out, what contingencies will happen to us and those around us, being surprised, surprising others, surprising ourselves. And this future-blindness of all present action is true of (both parties in) the co-improvised interview performance as well. So, given that the data includes the transcript of the whole interview [and often this includes all the lived-life data that the researchers will work with], how does the BNIM approach achieve such a simulation of the subject not knowing-the-future? Briefly, by recasting the flows of the recorded interview on the one hand and the flows of the reported lived life on the other into two series of event-chunks, and then starting by asking an interview panel that knows nothing of the whole life or the whole interview to imagine the possible subjective experiencing of the focal protagonist at the point of the first event-chunk, and then of a number of subsequent event-chunks in each eventchunk series. The future-blind method of the researcher simulates the future-blind acting/experiencing subject, and thus enables us to reconstruct for ourselves and to an extent empathically within ourselves -- the predicaments, opportunities and decisions of the selecting/acting subjectivity in question. This work begins with a first phase of panel interpretation in a 3-hour session. Though in your research practice it is important to start any actual BNIM interpretation by analysing biographical data first to do a biographical data analysis, in this Shortest Guide it is easiest to see this first by thinking about the interview. So let us start with the interview record of the improvised performance of the improvising historically-situated subjectivity.

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3.2.2 Reconstructing the interview flow and telling of story The flow of the interview (as recorded in the transcript) is turned into a sequence of text segments. A new text segment is held to start when any one of three things happens: 1. the speaker changes (shift from interviewer to interviewee or vice-versa).
For the ease of exposition here, we ignore this type of change in the discussion below.

2. the topic being spoken about changes 3. the manner in which the topic is being spoken about changes (textsort; see p.55) Each of these are held to represent a decision by the speaker (in a biographical narrative, to speak about the same topic but from now on in a different way; to change the previous topic, etc.). The questions arise: : what was the speaker experiencing when they decided to stop what they were doing and do something else? What was that decision-making (principle of selection) that went into making a shift? What e/ motional complexity and urgencies drove the decision-making? An interpretive hypothesis about the (often contradictory, ambivalent) experiencing during the doing and the closing of the interview segment is put forward and, it is part of the method that such hypotheses should be preferably linked to an eventual guess as to what the shape of the next or succeeding text segments would be like if the experiencing hypothesis were true. E.g. If the experiencing hypothesis is that the interviewee is embarrassed about showing emotion when giving a detailed story about topic F (family), then one following hypothesis would be that he or she will shift either to a less emotion-inducing topic (e.g. Work) or to a different way of talking about the same topic F (rather than re-living a narrated moment very concretely, s/he might keep the emotion better at bay by either keeping the topic F but shifting to an abstract argument, or by launching into a declaration of values). S/he might possibly do both (changing topic to W and shifting out of narrative). Once the panel has registered its alternative models of the experiencing subject at that point, then the actual next segment is revealed. This new chunk of data might confirm some previous hypotheses, force a shift in others, lead us to reject still others. Some earlier hypotheses might and for a long time they do -- remain untouched. Having considered the impact of the new event chunk on earlier hypothesising, the panel then turns to generate new hypotheses and counter-hypotheses in the light of the new event-chunk.

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

Then the exercise is repeated. At some point during this procedure of chunk-by-chunk hypothesis generating and rectifying, a member of the panel may intuit a structural hypothesis.. It guesses forward to the eventual shape that might be found in the series of data-chunks being studied. This is also recorded and may stimulate different further structural hypothesising. All hypotheses of all sorts are recorded, all remain provisional and in play. Structural hypotheses are sought during this process, and at the end of the panel, panel members are invited to generate their own summary syntheses (in words but often in an embodying image) of the subjectivity-in-situation that they detect in the lived life to serve as a repertoire of hypotheses to guide the further work of the researcher. By the time the 3-hour panel has ended its work, the panel (more typically, the researcher on their own going on beyond and also reviewing the work of the panel) usually has a quite strong set of hypotheses about the experiencing deciding subjectivity that produced that flow of interview decisions. Something like pattern, a gestalt, emerges, or is at least foreshadowed. We have reasons for thinking that we understand better what story is trying to be told and what is the subjectivity that is trying to tell that story about the lived life, and not another story that might have been told by someone else, or by the same person in an earlier moment of their life. We ask What is the text trying to persuade us of? What is the meaning behind all this? What is all this about? What are we being asked not to think? What is happening behind the text as expressed in the text? The hypotheses generated by the panel and the individual summary syntheses that they generate at the end of the panel help to orient the further post-panel work of the researcher. This does not mean that further post-panel research by the researcher will be bound by any ideas of the panel that kick-started his or her inquiry. The eventual findings may be very different, but that does not mean that the panel made no contribution or was wrong. De Bono has written well on the importance of ideas, the judgement about the truth of which is neither yes, nor no, but po creative in the further advance of the inquiry or research process. We need to be always pursuing more truth, but never succumbing to the phantasy that we possess the truth. At the end of the researchers further work on the telling of the told story, they need to produce an internal document of findings (some 5-15 pages, perhaps) that summarises the findings of the sequentialisation (so that it can be briefly overviewed without ploughing the detailed record of the process of doing the TFA), and then write a structural summary about the subjectivity that produced that story told that way in that context of no more than a page.

