53-3 Review and Prospect of Narrative Research in the Field of Psychology and Counseling in Taiwan
| Meei-Ju Lin | Chin-Chen Wen |
| National Dong Hwa University | Tzu Chi University |
The purpose of this paper is three fold: (1) Review narrative studies published in psychology and counseling journals in Taiwan; (2) highlight features and significances of narrative research; and (3) discuss future research directions for improving this literature. This paper is grounded on the definition of the word of narrative, methodology of narrative research, and reviews from counseling professions. Included in this review were 67 narrative studies in journals of psychology and counseling which could be described as narrative research or using the method of narrative analysis. By the method of probing, analyzing, and interpreting, this paper presents four aspects and related research examples to illustrate significances of current narrative studies in Taiwan. (1) Narrative studies show the power of story which characterizes the dialectical relationship between personal and social construction. (2) The concept of narrative can be served as the metaphor of counseling process and changes, and can be applied to studies across counseling and psychotherapy approaches. (3) The idea of holisticcontent analysis from Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber was preferred and adopted in most studies, however researchers claimed that method of narrative analysis should be more diverse and complex. (4) Self-narrative studies encourage helping professionals and learners to reflect on themselves and generate their own helping knowledge, which would subsequently empower themselves and others. Although significant features were found from the review of existing narrative research, current trends of narrative studies still reveal many challenges today, especially those issues from methodology, which need to be clarified and improved. Accordingly, this paper presents five prospects for future narrative research in the field of psychology and counseling. First, from mono-tone to multiple-tone, there are diverse approaches and phenomena shown in narrative studies. Further, there is a tendency to develop toward a new paradigm of qualitative research by the refinement of cross-disciplinary study of humanities and social science. Second, with the majority of narrative research adopting the perspective of holistic-content in the analysis of narratives or stories, possible falls into the mere induction of themes would occur, and it is possible to disregard the narrative form and multi-level analysis. Moreover, there arise problems of lacking clarity in the definition and research method. And the way to work with such challenges is to return to the "language" nature of narrative. Third, there is a need for more exploration and clarification for issues such as adopted research paradigm, what is healthy narrative, and what are the criteria for good enough narrative research. Moreover, whether the focus of study is based on the perspectives of macro vs. micro, or narrative coherence vs. complexity, also need to be clarified. Forth, there is a gap between stories studied and promotion of counseling practice. In other words, with many stories collected, it is time to work on filling this gap. Finally, there has been many years in the development of narrative research in Taiwan, and many indigenous life stories and counseling stories have been accumulated. More efforts need to be invested in the convergence and connection at the level of theory construction. Conclusions of this paper are tentative, and are not the only truth. This paper invites more researchers to engage in more dialogues and exchanges their perspectives regarding narrative research.
Keywords
Narrative research, review and prospect.
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