UCLA Labor Center

Narrative Analysis Overview

 This section will guide you through each phase of the narrative analysis methodology.


Introduction to Coding Text

The following interview coding module, instructional videos, and slides provide additional information as to how to organize and thematically code (interview) data.  For additional information in developing your coding scheme and organizing your data, you can download the introductory coding manual below:

This tutorial demonstrates how to focus on segments within the transcripts, develop codes, and create thematic categories. However, it is important to remember that you can also analyze qualitative in its entirety and not in segments.  The tutorial assumes that your task is to make sense of a lot of unstructured data ( i.e., that you have qualitative data in the form of interview transcripts).  You can use the steps described in this tutorial to analyze:, notes from participatory, observations, documents, web pages, and other types of qualitative data.

[youtube id=”DRL4PF2u9XA”]

Click here to access the qualitative data module


Coding Demonstration

This module will illustrate how qualitative data is analyzed. A common form of qualitative data analyzed by action researchers is interview data.

The following example is an annotated interview between a researcher and a bilingual education teacher and will be used to illustrate step-by-step how the action researcher analyzes and interprets the interview data. Click here to access this material. 

The qualitative process of data analysis is an inductive one, in which the data is examined from a “bottom-up” approach (Creswell, 2005). The specific data is examined to identify more general themes that will be used to understand the meaning of the data.