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3.2.3 Micro-analysis of selected segments of the verbatim interview Often, even after the TFA described above, we remain somewhat undecided about the significance of the interview as it flowed. We may try to clarify a bit further by one or more panel micro-analyses. In a micro-analysis (typically of a chunk of verbatim transcript, but an audio or video clip can be used), a puzzling small piece of expression or interaction is examined close-up. The principle of the chunk-by-chunk future-blind analysis continues, but the chunks are very small indeed. The TFA might be said to look for overall thematic congruency underlying the flow of segments; the Micro-analysis of small bits of verbatim text is concerned to understand moments in the interview where incongruent and contradictory meanings seem to erupt into an otherwise largely well-mastered flow of improvised account, or where the speaker is not finding the right words to convey a definite felt tacit experience. Or for some other reason. [These puzzling segments can either be ignored by the speaker (the un-noticed Freudian slip) or lead to a flurry of attempted intensive remedial work by the speaker]. Sometimes the interpretive panel detects a contradiction between emotional impulses; sometimes between would-be self-positionings: sometimes a struggle between cultural constraints and personal experience or vocabulary. Sometimes things quite other than the above are going on: the essence of coping with the puzzlement is that you cant predict before the micro-analysis panel how it will be made best sense of by the panel (if you could, you wouldnt need the panel!). In any case, the results of such micro-analyses of difficult and awkward little bits are fed back into the main understanding of the told story/ interview performance / selfpresentation as described above. Additional note: Mechtild Bereswill has experimented productively with asking different members of a (student) group to read the transcript separately and each identify what he/she considers the most productive segment of a text to be for an eventual micro-analysis. The arguments of each student in the group for their segment candidate provide powerful insights into the text as a whole even before any actual micro-analysis occurs! For this to work, all the members of the group have had to really thoroughly sink themselves into the text.

3.2.4 Reconstructing the life-flow: the living of the life The same procedure is carried out for the flow of life-events, the chronology of objective facts, extracted from the interview and any other relevant sources (see p. 8 above for more detail). In the same way as above, a (this time chronological) series of life-eventchunks is laid out. and a future-blind panel attempts at the end of each item to say how the experiencing subject might have experienced the event(s) so far and what would be likely to happen next in the lived life if they had. Structural hypotheses are sought

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

during this process, and at the end of the panel, panel members are invited to generate their own summary syntheses of the subjectivity that they detect in the lived life to serve as a repertoire of hypotheses to guide the further post-panel work of the researcher. Again, after having worked through the process of doing the biographical data analysis assisted by but not bound by the initial kick-start panel for this series, the researcher then writes a short document summarising findings (say 5 pp) about the phases of the lived life, and after that a structural summary (1pp) about the continuities and discontinuities of the subjectivity that lived that lived life, as far (necessarily not very far) as can be hypothesised from the objective data of that life.

3.2.5 Summary, and then putting the lived life and told story together To summarise, dealing with each series (lived life, told story) separately, and future-blind to data not yet presented, constantly attempting to reconstruct the experiencing/interpreting subject at each decision point and riskily predicting the shape of what alternative he or she would then select, the panel and then the researcher engage in a datum-by-datum analysis of the performance of the biographer in their telling of the story and in their living of their life. This, it is expected, will clarify the psycho-societal dynamics of [and in] their particular milieu and social setting.

The point is parallel to that made by semiology that the meaning of any particular choice of sign depends on all the other signs that could have been selected at that point, but were not. The fuller the range of all the foregone virtual alternatives (meanings given to the experienced situation, actions in it) considered, the more precisely we can understand the significance that we should give to the particular virtual alternative that actually did occur.

Once the action-flows of the lived life on the one hand and the told story on the other have been separately analysed in this future-blind segment-by-segment, datum-by-datum, way, -- kick-started in each case by a panel and then completed one way or another by the researcher on their own -- then the question can then be asked: Why did the person who lived their life in the way we have described, then present their life story and themselves in the interview in the way that they did?; how can we understand the consistencies and inconsistencies between the lived life and the self-presentation in the interview? To answer these questions, the researcher starts from the internal documents of findings produced separately by the analysis of the biographical data, by the analysis of the telling of the told story, and by the findings of any micro-analysis that was undertaken. We are now looking for a description of the dynamics of the historical evolution of the case. This is usually understood as a particularised grounded theory, a case history: this can be presented in terms of the succeeding phases of the lived life in which often one or

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more past perspectives (usually detected in particular incident narratives) on the life as a whole or on incidents in the life or on the self or other protagonists within the life can be distinguished from -- but also intelligibly related to -- the present perspective currently dominating the telling of the life story at the moment of interview. This involves seeing events as moments that can reproduce or transform previous inner-world and/or outerworld structures that previously characterised the particular situated subjectivity being examined (Swell 2005) After such a history of the evolution of the case has been developed integrating the twin tracks of the living of the lived life and the telling of the told story, you may wish to go further, and find ways of describing the dynamics of that case evolution and the structure in more general terms. Such imaginative activity is very much helped by careful whole-case comparison in which sensing the specific pattern of the whole (Gendlin 1981) and the news about difference (Bateson 1973) has to be evoked within you in unhurried and surprising ways; it is often better to start with an image or a metaphor or a gut-feeling than with a scholarly word or summative discursive theory.

Look for exemplars, and think about your own Central Research Question In BNIM-based case- studies, (e.g. in Chamberlayne et al 2002) you will find examples of psychological and sociological, or better psychosocietal, answers to such questions. What we have tried to do so far is to suggest the methodology on which the case-studies were undertaken. It should be stressed that the work leading up to the juxtaposed patterns of the living of the lived life on the one hand and the telling of the told story on the other is relatively craft-like and capable of formal systematisation. An extended technical discussion of the BNIM procedures and practice can be found in Wengraf 2001 (ch.12). However, the task of producing holistic syntheses in the form of a case evolution history is more art than craft, and the process after the production of the juxtaposed patterns of lived life and told story does not lend itself to formal systematisation in the same way. Instead, we have to look at exemplars of finished case accounts so as to intuitively sense how they might be produced. However, not all BNIM-based or BNIM-using research is focused on generating full case studies of the life-histories of individual people . The important questions for you are: What would a good-enough answer to your Central Research Question look like? What sort of answering would you and your research audience think of as not quite good enough? Can you find or develop models of both so as to guide you in your construction of a presentation of your own work?

