Life History and Narrative

J. Amos Hatch, Richard Wisniewski, J. Amos Hatch, Richard Wisniewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135718770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research design in which stories are used to describe human action. This book contains current ideas in this emerging field of research. Chapters include a qualitative analysis of narrative data; criteria for evaluating narrative inquiry, linking emotion and reason through narrative voice, audience and the politics of narrative; trust in educational storytelling; narrative strategies for case reports; life history narratives and women's gender identity; and issues in life history and narrative inquiry. This text is intended to be of interest to all qualitative researchers and education researchers studying forms of narrative.

Life history and narrative: questions, issues, and exemplary works

J.AMOS HATCH
RICHARD WISNIEWSKI
University of Tennessee

This chapter reports findings from an analysis of answers to questions sent to a group of narrative and life history scholars. Respondents were asked to reflect on distinctions between “life history” and “narrative,” the relationship of narrative and life history to other qualitative approaches, issues connected with work in these fields, and the relationship of life history and narrative to poststructuralism. They were also invited to nominate significant works about life history or narrative approaches as well as outstanding scholarship utilizing these approaches. Findings are discussed in relation to literature in the life history and narrative field, including the chapters in this volume.

Introduction

Life history and narrative approaches have emerged as important research areas over the past decade. While not new, interest in these methods has never been greater. Life history and narrative offer exciting alternatives for connecting the lives and stories of individuals to the understanding of larger human and social phenomena. For many scholars familiar with other qualitative methodologies and for others exploring the possibilities for inquiry in a postmodern age, consideration of these approaches raises many questions. In preparing this chapter, we identified some important questions and asked individuals experienced in doing and writing about narrative and life history to respond. We also asked them to identify excellent examples of life histories or narratives as well as work discussing methods, ethics, and theory related to these approaches. In this chapter, we present the questions sent to our expert group, report a summary analysis of their responses, and provide a discussion of these responses in relation to the chapters in this book and other literature in this area. We include two appendices in which full references to the works identified as exemplary by our respondents are listed.

Guiding questions

As we planned this project, we recognized the limitations and incongruity¹ of using a questionnaire, no matter how open ended, to gather information about an important genre of qualitative inquiry. Nonetheless, we saw this strategy as the best available way to gather expert opinion and generate discussion about a field of emerging interest. We sent six questions to everyone in the database of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education listed under “life history” or “narrative” and to everyone not listed we could identify by being familiar with their work or references to it. The questions follow:

1. What, if any, distinctions can be made between “life history” and “narrative”?
2. What distinguishes life history or narrative work from other types of qualitative research?
3. What are the major issues connected with life history or narrative work?
4. What is the relationship of life history or narrative to poststructuralism?
5. What are three important works about life history or narrative?
6. What are three important examples of life history or narrative work?

The questions were sent to a total of 79 individuals and 22 responded.² While we were hoping for more responses, those received were of exceptional quality. They provide valuable insights into the “state-of-the-art” of narrative and life history scholarship. We use the above questions to frame this chapter and include, in appendices, full references to the works identified as exemplary in response to the last two questions.

What, if any, distinctions can be made between “life history” and “narrative”?

Everyone responding, except Bill Ayers, opted to describe distinctions at various levels between life history and narrative. Ayers wrote:

This is not a useful distinction to me. Both approaches to inquiry are unabashedly genre blurring. They tend to tear down walls—anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics—and why should we resurrect them? Each relies on story, on subjective accounts, on meaning as it is constructed by people in situations. Each focuses on life as it is lived—an experience not easily fitted into disciplines, categories, or compartments. Each assumes a dynamic, living past, a past open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to meaning-making in and for the present

Despite this important statement and the acknowledgment by most others of the similarities in the approaches, several useful differences were evident in the responses.

Life histories as a type of narrative

Several individuals (who, like us, are structuralists at heart) offered a distinction based on taxonomic relations. All who were explicit about the superordinate-subordinate relationship between the two had life history as a type of narrative. Examples of responses taking this approach include: “Life history is often presented as though it were a special case of the more general class of ‘narratives’” (Rob Walker); “It seems to me that a…simple distinction between narrative and life history is that one is much broader in scope than (and subsumes) the other: while all life histories are narratives, not all narratives are life histories” (Nancy Zeller). Michelle Foster suggests that confusion could be avoided by using the term “autobiographical narrative to indicate that one means life history narratives and to distinguish them from other kinds of narratives.” Anticipating question two concerning the relationship between qualitative research and life history and narrative, Mary Jean Herzog organized the following straightforward classification:

I. Qualitative Research

A. Narrative

1. Life history.

Stories as ways of knowing

Narrative was characterized by many respondents as “a way of knowing.” As they made distinctions between life history and narrative, the place of story was important. Andrew Sparkes wrote:

The ways that stories are used differ. Life histories often take them more at face value and work off them in terms of content to generate interpretations. Narratives focus more on how stories are formed and structured by the wider culture in terms of their telling, and during the face-to-face interaction that generates their telling.

