• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.61-84
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• 1999

The purpose of this study is to understand the context of cosumers' lives in Korea with a narrative analysis method. The epistemological orientation of eh narrative analysis is Interpretivism, which blends the two polar philosophical perspectives, Empiricism and Rationalism, and includes Narrotology, Hermeneneutics, Semiotics, and Structural Criticism. Narrative analysis takes as its object of investigation the story itself. This study collects eleven narrative plots from four housewives, into which Labov's structural approach is applied. This study shows clearly that the socio-cultural environment in which consumers live has strong influence on their consumption behavior and also reveals that narrativization tells not only about past actions but how individuals understand those actions, that is, meaning.