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

Examples of good-enough and not-good-enough answers will be found in the research literature around your own topic as treated so far in your own (inter)disciplinary field. These need to be studied as exemplars of modes of answering (Wengraf 2001: Part VI Writing up: strategies of (re)presentation rather clumsily provides one way of looking at such exemplars). You are working and researching towards your own template of adequate presentation Your own particular CRQ, Central Research Question (defined by your own special research project) whether generalising or particularising -- will probably not be identical to either of the above default questions: however, you probably will be interested in the relation of events and actions and the lived experience of individuals and groups and how these have evolved over time, and such an interest will have led to your interest in BNIM as a methodological resource available for such a study.

3.2.6. The function and functioning of the panels A warning. The use of two three-hour panels (one to analyse the objective biographical data in the chronology; the other to analyse the deep thematics of the telling of the told story) to kick-start the researchers twin-track approach (and another for any micro-analysis that may eventually seem useful) does not mean that panels are the most important aspect of BNIMs interpretive procedure. Panels are not uncommon in social research. What is relatively unusual is the BNIMs combination of (a) interpretive panels, and (b) futureblind chunk-by-chunk interpretation along two distinct tracks, and (c) its strategy of experential hypothesising about the nature of unknown future chunks. We expand on this below, but should stress that only 6-9 hours (or 12 at typical maximum) of any work on a case is spent in panel. Most of the time spent on interpretation a case might take a month, the panels might take 3 or 4 half-days is spent by the researcher nowhere near a panel. The function of the panel and the recording of its deliberations is to overcome the distorting effects of the blindspots and the hotspots, the defended subjectivity, of you as individual researcher (see Froggett and Wengraf 2004 for a discussion and detailed exploration of an example, plus references), and to widen your imagination irreversibly (through the registered panel discussion especially) for post-panel work. This is especially important for the lone researcher whose conditions of work (i.e. most peoples!) make it impossible for them to work frequently in a team (see also Jones 2001 for detailed presentation of team interpretation work and processes). Even in a research team, however, much work has to continue to be done by one researcher on their own supported by occasional presentations to, and discussions with, other members. The work of the initial panels, and the [typed-up] record of their deliberations, raises the capacity of even the most experienced researcher in a way that needs to be experienced to be believed. As the paper by Froggett and Wengraf shows, starting from 2004 onwards, in BNIM panels we deliberately and very productively used intermittently an explicit focus on the

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subjective response (counter-transference) of panel members to the successive chunks of data as a way of speeding up and sharpening panel hypothesising. Nervous about this to start with, we are starting to be very pleased with the results. What might be disregarded as very far flung or far-fetched hypotheses quite frequently turn out to have come from somewhere pretty deep, and generate oddly insightful ideas and hypotheses. Scheffs remarks about the tacit processing involved in our unconscious and superficially inexplicable responses to bits of data seem very justified (Scheff 1997: 54-8). For an example, see also Buckner (2005). Given the crucial role of interpretive panels that we have suggested, for each interviewee, you should include in your time-budget, two 3-hour panel interpretations (to start off the living-of-the-lived-life analysis and the telling-of-the-told-story analysis, respectively) and another 4-hours that could be used for micro-analysis of say two puzzling text segments. You should look for three or four other people to join you in each of your panels. Try to have different people on your different panels. Though the members of your panel should if possible include somebody similar to the interviewee, you should then look for heterogeneity. They should be significantly unlike each other and, especially, unlike you. If you are part of a collective research team, then other members of the team should be easily recruitable. If you are an individual researcher attached to a university, then the chances are that there are PhD or MA students around who are likely not to have a wide and thorough training in qualitative research methods and who would therefore be happy to invest three hours in learning about another one. If you are not attached to any research unit, then you need to enrol family and friends members of an interpretive panel do not need to be academics or researchers and, indeed, it is often better to keep people like yourself in that respect in a definite minority on your panels! Remember, heterogeneity of educational formation, generation, gender, class, ethnicity, occupation, national culture etc is the secret of a good panel. You will also need to become skilled in handling groupdynamics and your part in them: even if you have no practice or training in facilitating groups, with reflection you will develop this skill over time.

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2. BNIM interviewing rules and points to guide you

3.3. Conclusion We have tried to develop further in this section the detail about the interpretation procedures of BNIM focused on hypothesising systematically about the experiencing subjectivity-in-situation that expresses itself both in the pattern of the lived life and also in the pattern of the telling of the told story. We have stressed the importance of the subjectivity of the situated researcher and the importance of initial 3-hour heterogeneous panels with fully recorded brainstorming and hypothesising for overcoming his or her inevitable defendedness with its blindspots and hotspots. This concludes our introduction to BNIM. The next section of this Guide provides a set of discussion-points for those interested in the areas being discussed. After that, there are bibliographies, diagrams and information about BNIM trainings and taster-events, should you wish to pursue your interest.

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Error: Reference source not found4. Discussions This second half of the Short Guide considers different points frequently raised in discussions of BNIM. It will be of interest mostly to people who have done some BNIM work. The first part deals with how BNIM uses cases and case-comparisons. We consider the question of How many cases?. The second looks a little more technically at the term perspective which we use a lot at the moment in our interpretation of biographic material as in whats the informants perspective on the world, on him or herself, on the problem? and note that we use it to convey something emotionally much richer and more difficult to grasp like a structure of feeling or felt sense (Gendlin 1981) that can be evoked (with the help of direct quotations, images etc as well as conceptual propositions) but not fully articulated in concepts. A further section looks at the vexed question of researcher / informant and interpretive-panel / informant intersubjectivity and revisits the question of how the future-blind chunk-by-chunk procedure of BNIM lets you see further and deeper than you might expect into the experience of, and the loose coupling of, inner and outer worlds. It suggests why achieving a good sense of the perspective or structure of feeling of a person, milieu or organisation is supported by the BNIM methodology of interpretation. The next section shows how BNIM-researchers continue to work with the verbatim transcript after the interpretive panels have kick-started the process of interpretation. It suggests the importance of the work of Fritz Schtze in helping us think systematically about the constraints of biographic narrative improvisation and the process-structures involved. A very provisional section suggests some points about the ethics of depthinterviewing / interpretation as carried out in BNIM. A final section reproduces a paper by Prue Chamberlayne on how, when working on a case, to think the whole other than by a mechanical following of rules.

