Quick Outline Sketch ofBNIM.14
Table of Contents
A. Outline Sketch of BNIM
1. Eliciting the narration: getting stories of lived experience
3. To conclude
B. An email exchange
C. BNIM: a handful of things to look at
D. Getting the BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manuals - part of a package
This is a very quick outlinesketch.
It is NOT ADEQUATE as a basis for doing a BNIM interview.
To have any chance of doing a BNIM interview properly, you should
either have carefully read the BNIM Short Guidesection 1.4. and/or Volume II of the BNIM Detailed Manual (2014)
or at least studied carefully chapter 6 of my 2001 textbook Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured method (Sage).
So: just on the basis of this sketch plus earlier interviewing experience, please do NOT attempt even a pilot informal BNIM interview
Otherwise you will waste an interview and demoralise yourself. Any practice of a new complex craft requires more study: Think of how you learnt any software programme (e.g. SPSS)……!
See Email Exchange in (B) below for an illustration!
In section C, there are a handful of references.
Section D tells you about how to get hold of the BNIM Electronic Package (2014).
I also attach a recent BNIM Bibliography.Most people quite rightly won’t look at it.
The bibliography’s Section 3 is concerned with BNIM methodology.
Sections 1 and 2 are focused on BNIM-based or BNIM-using research substantive studies.
A. Outline Sketch of BNIM
I am drawing on the BNIM method in parts for my PhD project and have found your guide and the book immensely useful to structure and plan my interviews. I have done a few interviews now and every time I am struck and fascinated by how well the first narrative question about a participant's life history works… Once they start talking so many interesting things have come up(email March 2014)
The human need to know the truth of one’s experience
is the most fundamental impetus for thinking
(Thomas Ogden 2009:9)
[reworked for BNIM]
The human need to know [more of] the truth of one’s own experiencing
and/throughother people’s experiencing is the most fundamental…..
(Tom Wengraf 2014)
I have two new funded projects starting so will be sending more trainees your way – BNIM is quite simply the best method for us!(Aine Macken-Walsh, TEAGASC, April 2014)
*************************
The BNIM approach to research interviewing consists of answering two questions:
1. Getting to understand somebody’s experiencing of something usually involves getting them to tell you their story of it, getting them to narrate how it all happened. Once they’ve told you that whole story, you often have some questions that you would like to ask to help you get more details of bits of the story, and your experience of all that. What is a good way for you to organise this?
2. Once you’ve got their story and their answers to your further questions, you will want toget into the material to think about what they’ve said and how they said it, and how to infer changing patterns of evolving subjectivity and evolving situationfrom their story-telling, and come up with a good case-account, one that you can compare with others? What is a good way to do this?
I deal with these in turn.
1. Eliciting the narration: getting stories of lived experience
In most cases, we talk better about our life experiences when we do not fear interruption by the listener while we are talking and, while we are talking, do not fear that the listener will afterwards start challenging and commenting (maybe critically) on what we say, and what we haven’t said.
The core of the BNIM interview methodology is a two-part interview in which that, as interviewer, we guarantee that there will be no interruption, no challenges and no comments.
All the questions -- one question in subsession one, several questions in subsession two --will just ask for remembered story, for remembered stories about what the interviewee has freely chosen to mention or talk about.
Freed from the fear of comment, challenge and interruption, during the core two-part interview, and from any request to justify or explain, the interviewee gives us more and better narrative material.
In that two-part first interview, the first subsession just asks a well-designed open narrative question -- think of it here as “please tell me your story” -- and the interviewer holds back from interruptions of any sort. This self-restraint is difficult for you as interviewer. The interviewee decides when to stop telling. This creating a safe space for them to improvise an uninterrupted telling of a ‘whole story’ in whatever ways they choose (and not in ways they don’t choose) and find themselves doing is the core of the first subsession BNIM interviewing method.[1]
In that two-part first interview, the second part, the second subsession takes up some of the particular points previously made(in the form of noted-down cue-phrase quotes) and asks carefully-constructed questions , pushing for “more story and more story details” that the interviewee is prepared to provide. If they don’t want to, can’t or won’t, the topic is left. If they can and will and do, the interviewee can then be asked to provide just more narrative story detail – always without interruption , challenge or comment. Thisinterviewer-restriction to pushing for details of particular incidents, pushing only for PINS (Particular Incident Narratives) is the core of the second-subsession BNIM interviewing method.[2]
And, because the meaning of something said depends on when and where in the interview it is said, in subsession two you have to stick to the order of the saying: you can miss items (cue-phrases) out (indeed, you normally have to) but, once you have asked about a later item. you can never go back to ask about an earlier item.
