Narrative Analysis in Healthcare Market Research

Summary

Stories matter—especially in healthcare. In this quick video, Brendon O'Connor talks about how we use narrative analysis at inVibe to dig into the why behind stakeholder experiences—and turn those insights into something meaningful for our clients.

Transcript

Hi! My name is Brendon O’Connor. I’m a senior language analyst at inVibe. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about the application of narrative analysis in healthcare market research.

When we conduct voice response research with healthcare stakeholders, we're not just collecting isolated data points. Instead, we’re eliciting stories that reveal deeper truths about healthcare experiences. And using narrative analysis, we can better understand and contextualize these stories to make them actionable.

So, what is narrative analysis? Well, it’s a method of linguistic research that focuses on how people make sense of their experiences through the stories they tell, and it can reveal a wealth of insight into a speaker’s inner feelings, perceptions, and knowledge.

When we conduct healthcare market research, narrative analysis helps us to comprehensively identify valuable stakeholder perspectives and translate them into actionable insights. And it does this by ensuring that we’re always looking at the data across a few different dimensions.

First, narrative analysis has us look at how people structure their stories, particularly in terms of their engagement with key research topics. So, we might note which topics respondents cover in the most detail, and where they place the strongest emphasis or value judgments. This allows us to test hypotheses about what resonates most with our clients’ stakeholders as well as identify new hypotheses that might not have been considered before.

Then, we can examine how our respondents assign meaning to different aspects of their lived experiences, paying attention to the ways in which they communicate different levels of impact. For example, if we’re doing an HCP study, we might want to examine the subtle differences in how physicians talk about clinical data for competing treatments.

Next, we can look at how respondents position themselves in their own roles, paying attention for clues about how they feel. So, we might look at HCP language for signs of unmet informational needs that hold them back from helping their patients more effectively, as well as any potential in-roads for a client to support them.

And lastly, we can consider how broader context shapes storytelling across different stakeholder segments. So, with a patient audience, we might consider how long they've been managing their condition, whether distinct patterns emerge between the narratives of new and long-term patients, and what the implications of those patterns might be.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this quick talk about how inVibe uses narrative analysis to get the most out of our clients’ data.