Methodology of the narrative analysis in economics: The case of the entrepreneurial networks

The purpose of the article is to provide theoretical and empirical evidence that narrative analysis in economics is not an integral part of qualitative research and is quite compatible with the methodology of quantitative research. The development of methods for collecting and processing data is one of the significant directions in the development of both empirical and theoretical research in economics. Of particular importance to this direction is the consistent expansion of the consideration of social factors in the study of decision-making processes, both at the micro and macro levels. Narrative economics, which has emerged and developed in the last decade, is an integral part of this trend. The article proposes and substantiates a methodology for empirical analysis of narratives considered as sources of quantitative information used in decision making. This distinguishes it from the methods of narrative analysis used in qualitative research in the social sciences, although they are not always distinguished in the literature. The technique combines the search for the frequency of occurrence of various phrases on the Internet with interview analysis, which significantly reduces the time and effort required to search and analyze the necessary information about social factors. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is tested on the example of the analysis of narratives that characterize personal entrepreneurial networks, no statistical information about which is collected, although the networks themselves play an important role in the formation of new small businesses. The presented results of the analysis show that the technique makes it possible to obtain useful quantitative data on such objects of economic research.