These discussions are not to be found in this Shortest version, but only in the Longer Short Guide full edition.

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Bibliography some BNIM texts

Bibliographies Bibliography A: short list by topic area Descriptive and policy-oriented: Torbjorn Andersen. 2005. A particular case of the possible: sexual abuse in adolescence a story of overcoming, in Qualitative Social Work vol.4(3) p253-69 Julia Brannen., Peter Moss, and Ann Mooney, A.2004. Working and caring over the 20th century: change and continuity in four-generation families. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan Prue Chamberlayne and Annette King. 2000. Cultures of care: biographies of carers in Britain and the two Germanies. Bristol: Policy Press Prue Chamberlayne, Michael Rustin and Tom Wengraf (eds).2002. Biography and social exclusion in Europe: experiences and life journeys. Bristol: Policy Press Prue Chamberlayne and Antonella Spano. 2000. Modernisation as lived experience: contrasting case studies from the Sostris project, in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf, (eds). The turn to biographical methods in social science: comparative issues and examples. London: Routledge Sostris Working Paper no.1: Social Exclusion in Comparative Perspective (1997) Sostris Working Paper no.2: Case Study Materials: the Early Retired (1998) Sostris Working Paper no.3: Case Study Materials: Lone Parents (1998) Sostris Working Paper no.4: Case Study Materials: Ethnic Minorities and Migrants (1999) Sostris Working Paper no.5: Case Study Materials: Unqualified Youth (1999) Sostris Working Paper no.6: Case Study Materials: Ex-traditional Workers (1999) Sostris Working Paper no.7: Case Study Materials: Unemployed Graduates (1999) Sostris Working Paper no.8: Innovative Social Agencies in Europe (1999) Sostris Working Paper no.9: Sostris Final Report - From Biography to Social Policy (1999) *Patrick Firkin, with Ann Dupuis and Carina Meares. 2004. New Zealand Experiences: biographical narratives of professional migrants on working in New Zealand. University of Auckland: Labour Market Dynamics Research Programme. 89pp. Available as http://massey.ac.nz/publications/Migrant%20Report.pdf

Lynn Froggett, Prue Chamberlayne, Stef Buckner and Tom Wengraf. 2005. Report on

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the Bromley by Bow Healthy Living Centres work with older people. University of Central Lancashire. Available from < http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/health/socialwork/bromleybybow/publications.htm > Kip Jones. 2001. Narratives of Identity and the Informal Care Role . Unpublished PhD thesis, De Montfort University.

Professional-practice: Tanya Campbell-Green and Fiona Poland. 2006. Using a biographic narrative interpretive method: exploring motivation in mental health, in Linda Finlay and Claire Ballinger (eds). Qualitative research for allied health professionals: challenging choices.London: John Wiley Tanya Campbell-Breen. 2004. Motivation in mental health: a hermeneutic qualitative exploration of client and occupational therapist narratives. Unpublished PhD thesis. Norwich: University of East Anglia *Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Ursula Apitzsch (eds) 2004. Biographical methods and professional practice: an international perspective. Bristol: The Policy Press Prue Chamberlayne. 2004. Emotional retreat and social exclusion: biographical methods in professional practice. Journal of Social Work Practice vol. 18(3) Lynn Froggett and Prue Chamberlayne. 2004. Narratives of social enterprise: from biography to practice and policy critique. Qualitative Social Work vol. 3(1) Kip Jones. 2006. Informal care as relationship: the case of the Magnificent Seven, in Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. Vol 13, pp. 214-20 Tom Wengraf. 2004a Boundaries and relationships in homelessness work: Lola, an agency manager in FQS [Forum for Qualitative Social research] vol. 5 (1)

Methodological: Stef Buckner. 2005. Taking the debate on reflexivity further: psychodynamic team analysis of a BNIM interview, in Journal of Social Work Practice vol 19 (1) p.59-72 Roswitha Breckner. 1998.The biographical-interpretive method: principles and procedures, in SOSTRIS Working Papers, no.2. London: Centre for Biography in Social Policy, University of East London, pp.99-104

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Bibliography some BNIM texts Prue Chamberlayne. 2005. Inter-subjectivity in biographical methods: mirroring and enactment in an organisational study. Paper produced for the Goettingen Conference. Available from p.m.chamberlayne@open.ac.uk *Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf, (Eds). 2000. The turn to biographical methods in social science: comparative issues and examples. London: Routledge Chris Jones and Susanna Rupp. 2000. Understanding the carers world: a biographicinterpretive case study, in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf, (eds). The turn to biographical methods in social science: comparative issues and examples. London: Routledge Emma Snelling. 2005. Hungry researchers: the tensions and dilemmas of developing an emancipatory research project with members of a Hearing Voices group, in Journal of Social Work Practice vol. 19 (2) pp. 131-47 Tom. Wengraf. 2001. Qualitative research interviewing: biographic narrative and semistructured method. London: Sage Publications Tom. Wengraf. 2004b. BNIM and the psycho-societal challenge: towards a psychoanalytically-informed institutional ethnography, and/or vice-versa, but above all both!. Paper produced around the IRGfPSA Dubrovnik workshop June 2004, pp.58 (available from tom@tomwengraf.com) = wider scope than just BNIM

iFurther references can be found in Bibliography B in the (Longer) Short Guide to BNIM.

