1 It is now quite commonly maintained in psychology that telling stories is one of the defining characteristics of being human (e.g., Bruner, 1991; Hermans, 1999; McAdams, 2006). Telling a story about autobiographical experiences may be understood as an interpersonal activity that occurs in the scope of the so-called narrative discourse (Ochs & Capps, 1996); it may also be an intra-personal activity that concerns story construction and telling stories to oneself, for example in the form of internal dialogues (e.g., Hermans et al., 1993; Sobol-Kwapinska et al., 2019). In discussing the psychological value of narrative activity (both inter- and intra-personal) in the literature, making meaning of personal experience, valuing experiences, and constructing personality are emphasized and expressed in the idea of narrative identity (e.g., McAdams, 2018; Singer, 2004). It should also be noticed that narrative psychology has become a lively branch of psychology (Laszlo, 2008; Schiff, 2006), and one with a great impact on counseling in almost every approach (not exclusively in narrative counseling) and in many settings— especially clinical, educational, and vocational, where a host of narrative techniques of intervention and assessment are widely used (McLeod, 2003; McMahon, 2018).

2 The general professional counselor’s role is to facilitate the client’s work in ways that respect the client’s values, personal resources, and capacity for self-determination (e.g., Dryden & Mytton, 1999). It is often suggested that the “not-knowing” stance—in which the counselor remains open to the possibility of a different response—represents the core values of narrative approaches to counseling and psychotherapy (Speedy, 2000). McLeod (2003) shows a number of facilitative processes potentially associated with the experience of telling a story to an interested and empathic listener, such as the experience of being accepted, the opportunity for the client to discover that there are different stories that can be told about the same events and experiences, as well as the use of creation of a narrative account to make sense of a confusing set of experiences. We may say that helping the client to tell his or her story seems to be an important aspect of professional competence (McLeod, 2003). Tantam (2002) posits, however, that listening skills do not suffice, and that mental health professionals also need to shape the story. This suggests that the professional narrative competence of a counselor may be twofold—requiring first the capacity to encourage and give permission to the client to narrate by setting up favorable conditions, and second, the capacity to actively conduct an interview, rich in client narrative activity, by means of proper questions, as well as timing and other subtle verbal and non-verbal interventions.

3 It is assumed that practitioners and researchers elicit self-narratives because they expect additional psychological value resulting from the personal storytelling and the stories told (Hermans, 1999, Laszlo, 2008; McAdams, 2006). It should be emphasized that additional psychological value emerges not only from the process of storytelling, but also from the possibility of self-narrative analysis as an analysis of text (utterance, statement). Thus, self-narrative is valuable as a method of intervention as well as an assessment tool. How can self-narrative elicitation be useful for counselors, and what is meant by “additional psychological value”? Counselors both stimulate the process of narration (storytelling) and analyze the self-narrative (story). We focus here on the self-narrative as the product of storytelling.

4 First, the narrative structuring of individual experience in storytelling gives access to the client’s patterns for organizing experience in the form of the narrative structure (e.g., narrative grammar; Greimas, 1971). It may thus be assumed that the way of telling shows how the events and experiences are constructed and represented and the connections between them occur to the narrator’s mind. The organizing of events and experiences involves temporal connections (something happened and then something else happened), enriched by causal (something happened because something happened) and teleological (someone had intentions to make something happen) connections. Having access to these types of connections, we can explore the world as it is experienced by the author of the story. This perspective seems to be very significant in psychological counseling, which is idiographically oriented and focuses on professional help adjusted to the individual needs and potential of the client (McLeod, 2009; Speedy, 2000).

5 Second, self-narratives are full of meanings important for a given culture, social world, and collective experience. Many papers in the social sciences stress that elements of cultural heritage are automatically included in the autobiographical story and that the process of meaning-making is separated from external influences in neither the content of these stories (e.g., Angus et al., 2004; Chase, 2003; McAdams, 2006) nor the available narrative patterns (e.g., Gergen, 1998). Consequently, self-narratives elicited in a counseling setting carry information not only about the individual, but also about the socio-cultural environment and the degree of socialization or rebellion against the status quo of the social world.

