Small stories in short interactions

Abstract The study investigates story-telling in naturally-occurring interactions in a care home for older people with dementia in England. Stories were told by a range of discourse participants and varied from more relationally-oriented anecdotes occurring as part of small talk to more transactionally-oriented narratives embedded into work routines. The main aim of the study was to explore narratives as social practice in the interactions of the care staff and to discover what functions they perform in their workplace practice and more generally in that of the care home. The analysis focused principally on two primarily work-oriented narrative types: “working stories” and “narratives of professional practice”. The findings were that such stories performed a range of key functions in the professional practice of the care givers, in particular problem-solving, knowledge-sharing and critical evaluation.