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See full version of the Short Guide.

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References longer list

Diagrams Figure 8 BNIM in the CRQ-TQ structure 0

What are the dynamics of the case?

What is the case-history of the case?

What patterns are suggested by analysing the Living of the Lived-Life?

What patterns are suggested by analysing the Telling of the Told-Story?

Outside Data other interviews and documents

The (BNIM) BiographicInterpretive Interview

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References longer list Figure 8 BNIM in the CRQ-IQ structure 2.3

CRQ 1: What are the dynamics of the case?

CRQ 2: What is the case-history?

Living of lived life analysis pattern

Telling of told story analysis pattern

What we do learn from the micro-analysis of selected segments of verbatim transcript?

What are the results of the Biographic Data Analysis? (BDA)

What are the results of the Thematic Field Analysis? (TFA)

What is the Biographic Data Chronology? (BDC)

What is the Text Structure Sequentialisation? (TSS)

Outside Data Field-notes + other interviews documents

The BNIM Narrative Interview Material tape + transcript

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social + historical research etc

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References longer list Figure 8 Classic SQUIN and the 3 (sub) Sessions.2 A SQUIN: Single Question aimed at inducing Narrative(s) As you know, Im interested in.[topic area] In a minute Im going to ask you to please tell me your life story, All the experiences and the events which were important for you, up to now, Start wherever you like Please take the time you need Ill listen first, I wont interrupt Ill just take some notes in case I have any further questions for after youve finished telling me about it all OK. So can you please tell me your life story, All the events and experiences that were important for you, personally, up to now. Start wherever you like.

Variants can be designed for particular research foci [phase or aspect of a life]

Three Sub-Session Structure

ONE. Initial SQUIN - and initial response/account facilitation but no direction or interruption unspecified narrative questions if necessary - note taking on topics for Subsession 2 TWO. Narrative Questions on Mentioned Topics only - only topics raised in subsession ONE - only in the order of their raising - only using the words used by the narrator

LATER, maybe after analysis of material from ONE / TWO A separate interview, say a month later THREE. All further questions relevant to the Interests and Theories of the Researcher

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- some topics may arise from ONE or TWO - others almost certainly wont Figure 8 Curly diagram nine topics in order2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. QRI p.139

Father Mother - early negative, later positive attitude to interviewee Julia [sister] Always feeling stupid Grandmothers death before subject was born Career University Primary school Mother appearance

Figure 8 Nine topics and four subtopics in gestalt order

1. Father 2. Mother - early negative, later positive attitude to interviewee 3. Sister 4. Always feeling stupid 5. Grandmothers death before subject was born 6. Career 7. University 8. Primary school 7a marriage in final year 9. Mother - appearance 7b loneliness starting University 7c desire for grandfathers support 7d reasonable University results 1) Stick to the narrative order of telling - not the chronological order 2) NEVER go back to a point earlier in the narration, once youve reached a later one 3) Dont fuse apparently similar topics (e.g. mother 2, mother 9) 4) In subsession 2, f you start with topic 7, you cant go back to topics 1-6. 5) Once she has replied in subsession 2 with narrative 7a-7d, you can raise or miss out any of the subtopics 7a-7d, (but not go back to an earlier subtopic), or go on to 8 or 9. In

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References longer list this latter case, again, you cant go back to subtopics of 7 or any earlier topics 1-6.

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Figure 8 Squin design sheet - menu of possibilities

Can you please tell me about the / your story of your experience of

.................. .................. ..................

all those events and experiences which were important for you, how it all developed up to now. till it stopped being personally relevant You could start about the time ......... began for you personally became personally important Begin wherever you like. Please take the time you need... // Weve got about ..... minutes/ ...... hours I'll listen first, I wont interrupt, // I tell you if we are running out of time Ill just take some notes for after youve finished telling me about your story of your experiences." to be said in full, as designed! Full Squin Partial SQUIN, Conceptual Focus a phase of your life a particular biographical strand biographically relevant phases your story of your life

e.g. youth; getting old e.g. professional work, family e.g. your family during the war

The temporal focus for any focus should be formulated pro-subjectively , not specifying time or event so that it is the interviewee who decides where it starts and where it finishes

Special issues or themes a migration an illness or period of bad health a segment of personal life a personal experience of a collective historical event a type of situation

e.g. a relationship e.g. the Second World War e.g. having children etc.

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References longer list Figure 8 The D-A-R-N-E Textsorts The D-A-R-N-E textsorts Textsorts can be identified as falling into one of five prototypical classifications (there are mixed cases, and subtypes) the initial letters of which are D-A-R-N-E, so this can be thought of as a DARNE classification.

D = Description, namely the assertion that

certain entities have certain properties, but in a timeless and non-historical way. No sequence of events is provided. This often provides the structural background to a story

A = Argumentation, namely the development of argument and theorizing

and position-taking, usually from a present-time perspective

R = Report, The story of a sequence of events told in a very thin way, like a
bare police report of dates and behaviours. The teller appears to keep at some existential distance from the experience of the events being reported

N = Narrative, namely the telling of a one-off event-sequence, told in a way

which is close to the emotional experience of being part of the incident being reported (or several such lived-event sequences) A rich or thick account in Geertzs understanding: [Particular Incident Narrative PIN] A rich description of an action/event - sequence. He said...then I did... then they.. and then. then I thought, and so I... but then....

