Anneke Sools

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Twente

In qualitative health research many researchers use a narrative approach to study lay health concepts and experiences. In this article, I explore the theoretical linkages between the concepts narrative and health, which are used in a variety of ways. The article builds on previous work that conceptualizes health as a multidimensional, positive, dyn...

In this editorial, we position narrative health psychology as a variety of narrative psychology, a form of qualitative research in health psychology, and a psychological perspective that falls under the interdisciplinary term narrative health research. The aim of this positioning is to explore what are the most important features of the proposed ap...

This article uses Letters from the Future (a health promotion instrument) to explore the human capacity of imagining the future. From a narrative perspective, letters from the future are considered to be indicative of a variety of forms through which human beings construct and understand their future selves and worlds. This is consistent with an in...

In this article we develop a narrative psychological approach to futuring (imagining the future). We explore how this approach addresses the question of how people can become resilient in order to anticipate (social) crisis and change. Firstly, we bring to the fore how futuring takes shape in psychological theories. We argue that the linear-causal...

This article responds to the call for prospective methodologies in the social sciences by developing a narrative approach to study the imagination of personal futures. The approach encompasses an analytical framework regarding dimensions of projectivity and an elicitation method (Letters from the Future). Using an example letter from a study about...

Doctorate outcomes have evolved beyond traditional scholarly, original publications, fostering research-driven innovation. This study views a PhD as a ‘quest’ encompassing students’ aspirations, emotional responses, duration, pervasiveness, and unpredictability. We explored PhD candidates’ quests in connection with their engagements in research, ed...

Monica A. van Winkel et al. (2025). Identifying story types of PhD candidates lecturing in higher professional education: “ups and downs”, “turnaround”, “continuous growth”, and “scholarly recognition”. Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. Overview of included supplementary (original author's man...

This study examines the journeys of lecturers full-time employed at Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS), pursuing part-time, profession-focused PhDs with workload vouchers. Beyond academic publications, they are expected to generate professionally relevant, scholarly, and original knowledge to drive innovation (Griffioen, 2019; Lee & Bonga...

Treatment assignment for patients with personality disorders (PDs) involves a complex process consisting of diagnostic assessment and deciding on the most appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment. This article describes the development of a checklist for systematic analysis of life stories to support reflective and transparent assignment of patients...

Background: Chronic bothersome tinnitus is a prevalent tinnitus subtype placing a high burden on affected individuals, economies, and healthcare systems. Patient and professional perspectives seem to be partly misaligned on how to improve tinnitus research and treatments in the future. This qualitative interview study was aimed at exploring, compar...

Van Winkel et al. (2023). The multifaceted quest of PhD candidates in connection with their work engagements and aspirations in research, education, and professional fields 1 The Higher Education with Impact conference, December 13 th-15th, 2023, Hasselt University. Track: Future-Proof Higher Education; Theme: Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinar...

Presentatie queeste van de hbo promovendi, ORD, 2023, Amsterdam.

Early strategies of researching readers turned scholars to hermeneutic shortcuts like Iser’s ‘implied’ or Fish’s ‘informed’ reader. However, these shortcuts cannot be seen as studying ‘actual’ readers. One approach to studying actual readers has been turning to empirical methods. However, even though the institutions that do these types of research...

Uit onderzoek weten we dat leerlingen met een lagere sociaaleconomische achtergrond vaker kampen met een gebrek aan aantrekkelijke toekomstperspectieven en een laag zelf beeld, in vergelijking met leerlingen met een hogere sociaaleconomische achtergrond. Om deze groepen leerlingen te ondersteunen bij het vormgeven van hun eigen toekomst, ontwikkeld...

PhD trajecten van docenten in het hoger beroepsonderwijs: Verhalen over ups en downs, ommekeer, groei, en erkenning

Covid-19 forced changes in everyday life upon large sections of the world's population, with lockdowns and social distancing measures effecting conditions of work and leisure for billions of people. In this context our research created a space in which people living in countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Africa were invited to i...

Futures consciousness (FC), considered to be the basis for human anticipation, is important for its role in facing uncertainties and delineating alternative courses of action. This is especially so for emerging adults, who are traversing a life stage fraught with uncertainty and complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic as a high-impact event may trigger m...

This paper present a new approach to analyze how people anticipate the future in times of uncertainty. Our approach combines insights from narrative theory and the sociology of anticipatory modes of engagement with the future. We applied a mixed method approach to analyze 166 letters from a creative writing exercise where residents from five countr...

