Digital story grammar: a quantitative methodology for narrative analysis

ABSTRACT

Digital story grammar (DSG) is a methodology that combines narrative theory and computerised text analysis. The methodology offers new ways of identifying patterns in narrative identity work and examining how these patterns relate to social structures such as gender and social class. DSG works through an algorithm that identifies narrative units consisting of subjects, verbs and objects. To demonstrate the potential of the methodology, we apply it to interviews with young people from the Timescapes Qualitative Longitudinal Data Archive and address four research questions: Who are in the young people’s stories (characters)? What are their narratives about (domains of experiences)? When do they taking place (temporality)? How are the narratives told (sense of agency)? Among other findings, we observed that young people with middle-class backgrounds convey a stronger sense of agency than their working-class peers, and we show how this correlates with the ways in which they navigate school-to-work trajectories.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital Story Grammar
• computerised text analysis
• narrative analysis
• methodology

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Helle Marie Mortensen for her careful and competent help with analysis and literature review. Finally, the authors are grateful to Dr Kahryn Hughes and to the Research Data Leeds team behind The Timescapes Archive for generously providing access to the qualitative interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our search function – globally search a regular expression and print (grep) – identified patterns in interview quotes containing the following elements: course, class, college, exam, grade, GCSE, school, stud, teach, tuition and university.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefan Bastholm Andrade

Stefan Bastholm Andrade PhD in sociology and senior researcher at VIVE – The Danish Centre of Social Science Research. His research activities lie within the sociology of inequality and life course research. Stefan has specialized in quantitative analyses and has published his work on income and educational mobility, social class and youth risk behavior in a number of high-ranking international journals.

Ditte Andersen

Ditte Andersen PhD in Social Science and senior researcher at VIVE – The Danish Centre of Social Science Research. Ditte has specialized in narrative analysis. Recent publications inquire welfare state dependency as lived experience (European Societies), co-production in community health care (Sociology of Health & Illness, with Sine Kirkegaard) and stigmatization in welfare state encounters involving citizens who experience drug problems (Addiction Research & Theory, with Malene Kessing).