E = Evaluation, a short form of argumentation given before, during or after

a Narrative or a Report, the function of which is to provide the explicit moral of the story that the narrator wishes to be drawn

Darne - thin revised.2

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Defended complex researcher(s)

RESEARCH TEAM PANEL

RESEARCH PEERS

psychodynamic -----------------------------------------sociological GEORGES DEVEREUX PIERRE BOURDIEU psycho-societal reflexivity

INTERVIEW SELFREPORT-TALK
Biographic-narrative BNIM interviews Semi-structured depth interviews Group Discussions

OBSERVATION OF PRACTICES
Institutional observation

Casual observation

Research assistant diaries

Narratives around artworking (and other socio-technical practices) and the sensed environment Participatory Action Research PAR PARTICIPATION

BBB CENTRE AS THE OBJECT OF STUDY

defended complex subject(s)

WIDER SOCIAL AND SOCIETAL DYNAMICS

defended complex organisations / societies

Figure 8 Triangulated multi-method 'psycho-societal' methodology
Based on the experience of the Bromley-by-Bow research into a Healthy Living Centre, the diagram above illustrates the three points of a multi-method self-triangulating and complementary methodology using BNIM and other data-collection methods for a psycho-societal research project. Georges Devereux stands for psychodynamic reflexivity, Pierre Bourdieu for sociodynamic reflexivity: they combine into psycho-

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References longer list

societal reflexivity

BNIM Trainings For about eight years now, Prue Chamberlayne and myself have been developing BNIMbased research and BNIM-based training. In the autumn of 2005, we received two encouraging remarks, and I wrote an email as below:
Some encouraging news about the direct and indirect productivity of BNIM. Given that we are not all in contexts where BNIM is spontaneously understood and welcomed, I thought it would be nice to circulate this. ONE: Emma Snelling wrote: I had been meaning to get in touch to let you know that a number of the trainees who graduated this year got top awards in their doctorate projects... and that the BNIM and narrative projects were considered to be of a particularly high standard.. and were examined by both internal and external examiners and were very well received. A number of these projects were based on the BNIM interview technique and also drawing on the BNIM analysis as well. Rudi Dallos (the course director you met when you came to Plymouth) was very impressed and has told me that the standard of the research of those undertaking these projects has improved the standard of the whole cohort. Rudi wants to continue to build on the narrative research base at Plymouth. TWO: A doctoral student who had done the BNIM training and who received a copy of the new Short Guide wrote: Thank you very much for this valuable resource! I have now completed the panels which turned out to be very interesting and very powerful!.My supervisor gave me a lot of compliments because of the method of choice and told me that TFA is just like psychoanalysis, where you make an interpretation and wait for it to happen. When it happens you know that you were right. I found it extremely interesting how after a while you can really get into the thinking of the thinking, feeling, experiencing subject through this method! Amazing! I commented: We usually get positive feedback from people who have done the course, and thats always encouraging. When they get positive feedback about their use of the method from supervisors and others who have no axe to grind except to judge the professional quality of the results, thats even more encouraging for us, and for others who have or might use BNIM.

So, if anybody has any other similar good evaluations now or in the future, do circulate them to the group. And, contrariwise, if there are any negatives that we should know about, and tackle, they are just as important to feed back to the community of BNIM-practitioner.

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THREE Another researcher wrote: I am currently doing my first case study and Maria and I will present it to some clinicians next week. It is really quite hard to implode all of the analysis into a few pages, but boy, do we have a good sense of what was going on in the interview and the service provision implications. Fascinating stuff.. We hope this Short Guide provides you with a sufficient basis for understanding this particular method of interviewing and of interpreting that generates such interest enthusiasm. Further reading is indicated in bibliographies A and B. Should you be interested in formal training in the methodology, BNIM trainings have been running for the past eight years or so, at the rate of 2-4 trainings per year. The two tutors are Prue Chamberlayne and Tom Wengraf, with Debra Hopkins, Jude Robinson and Margaret Volante. They currently are organised on a 5-day and 6-or-so-persons basis (Thursday and Friday of one week, and Monday to Wednesday of the next week. Those who complete the training have access to the dedicated BNIM listserve for information and discussion to support their research work. See next page for a sample flyer. So far, they have been held in London, UK and Auckland, NZ. In 2006, one will be held in Slovenia (November 2006) and another in Sydney (September 2006). but there are plans to hold them elsewhere in England and Europe, but also in Australia Sydney). Maybe afterwards (2007) in New York? The deliberately low numbers enable each participant to get individual attention and coaching. Overall comments from the members of the June 2005 group at the end of the five days were as follows: Elvin fantastic to have mixed disciplines, understanding each others perpectives. A richness beyond what I could imagine. Diane yes, difficult. A nice balance between listening and exercises. Sian very happy Ive done this training. Well-balanced, with just enough of each step. It was nice to have a number of small achievements, little thresholds. I like the emphasis on the application to your own research, and having lots of time for reflection. James I liked the balance between the individual and the social levels. Mark I could go away and practice now. I liked the balance of how and why. I really got my head round that and could explain it to someone else.

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Louise the smallness of the group made it quite personal, and allowed explanations of each persons work. You cant get lost and fall too far behind. Its hands-on training, the only way to learn. We also run half-day and one-day introductory taster courses in BNIM for universities and other research organisations. We have just tried out (successfully) at the the University of Central Lancashire a two-day BNIM sampling courses for research organisations where preparation and subsequent support can be provided in-house by BNIM-trained researchers. Our main courses are, however, full training courses, currently of the 5-day variety. As of the middle of 2006, the cost for the 5-day intensive course is approximately 650 (600 for early full payment) to cover both the tuition costs and also tuition and feedback by Tom and Prue on any pilot interview transcript (and BDChronology and TSSequentialisation) eventually submitted before or after your training.

