Compare methods

	Disability Life-History Narrative Method	Disability Critical Discourse Analysis
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2015
Originator	Brett Smith & Andrew C. Sparkes (narrative inquiry in disability studies)	Jan Grue
Type	Narrative-inquiry qualitative method for disability research	Critical-discourse-analytic method applied to disability
Seminal source	Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (2008). Narrative and its potential contribution to disability studies. Disability & Society, 23(1), 17-28.	Grue, J. (2015). Disability and Discourse Analysis (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies). Farnham: Ashgate. ISBN: 9781472432926
Aliases	Disability Narrative Inquiry, Narrative Analysis in Disability Studies, Disability Life Story Method, Biographical Narrative Method in Disability Research	Disability Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis of Disability, Disability CDA, Discourse Analysis of Disability Representation
Related	3	3
Summary	The disability life-history narrative method collects and analyzes disabled people's life stories as a way of understanding disability from the inside, attending not only to what people say happened but to how they tell it. Articulated for the field by Brett Smith and Andrew Sparkes in their 2008 Disability & Society article on narrative's contribution to disability studies, the approach distinguishes the storyteller stance (working with stories, telling alongside) from the story-analyst stance (analyzing stories as objects), and offers structural, performative, and creative-analytic ways to interpret narratives. Its distinctive contribution is to treat stories as both data about lives and as the very means through which disabled identity and meaning are made.	Disability critical discourse analysis applies the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to disability, treating disability as a phenomenon that is constructed in and through language. Set out systematically in Jan Grue's 2015 book Disability and Discourse Analysis, the method brings together disability studies and CDA to examine how texts and talk — in media, politics, clinical settings, and everyday life — construe disability, position disabled people, and naturalize particular understandings (deficit, tragedy, rights) through specific linguistic choices. Its distinctive claim is that the language used to talk about disability is not a neutral description of a prior reality but part of how disability is socially produced and contested.