“All real living is meeting”. This study presents an empirical study of the way a sense of meaning‐as‐connectedness is brought about in a group counseling intervention in which meaningful moments are shared. Results from a thematic analysis exemplify and at one point extend Buber's philosophy of meeting.

The corona pandemic has been a disruptive event that calls for individual and collective efforts to make sense of the future. This paper aims to delineate the ways in which people from Greece (N=41) and Finland (N=18) draw on cultural story models (narrative schemas for organizing knowledge and experiences) to anticipate and make sense of a post-co...

Nowadays, traditional forms of psychotherapy are increasingly complemented by online interactions between client and counselor. In (some) web-based psychotherapeutic interventions, meetings are exclusively online through asynchronous messages. As the active ingredients of therapy are included in the exchange of several emails, this verbal exchange...

In this chapter (part of the Handbook for Positive Psychology), we examine positive psychological applications of narrative imagination of the future. Narrative imagination involves imagining experiences, events, thoughts and feelings of ourselves and others in a future world through stories. Stories enable people to concretely imagine a desired (m...

In this chapter (part of the Handbook for Positive Psychology), we examine positive psychological applications of narrative imagination of the future. Narrative imagination involves imagining experiences, events, thoughts and feelings of ourselves and others in a future world through stories. Stories enable people to concretely imagine a desired (m...

Background: Current technology innovations, such as wearables, have caused surprising reactions and feelings of deep connection to devices. Some researchers are calling mobile and wearable technologies cognitive prostheses, which are intrinsically connected to individuals as if they are part of the body, similar to a physical prosthesis. Additional...

Meaningful moments are specific events in life that are felt to be of great value and significance. This empirical study presents a framework on the way a sense of meaning emerges from these moments. Out of an existing data set of narratives of meaningful moments, a purposeful sample of nine narratives was chosen from different participants, all mi...

Unemployment and precarious employment have been treated as liminal states where people’s everyday lives are rendered into an “in-between” position, a place where the uncertainty of meaning and decision-making prevail. Liminality has also been applied as a way of understanding a changing social world, implying a transformation in consciousness eman...

A growing number of scientific publications is available to promote sustainable river management. However, these publications target researchers rather than water management professionals who are responsible for the implementation of management practices. To bridge this science-to-practice gap, we conceptualize and propose a series of steps to prep...

Unemployment and precarious employment have been treated as liminal states where people's everyday lives are rendered into an ‘in-between' position, a place where the uncertainty of meaning and decision-making prevail. Liminality has also been applied as a way of understanding a changing social world, implying a transformation in consciousness eman...

INTRODUCTIONOrange is afree data mining toolkit developed by the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.The software offers a large collectionof modules that can be combined in auser-friendly graphical interfaceto form arbitrary processing pipelines. Orange consists of open source Python code and canbe extended with cu...

This lecture presents a narrative approach to researching the imagination of personal futures. The approach encompasses an analytical framework (based on dimensions of projectivity, see Mische, 2009) and an elicitation method (Letters from the Future). Using an example letter from a study about post-Referendum futures in Greece, challenges in resea...

Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR) connects within-therapeutic change processes to outcomes. The labour intensity of qualitative methods limit their use to small scale studies. Automated text-analyses (e.g. text mining) provide means for analysing large scale text patterns. We aimed to provide an overview of the frequently used qualitative...

This contribution is part of an edited book (ksgv, in Dutch) that resulted from a symposium on positive psychology and meaning in life in the context of spiritual care. With positive psychology’s shift in focus from psychopathology and complaints to strengths and possibilities, attention for the future as guide to the present also becomes more impo...

BACKGROUND Current technology innovations such as wearables have caused surprising reactions and feelings of deep connection to the devices. Some researchers are calling mobile and wearable technology a cognitive prosthesis, intrinsically connected to the individual as if it was part of the body, similar to a physical prosthesis. And while several...

Background Current technology innovations, such as wearables, have caused surprising reactions and feelings of deep connection to devices. Some researchers are calling mobile and wearable technologies cognitive prostheses, which are intrinsically connected to individuals as if they are part of the body, similar to a physical prosthesis. Additionall...

Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring abo...

Millions of people all around the world watch the HBO series Game of Thrones (GOT). In this blog, I analyze how freedom is portrayed throughout some of the main storylines in the series, and raise questions about how stories (should) inspire action. The key question that runs through all seasons of GOT is about the essence of what it means to be hu...

In deze lezing ga ik aan de hand van Brieven vanuit de Toekomst, geschreven door psychiatrische patiënten in een Duitse kliniek, in op hoe toekomstverhalen kunnen bijdragen aan veerkracht en herstel. Het toekomstgerichte karakter van het onderzoek heeft als ethisch uitgangspunt dat het belangrijk voor een menswaardig bestaan is dat psychiatrisch pa...