“If you go back, the gestalt goes crack!”.
In a later, and other, interview, perhaps after a week or more, you have the option (often not needed) of a subsession three, a semi-structured interview of a more conventional sort, after the material from the first interview’s two sub-sessions has been thought about, and you now have further questions.
In such a sub-session three, you know you can ask all your piled-up non-narrative further questions. Then you can ask for factual background, explanation, justification, etc. But not before.
Not in subsessionone (where after the initial question you can’t ask anything);
Nor in subsession two (where you can ask for more narrative detail and examples about anything they’ve mentioned, but not about anything they haven’t mentioned, but where you still can’t ask for non-narrative material (like explanation and argumentation) or make interpretive comments etc., but only ask for more story.
To summarise this in a different way.
The first part of the two sub-session BNIM interview sets the agenda for that 'pushing pausefully for PINs’ that characterises the second part.
In the first subsession, there is a single open-narrative question and, having asked it, the interviewer has to restrain themselves from posing any new questions or giving any direction whatsoever. Even if asked to do so. The idea behind this can be seen in terms of Gestalt psychology, namely the interviewee has to improvise an answer to the initial open-narrative question andthe way that he or she does that improvisationcan reveal a deeper overall pattern (to be understood later). Your self-restraint enables the pattern to be unfolded, to explore and express itself.
The first subsession improvised ‘whole story’ can be seen as the ‘official story’ or self-presentation (which in doing so provides the agenda of sequenced initial cue-phrases for further questioning in the second sub-session).
In the second subsession, your gracefully and pausefully ‘pushing for PINs’ on the basis of cue-phrases previously recorded invariably generates more (very often much much more) remembered experience than could be found in the ‘improvised official story’, sometimes close to contradicting it, certainly always qualifying it and making the material much richer.
There is much richer remembering (and occasionally partial re-living) of particular incidents (PINs) and there is usually more self-reflection in the process of remembering. The Gestalt first traced out in the unique sequence of first subsession is deepened and more powerfully activated by the sticking to that sequence in the second sub-session.
From a depth interview to interpretation in depth: the first (does not ensure but) allows the second.
As many researchers have found, a BNIM interview properly conducted generates amazingly rich material for interpretation. This material can be interpreted – on its own or in conjunction with the data from other methods – in a whole variety of ways: every researcher including yourself makes their own choice. As a method of depth interviewing, BNIM allows for depth interpretation.
BNIM depth interpretation procedures are very powerful but quite complex. Their principles are quite intelligible; the detail of their practice takes time to learn. As you learn them you develop a very powerful new capacity to triangulate your data and generate depth-understandings: both of individuals and situations, both at present and in their evolution over time. This can be summarised by the notion of ‘the evolution of dated situated subjectivity’.
In the second half of this quick outline sketch, I sketch out the BNIM depth interpretation procedures. This should enable you to start deciding whether it is worth considering the BNIM approach to describing and understanding the ‘dated situated subjectivity’ that expressed itself in the BNIM interview.
2. Interpreting the BNIM interview material: a twin track (double) approach
Their story of their lived experience, but how it all happened, is a historical one – covering a historical period (e.g. 20 years). Their telling that story in the interview is also a historical happening, taking a small period of time (e.g. 2 hours). The BNIM approach to interpreting that (2 hours) historical telling is itself very historical.
We are trying to understand
(i) the living of the lived life, [through various states of successive dated situated subjectivity] and also
(ii) the telling of the told story [in and from the present state of dated situated subjectivity, revealing traces of earlier ones ]
To do this, we start by carefully separating these two tracks. Later on, we equally carefully bring the results of each track together.
1. We look at the history of the telling of the told story in the 2-hour two-part core interview: what did they choose to talk about and in what way, what do they appear not to have talked about? Very important is the ‘chronology’ of the telling. In what order or sequence did this telling happen. Why? What changed about the telling over the period of the 2 hours, and what didn’t change? Having described that, we try to understand it. What was happening to the (situated) ‘subjectivity’ behind the telling, doing the telling, in the telling?
