Narrative analysis is an analytical method that accommodates a variety of approaches. Through these approaches, social researchers explore how people story their lives. This is also a process through which researchers understand the complexities of personal and social relations. Narrative analysis provides the researcher with useful tools to comprehend the diversity and the different levels involved in stories, rather than treating those stories simply as coherent, natural and unified entities (Andrews et al., 2004). It is this approach to narrative analysis, which we shall call the constructionist approach to narrative analysis, that we aim to explain in the chapter that follows. Constructionism has a strong recent history within social sciences (Burr, 2003; Holstein and Gubrium, 2008; Sparkes and Smith, 2008). What we describe as a constructionist approach is very often adopted, in many of its features, by contemporary narrative researchers. The approach is distinct, first, as Holstein and Gubrium (2008) suggest, because of its critical take on naturalism, and in consequence its attention to the diversity, contradictions and failures of meaning,
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