The book, the stories, the people: an ongoing dialogic narrative inquiry study combining a practice development project. Part 1: the research context

The idea for this research and practice development project emerged from the production of a recently published book of recovery narratives, written by a community of people broadly working in the mental health recovery movement. The research component of this project, described in this paper, sits within: narrative inquiry as a moral endeavour in the human sciences; the pedagogy of suffering in the sociology of health and illness; and mental health narrative recovery. Two inter-related data sources will be used in the research. The first is chapters contributed by authors to the book. The second is interview data from those authors. Integrative textual and interview transcript analysis will extend to the end of 2012. The research component of this project represents a commitment to a mental health nursing practice allied to recovery as narrative healing as opposed to forms of psychiatric nursing which endorse and tacitly support abuses committed in the name of institutional psychiatry. ABSTRACT: This paper, part one of a two paper report, describes key aspects of the research context of an ongoing practice development project, conducted on two UK sites. The paper begins with a discussion of the project's origins within a community of people working in the recovery paradigm, including the contributory strand of the first author's recovery and survivor writing. The discussion then turns to three inter-related areas within which the research component sits and which provide it with philosophical, theoretical and conceptual coherence. Each area will be unpacked and its significance explained. This will provide a platform for discussing the focus, methodology and methods of the research, and related assumptions governing both data collection and analysis. The paper concludes with a research commitment to a mental health nursing practice allied to recovery as narrative healing. Links are made to the second paper which describes the context and specifics of a Writing for Recovery project for users, survivors and carers. This shares with, and builds on, the overall project's research context and its assumptions.