2. We also look at the history of the living of those 20 years, the chronology of the living. What happened in those 20 years, how did they respond to what happened and how did they make their lives in the situations in which they found themselves? What was happening to/in the situational and situating ‘world’ they were in? What was happening to the (dated situated) ‘subjectivity’ behind the living, doing the living, in that or those ‘worlds’?
We try to reconstruct (imagine) how they experienced the successive experiences and actions of their lives, and, at different moments, how did they make sense (or fail to make sense) of that evolving life. In particular, how do they currently make sense of that whole evolving life or life-period being studied by telling it in the particular way that they did?
To handle all the complexity involved, the track dealing with the living of the lived life is first dealt with in two separate procedures:
(a) the objective events of the lived life, the public track record of what happened over the 20 years;
(b) the reconstructed subjective modes of experiencing the experience of that life, as they changed over the same 20 years, as found in the ‘telling of the told story’ [from the traces of these previous subjective states found in the interview and in the present state].
The objective data analysis (a) and the subjective data analysis (b) of the whole lived life or partial-life-period as described above, are then brought together in a ‘case-description’ integrating both, a case-history and then a less-historical case-account.
We are then in a position to start to answer the Default BNIM Interpretive Question
“How did a person who lived their life-period like this come -- in the interview with you at this point of the most recent moment of their life-- to tell you their life story like that?
We work on the basis of constructing a model of dated, situated, subjectivities over the period and life-space in question.
A final two points about BNIM interpretation.
What happens in the interpretive procedure along the two tracks? There are two features which are worth pointing out.
Point 1.People in their lives and in their interviews do not know what is coming next. They try to imagine and try to control a process of lived life and lived interviewing which is not completely under their control. This is true of us, this is true of them.
In the BNIM interpretive procedure, we are constantly identifying a lived moment within a historical process (within the 20 years of the life; or within the 2 hours of the interview) and reconstructing a model of the individual, the subjectivity,at that lived moment, who is experiencing/ imagining that moment and eventually choosing, future-blind, what to do next, what they see as their best option in the life-improvising process
We do this whether this be the improvising of what they do in the hours of the interview or what they have done in the improvising that they did in the moments of their life-period.
BNIM is lived-moment focused, and lived-moment reconstructing: both in the interview and in the rest of the life that the interview is about.
This means as researchers we provisionally, and to start with, put aside as far as possible our knowledge of what did happen next, what were the consequences of choices made. Instead, we put ourselves in the shoes of the interviewee at that particular moment, of their life, of their interview. We largely operate one data-chunk at a time ‘future-blind’.
This is one key point of a large stretch of the BNIM interpretive procedure: one data chunk at a time, future blind.
Point 2. The second point is the systematic use of 3-hour kick-start panels to start each of the two interpretive tracks (living of lived life; telling of the told story). We are all human; we all at any given moment have limited perspectives and limited sensitivities. This is no less true of us than it is of our interviewees.
As researchers, each of us has blindspots and hotspots which come from our own history and our own culture.
To help us expand our imaginative capacity and avoid being left alone with our inevitable sub-cultural spontaneous prejudices, hotspots and blindspots, to start the process of future-blind, chunk by chunk interpretation BNIM interpretation along each track has a 3-hour start-up panel of about 4-5 people (one as similar as possible to the interviewee; the other as different as possible from each other).
These two kick-start panels – one for the track of the living of the lived life; another for the track of the telling of the told story -- if conducted according to rather precise BNIM rules, massively expand your interpretive imagination and set you up for rich interpretation.
As part of this, to help you to manage better your hot-spots and your blind-spots, by enabling you to see them at work in immediate vivid social interaction, the BNIM interpretive panels work wonders.
3. To conclude
In the BNIM interview, asking for (first subsession) first a ‘whole story’ of their lived experience over a particular period of their life (biographic narration), and then (second subsession) for particular stories from within that period, the interviewee is supported by a promise of non-interruption, non-challenge, and non-comment. They are free to not talk about anything they don’t want to talk about, and what they are asked to do is just to tell story, how it all happened.[3]
Interpreting the BNIM interview material is done along two distinct tracks – the living of the lived life, the telling of the told story – which are then brought together in a final understanding: how did a person who lived their life like this come to tell their story in the interview like that?