6 A self-narrative also allows the narrative identity to be examined as a life story (complete with setting, scenes, characters, plots, and themes) that situates a person in the world, integrates a life in time, and provides meaning, purpose, and an integrative personal myth (McAdams, 2018). In his personality model, McAdams (2006) describes self-narratives as an existential dimension, connected with the attempt to make sense of an individual’s life at a point in time. This personality level is therefore quite difficult to assess psychologically. However, it seems that through quantitative and qualitative content analysis of self-narratives it is possible to obtain diagnostically valuable data from the life story. Counselors are able to recognize how the client synthesizes his or her experiences, how he or she integrates time perspectives and different social roles, and what kind of point the client’s life story carries. This kind of information is very valuable at the stage of gathering data to diagnose adequately and to plan the intervention accurately.

7 To summarize, eliciting self-narratives during interviews is diagnostically useful, especially for recognizing the integrative life-story personality level, to establish the way in which personal experience coexists with socio-cultural influences, and for recognizing the client’s idiographic ways of organizing individual experience.

8 There has been little direct research on narrative-elicitation methods or instructions, and existing studies have mainly dealt with vocational practice. For example, there is a study on facilitators and barriers for narrative elicitation and setting goals in a particular example of person-centered care practice during admission interviews in health service (Naldemirci et al., 2020). The analyses show that the narrative elicitation consists of the following strategies: preparing for narrative elicitation; lingering in the patient’s narrative; and co-creating—that is, the practitioner’s and third parties’ engagement in—the patient’s narration. The skills needed in narrative elicitation are not the same as in medical history taking. They encourage ethical reflection, and the need for patients and counselors to adopt a broad life perspective (instead of a narrow perspective of the illness). Naldemirci et al. (2020) also draw attention to the co-construction of the narrative, concentrating on well-balanced self-disclosure and joint interviews with families (for other coconstruction issues, see more in Holstein & Gubrium, 2016). As far as the patients were concerned, they were not familiar with self-narrative in a medical context, but many of them considered such conversations to be personally meaningful. As the researchers insist, the study identified strategies of narrative elicitation in a specific ward, but there is need for further research addressing the contextual variations of the use of narrative in different settings. Recently three data collection methods (video diaries, narrative interviews, and semi-structured interviews) were compared in a children’s healthcare context (Litovuo et al., 2019). The authors concluded that narrative interviews with parents have the potential to capture temporal, spatial, locus, and organizational dimensions through stories and are well suited for mapping children’s experiences and the actors influencing them.

9 In psychotherapy and counseling, on the other hand, work with narrative is emphasized as a particular process of capturing the experience that changes in the healing direction. For example, emotion-focused therapy emphasizes the importance of the narrative unfolding of significant personal experiences and experiential awareness that lead eventually to emotional transformation and self-narrative reconstruction (Cunha et al., 2017). In recent years, meticulous research on changes in self-narration in the psychotherapy process has been developed (Montesano et al., 2017). Nevertheless, researchers’ attention has focused on how self-narration changes in psychotherapy rather than on the circumstances for inducing or stimulating a narrative with specific methods or instructions.

10 Thus, we know that eliciting self-narrative is a unique relational phenomenon based on co-construction and that it can lead to specific verbal data. However, research to date still does not provide insight into the factors that contribute to obtaining highly narrative material through the use of specific narrative instructions.

11 Specific methods of conducting a psychological interview are preferable for setting up the proper conditions and stimulating the narrative activity of the client to better contribute to obtaining autobiographical narrative texts (Hardin, 2003; Kvale, 2007). The self-narrative elicitation methods, as we call them here, are concerned with the data collection (creation) stage during the qualitative assessment and intervention and are based upon an in-depth psychological interview, in which the subject’s (research participant’s) self-reflection appears.

14 This study is a quantitative empirical evaluation of chosen qualitative counseling interview interventions, conducted to enrich knowledge of self-narrative elicitation methods and to estimate and assess the possible ways in which these methods work in practice in counseling. The complex evaluation of the usefulness of particular methods is difficult because of the variety of decisions made by the counselors conducting the interviews, the individual features of the people participating in them, and external circumstances that are difficult to control. However, it seems justifiable to examine the issue of the dependence or independence of how these methods function (especially the effects of the instructions) from chosen personality factors and situational circumstances, such as the interview topic or instruction sequence. Therefore, this study—quite uniquely in this field of research— is not only concerned with determining the level of usefulness of particular self-narrative instructions, but also with verifying whether external factors and individual differences in narration may modify in any way the method’s functional usefulness. The self-narrative inclination, understood here as a tendency to think about oneself in self-narrative categories and to reporting on these events and autobiographical experiences, is considered in this paper as an important variable of individual differences. If the functioning of the instructions is modified by such an individual tendency, then the self-narrative methods would hardly work autonomously.