A 3+3+3 phased 9-day course in 2007? The original BNIM training courses until 2000 were 9 day ones, spread out into three blocks of 3 days each. These allowed people to learn to do interviews in the first block, say in February. They would then do a BNIM interview and do initial processing on the data and send in material to us for feedback. There would then be a 2nd block of 3 days on interpretation in, say, May or June. Students would then work further on their interpretation of their own case, sending in materials and getting feedback as before. Finally, the 3rd block on the comparative study of cases, presenting cases, and theorising from cases would take place, say in November, using the cases and presentations, etc. from the students own work. Might you contemplate this in 2007? At the first training for BNIM trainers (February 2006), it became clear that there were obvious advantages in such a longer and phased model as compared to the all-in-one 5-day intensive, and that there might well be sufficient demand to make such a course viable. There would be more days, more practice and coaching, and more tutor work on student materials, and so the cost would necessarily be higher, but no more than 1200, but given the opportunity for students to spend 50% more time on each of the three stages, and to do (as opposed to imagine) their own work before block 2 and then before block 3 -- the learning would be much more powerful. Please contact us if you think that you or anybody you know might be 59

interested in such a course.

If you are interested in any of the forthcoming trainings or types of event, or need a different sort of one, please contact us. In addition, new versions of this Short Guide are produced quite frequently; please let us know if you want the next updated version expected in late 2006. For all information and questions: tom@tomwengraf.com The next page is a flyer for the next 2007 5-day intensive course, followed (for the very keen who want to know in detail how it is organised) by a teaching scheme. P.S. Researchers who have done previous 9-day or 5-day courses ask us to stress that you shouldnt engage in the training unless you are prepared to feel like a novice. Unlike some other courses, it requires you temporarily to unlearn some deeply embedded assumptions and professional reflexes in order to acquire some new capabilities. The more experienced you are as a research interviewer and interpretor of text material, the more you will have to unlearn or perhaps learn to put aside would be a better formulation. The moment of learning is not a seamless addition to what you currently do, though it will later become a valued new capacity to be used in conjunction with ones you already have. These latter ones are likely to be subtly modified and enriched by the experience. We know these are big claims, but they emerge from what we have been told by those who have taken the course. It can, however, be a strange experience feeling like a novice beginner again. Be prepared! It certainly isnt dull!

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Ninth Intensive Short Course

in the Biographic-Narrative-Interpretive Method (BNIM)
5 days for 6 people MARCH 8th-9th, 12th-14th 2007 in London

Summary
Designed for PhD students and professional researchers, the course provides a training in doing BNIM biographic narrative interviews, together with hands-on experience of following BNIM interpretation procedures. Students develop a sense of how their own research projects might use such aspects and components. The cost is 700 (600 for early-birds who pay in full 5 weeks in advance, i.e. by February 1st ). Taught by Prue Chamberlayne and Tom Wengraf in North London., the courses small number of students ensures close coaching and support for the intensive work that is needed for you to fully acquire both the understanding of principles and the practical capacity for proceeding with the systematic practices involved in BNIM -- both for BNIM and for other types of narrative interviewing and interpretation. You will be expected to have looked at (not read!) chapters 6 and 12 of Toms textbook, Qualitative research interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured method (2001: Sage Publications), Examples of the use of BNIM can be found in the case-studies from the European Union 7-country SOSTRIS project in our (edited) Biography and social exclusion in Europe: experiences and life-journeys (2002: Policy Press) and other items in this Short Guide to BNIM . Preliminary and supplementary material will be provided. More recent debates and developments in theory and method are integrated into the programme. Before the course starts, you are expected to have studied the most recent version of the Short Guide to BNIM which will be sent to your email address. Programme (subject to revision) Thursday Friday We start with a short introduction to the Biographic-narrative-interpretive method, a very brief history of its development in Germany and then in Britain, and an indication of the principles behind its practice. The point and timing of using open-ended biographic narrative interviews rather than (only) the more conventional semi-structured and attitude-and-argument focused ones is clarified. The bulk of the two days is then almost entirely devoted to learning the craft of BNIM interviewing practice. This involves learning to ask narrative-pointed questions (both topic-focused and also open) and not inadvertently interrupting or deflecting the interviewee. Apparently simple, it rapidly becomes clear that such a craft requires repeated and careful practice to be successfully achieved. Pencil-and-paper and repeated practical exercises ensure such success is achieved by the end of the 2nd day. Monday - Wednesday We outline the principles and you engage in the key practices of BNIM interpretive work . We explain the twin-tracks of lived life and told story analysis, and micro-analysis, and how you convert the raw transcript into two series of processed data for each track. You learn the significance of the future-blind chunk-by-chunk approach peculiar to BNIM by practice by doing parts of a narrative text analysis, a micro-analysis and biographical data analysis. Finally, on the basis of case-presentations, you practice case-comparison and the comparative theorising towards which BNIM work is typically oriented. The course ends with our looking again at how you might best use all or part of the BNIM approach for your individual research projects, and how to defend your choice to use a low-N in-depth sample in arguments with sceptical research and policy audiences. To get a copy of the Short Guide, to ask any questions or to book a place, contact tom@tomwengraf.com. Places tend to go quite fast, so if interested, please dont delay too long! Provided there are still places left, 100 refundable deposit secures your place on the course of your choice.

