Narrating Networks: A Narrative Approach of Relational Data Collection

The article discusses the potential of narrative interviewing techniques in the context of a computer-assisted collection of relational network data. It illustrates a way in which the data collection instrument can be conceptualised in order to stimulate narrative and communicative structuring processes about network relations. On the basis of an ethnographic research design the paper describes the empirical process of data collection and introduces an innovative strategy of analysing qualitative relational data through hermeneutic interpretation. Besides exemplifying pros and cons linked with the technical construction of the interview design, the article points out opportunities and limitations to a narrative interview method that is used to reconstruct ego-centred social networks. Insofar as they encourage narrations, we conclude that relational data collections can even function as narration generators.