15 In the context of these considerations, the following research questions were asked: Do differences in the narrativity level of utterances occur if: (a) different self-narrative elicitation instructions are used; (b) the sequence of giving instructions is different; (c) the person tells a story on a positive or negative topic; (d) the person has a low, average, or high self-narrative inclination; and (e) these factors interact. Additionally, we have described some of the self-narrative features that appeared after applying various instructions.

37 The basic research problem is concerned with verifying whether the usefulness of self-narrative elicitation instructions is subjected to external and internal circumstances. Instruction usefulness was evaluated on the basis of utterance narrativity level, which was established with two generalized utterance narrativity measures: narrative figures of speech and narrative bonding. The influence of instruction sequence and topic (external circumstances) and of self-narrative inclination (personality feature) on the utterance narrativity level was tested. The answers to the research questions indicated a lack of difference in the narrativity level of utterances when the following were considered: (a) different self-narrative eliciting instructions, (b) instruction sequence, (c) positive or negative instruction topic, and (d) interaction of these factors. The situational factors considered thus appeared to have no influence on the narrative level of the utterances.

38 We found a lack of differences in the narrativity level when different instructions were considered. This might seem controversial in light of the many recommendations for particular self-narrative elicitation instructions for psychological interviews present in the literature. It is therefore probable that the analyzed instructions are equally useful (or useless) in eliciting self-narrative. That is, the significant limitation of this research is the fact that it is not known whether instruction usefulness is high (see Limitations section, below). Nevertheless, the narrativity of the utterances in response to the narrative stimulus may remain independent from external situational factors, such as the instruction itself and the topic or sequence of giving instructions. This is an important conclusion, and one that suggests the possible independence of a person’s narrative activity (storytelling) from external factors. However, this independence refers to a lexical level of analysis of narrativity. By taking a macro-analytical perspective, we are able to see something more. The results of exploratory analyses suggest that the responses (and the process of arranging the stories) in response to the three instructions differed both in terms of the type of memories and the time it took to start the storytelling. The time can be understood as an effect of the difficulty or non-obviousness of a given instruction (in our case a book metaphor was the example). The book metaphor with the reference to the chapters could make it more difficult for people to deliver specific memories. It is likely they tried to look at the course of their life from a distanced view and generalized experiences more. Taking into account the observation (Naldemirci et al., 2020) that an important element of the strategy of using narrative methods is proper preparation, we suggest that the book metaphor needs to be clarified to its subjects or clients.

39 In our study, the narrative figures of speech and narrative bonding indices, as well as the length of the utterances, showed no difference based on whether the clients were telling a story about a positive or a negative event or experiences. This does not mean, in general, that the level of narrativity is equal regardless of the affect. Perhaps the emotional subject of the interview should be more differentiated to reveal such differences. Research shows that narrativity is higher in narratives about angering and scary events than in narratives of sad, happy, or pride-inducing events (Habermas et al., 2009).

40 The sequence of narrative stimuli also did not appear to influence the narrativity level of the utterances. We may refer to the length of contact with the interviewer here, and, in practice, this often is not the case. The nature of psychological contact is such that it deepens with time. However, time is not enough—the quality of the relationship is needed. There is no doubt that the context of the therapeutic relationship and other therapeutic factors (especially common factors) influence the outcome of therapy, although the question of the mechanism of change is still relevant (cf. Cuijpers et al., 2018). Likewise, more open self-expression can be achieved through psychological contact (rapport), contract, or more broadly, the co-construction of interview data.

41 The discussion of the role of external circumstances and the psychological situation in producing narrative statements is still ongoing. For example, research shows that people, for personal (biographical) but also situational reasons, can tell stories with different properties on a prompted topic, so controlling these factors in narrative studies is recommended (Soroko, 2020).