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Sample teaching scheme for 5 day training Overall aims: To provide each student with core competences and understanding of BNIM interviewing and interpretation procedures Section One: BNIM interviewing Thursday and nearly all of Friday Time 09.45 10.00 10.00 10.45 Activity Coffee Introductory Target learning outcomes Waking up! Housekeeping, getting to have a sense of each other. First intuitions about observing narrative forms in self-presentation Getting a sense of the course approach: namely, Short Guide assumed to be read or readable; Focus of 5 days is hands-on experience + discussion of principles. Structure of 1st two days understood Reminder of history/philosophy of BNIM; 3-subsession model of BNIM as laid out in Short Guide Clarification of issues arising; tutor response to some questions Grasping the point of, and developing the capacity for, asking narrativepointed Qs; using the SHEIOT notepad to do noting and asking; funnelling with pro-narrative nudges Further development of capacity for SHEIOT-noting and for asking N-pointed Qs

Thur

10.45 11.30

10.30- 11.45 11.4512.15 12.1513.15

13.15- 14.45 14.4516.15

16.15- 16.30 16.30 16.45

16.45 17.45

Presentation A: BNIM and three subsessions Tea Discussion of Presentation A Lecturette and exercises: N-pointed questions and SHEIOT note-taking 1 Lunch Exercises: N-pointed questions and SHEIOT note-taking 2 Tea Plenary / lecturette and intro to timed dyad exercises Two Dyad exercises

Clarification of issues arising Preparation for practice interviews Choice of topics by interviewee Practice in two 30-minute tightly timed

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References longer list dyad exercises Clarification of issues arising

17.45 18.15

Self-debriefing notemaking One-question plenary

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Frid ay

9.00 9.15 9.15- 9.45 9.45 9.50

Coffee Clarification

Plenary on previous day Preparation for dyad interview exercises lecturette 9.50 10.45 45 dyad exercise 10.45 11.00 Tea 11.00 11.45 45 dyad exercise 11.45 12.00 Self-debriefing 12.00 12.30 Final plenary on BNIM interviewing 12.30-12.45 Your personal project SQUIN mini-lecture on the drafting form 12.45 14.00 Lunch 14.00 15.00 First review of projectspecific SQUINs 15.00 15.15 Tea 15.15 15.30 Lecturette review of BNIM twin-tracks + practical intro through micro-analysis

BNIM interview practice BNIM interview practice Clarification of personal issues and preparation for next session

Preparation for students to draft project-specific SQUINs. Drafts to be discussed after lunch Peer and tutor feedback on first drafts

15.30 16.30

Micro-analysis

Reminder of two track, chunk-bychunk principles. Demonstration on de-contextualised verbatim text segment (assists later triangulation). Sensitivity to the possibility that the structure of the performed text tells us something about the structure of the case. Exercise in independent blind panel interpretation

16.30-16.45 Tea 16.45 17.15 Review and feedback on micro-analysis. Preparation for Monday.

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Day
Mon

Time 10.00 10.15 10.15 10.45 10.45 12.00 12.00 12.15 12.15 13.15 13.15 13.30 13.30 13.40 13.40 15.00 15.00 16.30 16.30 16.45 16.45 17.45 17.45 18.00 18.00 18.30

Session Coffee Lecture: Twin tracks Lived life track from BDC to BDA Tea BDA (cont) Plenary on BDA Exercise Lunch Constructing a TSS sequentialisation A Tea Constructing a TSS sequentialisation B Self-debriefing notes

Objectives Reminder and clarification of BNIM interpretive issues Practice of BDA work in panel

Practice of BDA work in panel Discussion In what different ways might the story be told? Practice in sequentialisation

Practice in sequentialising

Clarification and preparation for a plenary Plenary on BDA and TSS Discussion

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Tues

9.15-9.30 9.30-10.00

Retrospective plenary Lecture: Told-Story Analysis (TFA), caseaccounting, casecomparison Tea Mini-lecture: TFA questions TFA panel exercise Student presentation of case-summaries (the 1st case) Lunch Mini-lecture and Plenary on the case

The craft of TFA of putting together the two tracks, the art of caseaccounting, your project-CRQ and the good answering of your (research) practice community Preparing for the TFA exercise below Acquiring practice of TFA and of facilitating the panel Practice in condensation/presentation

10.00-10.15 10.15-10.30 10.30- 12.15 12.15-12.45

12.45 14.00 14.00 14.30

14.30-15.00 15.00 15.15 15.15-16.45

16.45 17.00 17.00-17.15

Case-presentation of a 2nd case Tea Student exercise in 2case comparison Presentation of flipchart based comparison back to plenary Silent self-debriefing notes on the day Plenary retrospective and prospective

Understanding of more recent BNIMdevelopments taking the countertransference into account; plenary on the two-track intra-case approach Experience of case-presentation; preparing for case-comparison Students in small groups learn to: compare the 2-cases; prepare a flip-chart presentation of their comparison; presentation back in plenary

Discussion

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Wed

9.00 9.15 9.15 10.00

10.00 10.20 10.20 11.00

11.00 11.15 11.15 11.45

Coffee Plenary on caseinterpretation and comparison Presentation of 3rd case Student exercise in 3case comparison for postcoffee presentation to plenary Coffee Poster-presentations and discussion Exercise: using a TSS to overview an interview Lunch Lecture: non-binary theorising from cases Lecture: biography, professional practice and policy research Video using BNIMderived critical incidents tea Self-debriefing Workshop: how does or could this apply to your work? Final Plenary: Keep in touch!

Discussion

Learning to engage in small-group production of 3-case comparison flipchart

11.45-12.30 12.30 14.00 14.00 14.20

Exploring learnings about the casecondensations and casecomparison/presentation process Introduction to other uses of the TSS

14.20-14.40

14.40-15.15

Exploring relation between emergent case-concepts and theorising of your own research/practice community Innovative issues arising: strategic view of place of biographical research in social science and social policy Expand sense of training and reflective dialogue uses of BNIM material Preparation for next workshop Opportunity for further discussion of draft SQUINs, of mixed-method design, of modes of presentation etc. Orientation to further work with other BNIM students, and also the use of tutors and of the post-training BNIM jiscmail listserve

15.15-15.30 15.30 15.50 15.50-16.45

16.45-17.00

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