Introduction: Telling stories is a natural way to explain our experiences to others. Through telling stories, we come to understand these experiences, and to explain our own and other’s place in the world. Stories are an opportunity to present a version of ourselves and to shape how we would like to be seen. By analysing stories, we also reveal something about the social world beyond the immediate story. Objectives: Applying a narrative approach to interviews can be challenging for the beginning narrative scholar. This paper provides a worked example of a narrative psychology approach to analysis. We present examples identifying the different levels at work in stories: personal stories, interpersonal accounts, and social narratives. Beyond identifying the levels, we offer further suggestions to assist with the narrative analysis of interview transcripts. These suggestions provide a way to start to understand why stories have been told, and what their telling reveals more broadly. To illustrate how to build a narrative analysis, we use a small set of interviews with older people in residential care.

There is increasing emphasis in the media, public and policy discourses about the implications of the ageing population on promoting independence and self-reliance in old age, which is linked to the importance of social connection and the dangers of social exclusion. This paper examines how the potentially contradictory moral imperatives of independence and connectedness are managed by older people through reciprocity. Thirty-six interviews were conducted with people aged 55–70 years in New Zealand, and the data have been analysed discursively. Older people drew upon social conventions of independence as well as describing firm ties to family and community. One way in which the contradictions between the discourses of independence and connectedness were managed was through the notion of reciprocity. This allowed the participants to describe their lives as linked to others through acts that benefited both parties, constructing both a sense of connection and a rejection of the position of dependency on others. Using this linguistic resource has both possibilities and limitations for older people's attempts to manage a moral identity as they age. Although many approaches can be used to construct an equal relationship between people, a commitment to reciprocity in social exchanges may restrict older people from accepting help if they do not see the interactions as contributions to others.

Teenage motherhood is routinely discussed in medical and nursing journals as a cause for concern and a social problem. Taking these accounts as a starting point, this paper uses discursive analysis to understand how the teenage mother is produced as an unsuitable mother. Beginning with a ‘Public Health’ discourse, early motherhood is understood as a disease requiring surveillance and a public health response. Using an ‘Economic’ discourse, teenage mothers are positioned as a financial drain on society and early motherhood as a cost to the mothers themselves. An ‘Ethnicity’ discourse classifies young mothers into ethnic groups and explains differential fertility rates through the resistance of appropriate reproductive technology among minority group members. These understandings are reflected in a ‘Eugenics’ discourse, which engages metaphors of parenting as a biological priority and highlights the unsuitability of young mothers as parents. An examination of these discourses shows that concern about teenage motherhood is as much about the wrong sort of young women becoming mothers, as mothering too soon.