Narrative Analysis: Thematic, Structural and Dialogic Approaches

Reviewed by Prof. Dr. Alexander Holtermann · Updated 16 October 2026 · 6 min read

Narrative analysis studies how people tell stories about their lives: what they tell (thematic), how they tell it (structural) and for whom and why (dialogic).

Key takeaways

Narrative analysis treats stories as the unit of analysis and asks how people use them to make sense of experience and construct identity.
Riessman (2008) distinguishes thematic, structural, dialogic/performance and visual approaches to narrative analysis.
Unlike thematic analysis, narrative analysis keeps stories intact rather than fragmenting them into codes across cases.
Narrative interviews invite long, uninterrupted accounts; transcription must preserve the sequence and often the form of speech.
Narrative analysis suits questions about identity, biography, turning points and how people present themselves.

What is narrative analysis?

Narrative analysis is a family of approaches that take stories as their object. A narrative, in a narrow sense, is an account of events connected in time and meaning: something happened, then something else, and it mattered. People use narratives to make sense of experience, to claim identities, to persuade and to justify. Narrative analysis asks not only what happened but how and why a story is told in a particular way.

Catherine Kohler Riessman’s *Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences* (2008) is the most widely used introduction. She emphasises the case-centred character of narrative analysis: stories are kept intact and analysed as wholes, rather than being cut into segments and compared across cases, as in thematic or content analysis.

Running example: in a narrative version of your belonging study, you ask 8 first-generation students to “tell the story of how you came to university and what your first year has been like”. You are interested in how they narrate their path, which turning points they construct and how they position themselves as people who (do not) belong.

Four approaches according to Riessman (2008)

Riessman describes four broad approaches. They can be combined, but you should state which perspective drives your analysis.

Approach	Focus	Question in the belonging study
Thematic narrative analysis	What is told: content and meaning of stories, kept within each case	What turning points do students narrate in their path to belonging?
Structural narrative analysis	How the story is told: organisation, sequence, language	How do students structure the story of their first term, and where do they place evaluation?
Dialogic/performance analysis	For whom, when and why: stories as co-constructed and performed for an audience	How do students present themselves to an interviewer from the university?
Visual narrative analysis	Images as part of storytelling (photographs, drawings, video)	What do photos students took of “places I belong” show about their narratives?

Structural analysis: the Labov model

A classic tool for structural analysis is the model of personal experience narratives developed by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky in the 1960s. It describes six elements that a fully formed story may contain. You do not need to find all six; their presence, absence and placement are themselves informative. The evaluation element is particularly important, because it tells you what the narrator wants the listener to understand about the significance of the events.

Element	Function	Example (P05)
Abstract	Summarises what the story is about	“There was this one seminar that changed everything.”
Orientation	Who, when, where	“It was week four, a sociology seminar, about 15 of us.”
Complicating action	What happened, in sequence	“The tutor asked me directly what I thought, and I just said what I really thought about class.”
Evaluation	Why it matters, the point of the story	“And for the first time I realised my background was actually worth something here.”
Resolution	How it ended	“After that I spoke in every seminar.”
Coda	Returns to the present	“That’s kind of when I stopped feeling like a guest.”

Doing a narrative analysis step by step

Narrative analysis is less procedurally fixed than thematic analysis or content analysis. The following steps describe a common way of working for a thematic or structural narrative analysis in a dissertation.

1 Collect narratives with an open initial question and few interruptions; ask follow-up questions only after the main story
2 Transcribe in detail, keeping the sequence, repetitions, pauses and, for structural or dialogic analysis, features such as emphasis
3 Read each interview as a whole and write a case summary of the overall story (plot, main characters, turning points)
4 Identify the stories within the interview: where does a narrative begin and end?
5 Analyse each case according to your approach: themes within the story, structure (for example Labov elements), positioning towards the interviewer and imagined audiences
6 Only then compare across cases: similar plots, contrasting turning points, typical story forms
7 Present findings case by case or as narrative types, with extended extracts

Narrative analysis vs thematic analysis

Both approaches can work with interview data and may even look similar at first. The key difference is what happens to the story.

Aspect	Narrative analysis	Thematic analysis
Unit of analysis	The story or the whole case	Coded segments across the dataset
Sequence and context	Preserved and analysed	Largely set aside
Typical question	How do people make sense of their lives through stories?	What patterns of meaning occur across participants?
Presentation	Extended extracts, case portraits, story types	Themes with shorter quotes from many participants
Sample	Often small (4–12)	Often larger (10–30)

Quality, ethics and write-up

Narratives are personal, and extended extracts increase the risk of identification. Anonymise carefully, and consider changing non-essential details. Discuss with your supervisor how much of each story you can present.

Quality in narrative research rests on persuasiveness (is the interpretation plausible and supported by the text?), coherence, transparency about your interpretive choices and reflexivity about your role as co-constructor of the story. Show the reader extended extracts and your reading of them. Narrative approaches vary considerably between disciplines (sociology, psychology, education, health); your department may expect a specific tradition. Follow your university’s guidelines (you can upload them to Professor Digital).

Our free coding tool at /codieren can support you in marking story elements such as orientation, evaluation and turning points as categories, keeping case memos and exporting coded passages, while you keep the full interviews as the basis of your analysis.

Frequently asked questions

What is narrative analysis in qualitative research?

An approach that analyses stories people tell, focusing on content, structure and how stories are performed for an audience, while keeping each story intact.

What are the types of narrative analysis?

Riessman (2008) distinguishes thematic, structural, dialogic/performance and visual narrative analysis.

What is the Labov model?

A structural model of personal narratives with six elements: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda. It helps to analyse how a story is built and where its point lies.

How is narrative analysis different from thematic analysis?

Narrative analysis keeps stories and cases intact and analyses sequence and form; thematic analysis codes segments across the whole dataset to identify shared patterns.

How many participants do I need for narrative analysis?

Often 4 to 12, because each narrative is analysed in depth. Justify the number with your research question and the depth of analysis.

Sources and further reading

Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Sage.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2022). Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide. Sage.

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