Some problems of narrative method and the applicability to the historical research in marketing

Abstract

　In the social sciences, materials are collected through direct interviews with the concerned parties. The interview survey method may be a question-and-answer or a format in which the subject is asked to describe a wide range of situations related to a particular event. The latter method of approaching specific phenomena using the storytelling of the experiences of the people involved is conceptualized as a narrative in the social sciences and positioned as one of the qualitative research methods. In this research, the author first mentions the conflict between quantitative analysis and qualitative research in the next section. In section 3, the author summarizes the characteristics of narrative study and provides an overview of oral history research and life history research, which are the areas of narrative analysis. In Section 4, the author addresses the problems of narratives and, in conclusion, discusses the applicability of these methods to historical research in marketing.