We present a method for de-identifying Dutch medical text based on an entity tagger and rules for identifying additional entity classes. A key problem for evaluating de-identification systems is that data used for evaluation cannot be shared. We propose to use public data for evaluation, which after an automatic conversion process can be made simil...

Familiar routines may be a source of meaning, but just as well become habitual and lose meaning. To understand this paradox, a narrative approach was used to explore how meaning is constructed in memories of familiar routines. Two types were distinguished: routines of transition and routines of harmony. Results show how meaning construction may rel...

Even after successful completion of psychotherapy, half of the clients with a personality disorder still have problems reintegrating into social life and work. This article provides an explorative study (N = 34) on a rehabilitation treatment program that was offered to patients with personality disorders after an intensive treatment phase, with the...

This article argues for a future-making approach to the Greek referendum vote of 2015. The idea is that in an anxiety-provoking situation, such as the one represented by the Referendum, a future-making approach is relevant to counter possibility-reducing thought and action. To test this idea, we asked potential voters to look back on the Referendum...

This article adopts a pragmatic-communicative approach, derived from Gregory Bateson's cybernetic theory, to the Greek Referendum Vote of 2015. Applying this approach, we interpret the Referendum as a double-bind situation. Our research question is twofold: (1) How do potential Greek voters discursively construct the Referendum? (2) How do they res...

This study is about the experiences of women health bloggers in the Netherlands. In addition to traditional health, illness or patient blogs, which focus mainly on the illness experience, this article identifies a new category for the study of illness experience, e.g. personal blogs in which illness experiences are discussed. Personal blogs have be...

A lot of Digital Humanities (DH) research involves applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, or topic modeling. A large amount of NLP software is already available. As long as researchers do not need to combine tools from different packages, it is usually relatively easy to write script...

Background The client experience is an important outcome in the evaluation and development of perinatal healthcare. But because clients meet different professionals, measuring such experiences poses a challenge. This is especially the case in the Netherlands, where pregnant women are often transferred between professionals due to the nation’s appro...

Abstract (ENG) In this article, we explore a new application of personal imaginations of the future as prospective reflective instrument in a political context. The case is the Greek Referendum of 2015. In the days preceding the Referendum, we collected via an online Survey 124 letters from the future from 99 potential Greek voters about a desired...

In this article, we bring the study of meaning together with the emerging field of study focusing on the emotions of wonder: wonder, enchantment, awe, and being moved. It is in meaningful moments that these two meet, and in our empirical study, we used the emotions of wonder as a lens to investigate meaningful moments. We applied a novel interventi...

This article discusses a new intervention, which is specifically designed for people with psychiatric complaints and intellectual disabilities. The intervention is based on narrative and life-review therapy. Changes in psychiatric complaints (OQ-45) and mental well-being (MHC-SF) were studied in a pre- and-post design with 20 participants. Changes...

This article uses data from a qualitative case study to help support and further develop an argument about the uses of futuristic-hypothetical narratives of self as a tool to educate desire through imagination. First, existing research about the role of the future in the creation of new experience in narrative approaches to history, psychology, and...

This article uses data from a qualitative case study to help support and further develop an argument about the uses of futuristic-hypothetical narratives of self as a tool to educate desire through imagination. First, existing research about the role of the future in the creation of new experience in narrative approaches to history, psychology, and...

The aim of this article is to explore how teams make sense of their effectiveness over time by telling their team story. We selected five team stories from health care teams perceived by the organization as effective. We analyzed their stories using three-level narrative analysis, which addresses the temporal, social, and normative complexities of...

The Letter from the Future is a positive psychological instrument (a written narrative), which can be employed for both research and intervention purposes. Which role does utopian imagination play when writing such letter? And what is the relevance of evaluation and of breaching the taken-for-granted? Taking on these questions, this article explore...

The growing supply of online mental health tools, platforms and treatments results in an enormous quantity of digital narrative data to be structured, analyzed and interpreted. Natural Language Processing is very suitable to automatically extract textual and structural features from narratives. Visualizing these features can help to explore pattern...

Objectives: Solution-focused support (SFS) is an upcoming approach to support people with intellectual disabilities (ID). However, while research shows that clients appreciate this approach, insight into professionals’ experiences and their application of SFS is lacking. This article describes a qualitative study aimed at understanding how professi...

This article describes an innovative intervention based on narrative and life review therapy that is tailored to people with intellectual disability (ID) and psychiatric problems. The current study provides a first evaluation of the intervention. A symptom checklist (SCL-90) was used in a pre- and post-follow-up design, and a qualitative evaluation...

