Narrative Approaches: From “Life‐Stories” to Everyday Life Storytelling Practices

Abstract The primary qualitative method for studying people's identities has traditionally involved eliciting life‐stories or narratives of key events through research interviews, known as narrative inquiry. However, this approach has faced criticism within applied linguistics, in particular, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. In this contribution, I propose a significant rethinking of narrative research. Instead of focusing on life‐stories, I advocate for studying everyday life storytelling using an alternative approach known as small stories research. This research method extends beyond face‐to‐face storytelling to include the examination of the hugely popular, curated small stories found on social media platforms. Particularly among Generation Z, such curated small stories have rapidly become a preferred mode of narrative expression and self‐presentation.