Session 11. From narratives to textual analysis in social sciences

In the last few years, critical events such as pandemic and war have increased the already existing democratic decline, violence, and health inequality, leading to an unprecedented global health crisis. As sociologists, we need to better understand, explain, and address such crises and their effects on people's life and health. Narratives have been widely employed within social sciences for decades to comprehend in Weberian terms the point of view of the social actors and the meaning they give to what they do in their ordinary life. An epistemological assumption to observe how the sense of action is expressed by narrating itself in daily practices. i.e., how people tell their stories starting from their health experiences. Therefore, the textual analysis allows the observer to understand how the interaction between a social system and its environment works in different socio-cultural contexts. 

There are a variety of qualitative and quantitative textual analysis methods and their application in the health contexts is increasingly popular and led to eminent work. This session is dedicated to studies using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed textual methods in the health domain. We are particularly interested in studies addressing people sensemaking of their health experience in health context and on digital platforms.

Keywords: storytelling, narrative, textual analysis, digital platform, sensemaking.

Guido Giarelli is full professor of General Sociology at the Department of Health Sciences of the University ‘Magna Graecia’ of Catanzaro. He was - President of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS) (2006-2010) and Vice-president of the Research Committee 15 (Sociology of Health) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) (2014-2018); he is currently coordinator of the Board of the Research Network 16 (Sociology of Health and Illness) of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and Coordinator of the Section of Sociologia della salute e della medicina of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (AIS).

Francesca Greco, PhD, NSH as associate professor in General Sociology, is adjunct professor at Sapienza University of Rome, R&D manager of Prisma S.r.l., and she is organ donation representative of the Scientific Board of the Section in Sociology of Health and Medicine, Italian Sociological Association (AIS). She developed the Emotional Text Mining method that was awarded by the University Paris Descartes, USPC, and Sapienza University of Rome. She is an expert in social science research methods, computational sociology, big data, text mining, and health sociology.