Essentially, a detailed story that can be written or spoken, and from these forms can be biographical, fictitious or historiographical in nature. In fact, it is evident in all human acts of creativity involving not only writing and speech, but also visual media such as film, television, painting, photography and theater. It constitutes one of four rhetorical strategies, the others being argumentation, description and exposition. Narrative analysis has become an interdisciplinary enterprise within the context of qualitative research. Here, the likes of field notes, letters, oral life histories, interviews and family stories are some of the units of analysis that are studied in order to provide a means of gaining understanding of how people create meaning in their lives. It employed as a research tool in, for example, education, cognitive science and sociology. Jerome Bruner, in his book Acts of meaning (1990), regards narrative as a potent means of communicating meaning, as well as providing insights into how memories are constructed in this respect. Claims for its strength is that it is interdisciplinary, has universality, and serves as a bridge between theory practice. It does, however, have difficulties, perhaps the main one being an enormous diversity with regard to theory and method making various studies incompatible with each other. Owen Flanagan, a respected authority on narrative analysis, stated in his book Conscious reconsidered (1992) humans are inveterate storytellers from an early age, and that they are engaged in portraying their identity in an narrative form.
See Content analysis, Conversation analysis, Discourse analysis, Qualitative research