A biography or autobiography provides an account of someone's life. This enables the researcher to gain insight into how the author or subject experiences life (i.e., the subject's narrative). Through a person's reconstruction of events, a researcher can analyze how the subject perceived her life experiences. Furthermore, the researcher can construct a narrative from an established story by extracting the relevant reflections and analyzing what they mean.
By focusing on oral histories, narrative research reconstructs experience through eyewitness accounts that may be either first-hand or passed along from generation to generation. Interviews with the subject allow the researcher to experience an event through another person's eyes. Accordingly, the researcher reconstructs the story and creates a narrative that reflects meaning and can be linked to other experiences of the same event.
The use of correspondence is an essential tool for narrative research. It enables researchers to study not only how the writer perceived an event but also how the writer wished the reader to interpret the event. Accordingly, a letter represents two narratives. On one level, it retells something that has happened, while on another level it is a narrative about what the writer wants others to know about the event. A researcher can gain insight into these levels through correspondence and can link the sources to other interpretations of the same event.
When researchers consider using a narrative method, many of them overlook the narrative quality offered by photos and artifacts. The old adage, "a picture is worth a thousand words," applies here. A picture can reflect what people were doing at a certain time, how they celebrated an event and how hierarchies were applied. It can provide insight into the actors at a specific moment of time and can confirm what others have written about the experience.