From the perspective of the care ethics, developed by Joan Tronto, we reflect on four attunement patterns identifies in stories of patients in hospitals. Presuming that all patient are to be approached as autonomous clients does not fit with the variety of patients’ expectations about the role and responsibilities they are able and willing to take....

Mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, are among the leading causes of the global burden of disease. E-mental health (EMH) interventions, i.e., web-based psychotherapy treatments, are increasingly used to improve access to psychotherapy for a wider audience. Whereas different EMH interventions tend to be equally effective, the responsivenes...

From the perspective of the care ethics, developed by Joan Tronto, we reflect on four attunement patterns identifies in stories of patients in hospitals. Presuming that all patient are to be approached as autonomous clients does not fit with the variety of patients’ expectations about the role and responsibilities they are able and willing to take....

Launch of new section about narrative research Launch of new section about narrative research In this introduction to the new section about narrative research in the Dutch Journal for Qualitative Research (KWALON) a brief overview of contributions in KWALON related to narrative research over the last ten years is presented. This overview provides a...

In this article, we develop a theoretically substantiated narrative framework for assessing psychotherapy practices, based on a big and small story approach. This approach stretches the narrative scope of these practices by making explicit and advancing small story counseling. We demonstrate how this framework can be a reflection tool by systematic...

Using narrative methodology, we assess the feasibility of the active and independent patient, an image portrayed in Dutch government papers and contested by patient organizations, medical occupational groups and political parties. 109 stories about hospital care from 103 patients were collected online. Storyline analysis resulted in nine experience...

Wie lasst sich narratives Futuring („Vorstellen der Zukunft“) als psychotherapeutisches Werkzeug einsetzen, um damit die Resilienz zu steigern? Dieser Frage gehen die Autoren des folgenden Beitrags nach. Gestutzt auf nomothetisch-psychologische Theorie und Forschung, erortern sie zunachst die Beziehung zwischen Futuring und Resilienz. Im Anschluss...

Audiovisual collections of narratives about war-traumas are rich in descriptions of personal and emotional experiences which can be expressed through verbal and nonverbal means. We complement a commonly used verbal analysis with a nonverbal one to study emotional developments in narratives. Using automatic text, vocal, and facial expression analysi...

In this chapter, we describe the relation between narrative futuring and positive health on the basis of on-going research at the Storylab (University of Twente). In this research project, we investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying writing and sharing Letters from the Future. The assumption is that stories from the future facilitate the...

In this article, I explore narrative building blocks for future-oriented what-if (i.e., possibilities-generating) analysis developed in a health promotion study. The aim of this study was to gain insight into future possibilities for good health among participants known for their poor health status. In narrative inquiry, imagining future possibilit...

Narrative research. An introduction of characteristics and challenges of a rapidly growing research field Narrative research. An introduction of characteristics and challenges of a rapidly growing research field. This article provides a brief overview of different narrative approaches in social scientific inquiry. First different definitions, metho...

The aim of this thesis is to further develop a narrative psychological research methodology that is specifically suited for the study of healthy living. The title The development of narrative competence has a twofold meaning which mirrors the methodological and the substantive orientation of the study. First, narrative competence refers to the comp...

De titel van De verhalen die wij leven. Narratieve psychologie als methode verwijst zowel naar een benadering in de narratieve psychologie als naar een concrete interventiemethode (dus niet onderzoeksmethode) voor de hulpverlening aan ouderen. Overeenkomst tussen de narratieve psychologie als wetenschappelijke benadering en de life-review-intervent...

Although in the last decades there have been an increasing number of female managers, few make it to top management positions. In this study we want to gain insight into the persistence of the ‘glass ceiling’ by analyzing, from an ethnomethodologically informed discursive approach, how managers discursively position themselves in career making prac...

In een multiculturele en vergrijzende samenleving wordt het belang van diversiteit aan leefstijlen en opvattingen steeds belangrijker gevonden. Kennis over de perspectieven van (im)migranten op gezond leven, ouder worden en welzijn is niet alleen van belang voor het beter afstemmen van het zorgaanbod op de behoeften van bijvoorbeeld (im)migrantenou...

Om de hardnekkigheid van het glazen plafond in het bedrijfsleven inzichtelijk te maken, heeft de auteur het vertoog over 'hogerop komen' onderzocht. In de wereld van De Manager blijkt het geen sinecure op de juiste wijze ambitieus over te komen. Sools maakt aannemelijk hoe een onderliggende paradox van ambitie een specifieke competentie vereist, Zi...