Analyzing structure, process and content in narratives of patients diagnosed with agoraphobia

Résumé 0

"This research constitutes a first effort testing the possibilities of threerating systems intended to evaluative narrative structure, process and content inpsychological disorders. More specifically, the objective of this research is twofold: (1)to explore the reliability of three different rating manuals designed to evaluate, respectively,narrative structure, process and content; (2) to explore the validity of these same manualsin analyzing and discriminating Zenith (i.e., successful) from Nadir (i.e., unsuccessful).Forty patients primarily diagnosed with agoraphobia participated in this study. All theparticipants followed a protocol interview eliciting two different types of personalnarratives: (1) nadir narrative (i.e., unsuccessful life narrative); (2) zenith narrative (i.e.,successful life narrative). All the narratives were transcribed for further analysis usingthree coding manuals for the analysis of narrative structure, process and content. Theresults found show: (1) a high level of inter-rater reliability for both, each individualdimension of the three rating manuals as well as for the total scores; (2) a high levelof internal consistency for each manual both in terms of intercategory correlationcoefficients and alpha Cronbach scores; (3) the manuals were effective in discriminatingthe participants narratives in terms of narrative structure, process and content; (4)Zenith and Nadir narratives did not differ in terms of narrative structure, process andcontent, with the single exception of the objectifying dimension from the process/complexity rating manual, showing that agoraphobic patients tend to objectify significantlymore in Nadir narratives than in Zenith narratives"