The narrative interview (henceforth, NI) envisages a setting that encourages and stimulates an interviewee (who in NI is called an 'informant') to tell a story about some significant event in their life and social context. The technique derives its label from the Latin word narrare, to report, to tell a story. In an unpublished manuscript, Schütze (1977) has suggested a systematization of this technique. Its basic idea is to reconstruct social events from the perspective of informants as directly as possible. To date, we have used narrative interviews to reconstruct informants' perspectives in two studies: first, to reconstruct actors’ perspectives in a controversial software development project in a corporate context (Bauer, 1991; 1996; 1997); and secondly, to investigate representations of public life in Brazil (Jovchelovitch, 2000). Positive experiences encourage us to recommend the technique, and to make Schütze's systematization available in the English language with some elaboration.