42 The personality factor—the self-narrative inclination—proved to be significant in analysis of the changes in the utterance narrative level, determined by the narrative figures of speech index. This effect was not obtained for the narrative bonding index. Individuals with a high self-narrative inclination construct narrative utterances that are quite narratively structured (but not necessarily full of causal or intentional relations), regardless of the way in which the self-narrative elicitation instruction is employed. It may therefore be said that the instructions function differently for individuals with high and low self-narrative inclination, which would indicate that the instructions hardly function autonomously and are dependent on personality factors. The instructions may therefore not be equally useful (at least in the scope of narrative structuring) with different people. In light of this research, it seems justifiable to note that when a counselor comes across problems with a client’s storytelling (the client’s utterances are not structured in a narrative form), this may not reveal unconscious resistance issues or intentional hiding of selected information, but may reveal the client’s low inclination to tell autobiographical stories. Awareness of this fact can help avoid certain diagnostic artifacts, such as overestimating resistance issues or a lack of subordination. It may even decrease some unrealistic expectations, such as the belief that using a self-narrative method guarantees a highly narrative utterance or that it prevents extra-narrative linguistic expressions, like descriptions or argumentations, from being undervalued (see the so-called paradigmatic mode of thought; Bruner, 1991).

43 The question arises about the extent to which the counselor should leave the narrative to its course and to what extent he or she should enable people with low inclination to tell more narrative stories. We know from research that motivating should concentrate on the person (e.g., preparing to understand the narrative approach) and, if feasible, focus less on the external circumstances, such as the topic, sequence, or even the type of narrative stimuli used. The motivating process could include the initial phase of the interview (e.g., explanation of expectations) and will perhaps require some effort in the midst of the storytelling (e.g., by hinting at elements of the narrative, the world presented, the characters and their fates or additional prompts based on questions like “what?” “where?” “when?” or “who?”). However, while being too actively involved in the client’s storytelling, the counselor should be aware of the limited additional psychological value of self-narrative, as the free and spontaneous narrative structuring has been disturbed.

44 When considering the results of this study, we have to remember that a small set of methods (instructions) was tested, and the narratives were examined only from a micro-analytical perspective and on a lexical level. The instructions elicited self-narratives that were similar according to the level of utterance narrativity. However, the significant limitation of this research is the fact that it is not known whether instruction usefulness is high, as there is no empirical point of reference that would allow that to be established now. We rely here on the rational expectations, derived from knowledge of research interviews and counseling, that people respond following the contract and react according to what they are asked about, at least at a task-based level. Other methods (instructions) used in interviews should be compared in future studies to contribute to evidence-based assessment and practice standards.

45 Moreover, the presented results are restricted to the first narrative in response to a narrative stimulus. The lack of control for the length of interview time is also a limitation, especially if we would draw conclusions about the overall usefulness of the narrative methods. The analysis of narrativity and other properties of response to the instruction should also be assessed on the macro-analytic level in future research.

46 A significant limitation of the study is that it was conducted under laboratory conditions by researchers trained in a standardized research interview. The contact (rapport) with the subjects was short, and their involvement in the research was not preceded by the need to get help in self-recognized difficulties. Subsequent research could take into account the more natural circumstances of the study, increasing its ecological validity. This would allow more to be said not only about the reaction to a particular instruction but also about the broader impact of the instruction, including the quality of the relationship and psychological rapport. Qualitative systematic analyses of the experiences of the interviewees and counselors would also bring a more realistic picture. Other personality features (besides self-narrative inclination) are therefore worth exploring, as well as other relational factors that play an important, or perhaps vital, role in obtaining autobiographical narrative data.

47 The narrativity of utterances measured micro-analytically on the lexical level and obtained from the participants in psychological qualitative research and counseling practice remains independent from external factors (sequence, topic, instruction). Given the level of narrativity, these methods are close to each other. It is worth noting, however, that narrativity appears to be significantly influenced by individual differences, like self-narrative inclination. Research suggests that we cannot recommend any of the tested instructions, but neither can we necessarily consider them equivalent. It is worth keeping an eye on personal factors that can change the way the story is told in interviews, thus impacting the counseling practice.