This article (“Use of narrative interviewing in everyday information behavior research” by Jessica A. Bates) is addressed on the narrative interviewing, a research method to understand everyday information behavior from a person-centered perspective, now is considered as a qualitative research method used to stimulate interviewees to express their experiences and views through telling stories or narratives.  The technique of narrative interviewing stimulates storytelling and encourages interviewees to describe an event as they saw it, in their own spontaneous language, using their own terms of reference.  It is believed that how study participants report and narrate episodes from their everyday life reflects the factors which influence their behavior.  Narrative interviews give insight into how the participants make sense of their everyday lives in relation to the overall research topic instead of just one simple answer.  In addition, using narrative approach in social inquiry can overcome barriers that can arise when collecting data from people from relatively disadvantages backgrounds who may lack educational experience and language or literacy competencies.  I totally agree with this point of view regarding the language competencies as English is my second language.  By providing more context or scenarios, interviewer would have clear picture or better understand of my perspective.  Thus, I indeed feel that using the narration or story telling would bring out the original meaning or perspective in a more genuine form. The article also talks about the techniques which narrative interview should have besides providing real examples of narrative interview:

3 ways to analyze the data collected from narrative interview:

·         The sequential and temporal structure of narrative to understand the sequence of actions which comprise the story.

·         The focus /perspective of the narrative to understand how interviewees evaluated the situation.

·         How the interviewee tells the narratives including their use of languages and tones.

6 elements which any fully formed narrative should contain:

·         Abstract (a summary)

·         Orientation (context-time, place, situation, participants)

·         Complicating action (sequence of events)

·         Evaluation (perspective on the event and attitude)

·         Resolution (outcome)

·         Coda (relates the narrative event back to the present)

To conclude, it seems that narrative allows us to list out all the context, sequence, reasoning, details or even outcome that we can closely relate to the research topic as well as extracting the insight from analyzing the narratives.  Further, the storytelling techniques give researcher to gain access to everyday language of participants and where participants have difficulty responding to a formal, rigid line of questioning; and that is one of the significant advantages of extracting the truth.