In narrative work, there is a particular emphasis on “how we tell our stories rather than what is told. How we tell our stories, the narrative form, becomes a window to ways of knowing” (Petra Munro). Yvonna Lincoln summarized this perspective:

As Polkinghorne uses the term narrative, it may also mean a way of knowing, as for instance in the sense that we make sense of our lives not in terms of “factoids,” but rather in terms of stories we tell about ourselves and our significant others, and the meanings that are implicit in those stories, particularly the meanings which we ourselves have made of the events of our lives…. Thus, life history is always the history of a life, a single life, told from a particular vantage point, while narrative may be a style of telling, a particular way of constructing the story of several individuals or a group; a particular way of writing which has strong focus on the rhetorical structure, discursive structure, and “feeling tone” (as Studs Terkel calls it).

Life histories as individual, contextually situated stories

Several others agreed with Lincoln that life history is always the history of a single life. In terms of scope, some noted that narrative is well suited for making sense of “particular experiences,” while life history is designed to “explain, describe, or reflect upon a life-making meaning of a person’s life” (Linda Tillman Rogers). Bill Tierney supported this view: “Life history revolves around questions pertaining to one’s life. Narrative may simply pertain to a moment in a text, a story about an episode in one’s life (or a group, or an organization, etc).”

Pauline Chinn defined life history as follows: “A life history is composed of self-referential stories through which the author-narrator constructs the identity and point(s) of view of a unique individual historically situated in culture, time, and place.” Chinn’s emphasis on situatedness was a theme taken up by others using this approach to making life history distinct from narrative:

While there are a variety of forms of life history, they all include an essential combination of life story accounts (i.e., autobiographical accounts—oral and/or written), and the accounts of others, including the researcher, for the purposes of “triangulation” into a history rather than being a personal life story. (Richard Butt)

In so much as life histories are stories of people’s lives, they are narratives; but it is the connection of one’s life events to social events that distinguishes life history from other forms of narrative. The life is seen as being lived in a time, place, and under particular social circumstances rather than a simple collection of events. (Paul Schempp)

The most important distinction between life history as method and narrative as method is the role of context. I think of life history research as taking narrative one step further; that is, life history places narrative accounts and interpretations in a broader context—personal, historical, social, institutional, and/or political. Thus, life history studies go beyond “the personal.” Related to this, I also see a difference with respect to the broad purposes of life history and narrative research. Narrative focuses on making meaning of individuals’ experiences; life history draws on individuals’ experiences to make broader contextual meaning. (Ardra Cole)

What distinguishes life history or narrative work from other types of qualitative research?

Focus on the individual

Our respondents identified a focus on the individual as the predominant characteristic that sets life history and narrative work apart from other qualitative approaches. Yvonna Lincoln articulated this distinguishing characteristic as follows:

Life history and narrative are always rooted in the sense-making systems of individuals…. You would not, or could not, probably expect studies of communities or societies (as you would expect from more common sociological foci) or tribes or ethnic groups (as you would expect from traditional anthropology) from either of these two kinds of studies.

Understanding individual lives or individual stories is central to the research processes and products of life history and narrative. Data for this type of work “have to be collected by interacting with the narrators. Therefore, the material of the life history comes from the participants themselves” (Michelle Foster). Individual lives are the units of analysis of life history work and individual stories are the stuff of narrative analysis. In Norman Denzin’s words:

The focus with the life history-narrative approach is on the stories people tell one another. The focus on stories and their narrative analysis distinguishes this type of work from other qualitative methods like interviewing, direct observation, and participant observation.

The products of life history or narrative projects provide different perspectives on individuals than are possible in other qualitative genres:

The ability of life history to focus upon central moments, critical incidents, or fateful moments that revolve around indecision, confusions, contradictions, and ironies, gives a greater sense of process to a life and gives a more ambiguous, complex, and chaotic view of reality. It also presents more “rounded” and believable characters than the “flat,” seemingly irrational, and linear characters from other forms of qualitative inquiry. (Andrew Sparkes)

The tension between this focus on the individual and the contextually situated nature of individual experience was addressed as part of our respondents’ acknowledgment of the centrality of the individual in this work. Bill Tierney discussed how this tension gets played out in the different qualitative approaches he employs:

Life history is singular. When I undertake a life history, I try to understand how larger concepts (culture, society, time) get defined and worked out by one individual. When I do case studies, ethnography, or interviews, I might use the larger concepts to understand a particular idea/ dilemma.

Petra Munro warned of the potential dangers of decontextualizing individual lives:

This focus on the individual is to gain a deeper understanding of the complex relations between ideology and culture, self and society. Life history requires a historical, cultural, political, and social situatedness in order to avoid the romanticization of the individual, and thus reproduction of a hero narrative which reifies humanist notions of the individual as autonomous and unitary.

Personal nature of the research process

Related to its emphasis on the individual, our respondents saw the processes of doing narrative and life history work as distinctly more personal than other types of qualitative investigation. In order for the work to be well done, researcher and participant work closely together to come to a shared understanding of the participant’s story. As Pauline Chinn explained, “The element that distinguishes narrative and life history work from other kinds of qualitative research is its dialogical, discursive nature. Narrator and researcher achieve mutual understanding, or intersubjectivity.” Chinn acknowledged that while perfect intersubjectivity is impossible, the relationship between researcher and narrator is nonetheless much closer than in other modes of qualitative research. Ardra Cole agreed, noting several elements that make relationships closer: “the personal and intrusive nature of the research, the role of personal histories as a data source, and the primary emphasis on verbal and/or written personal accounts as an information gathering tool.” Cole also mentioned that because of the personal nature of the work, “research participants tend to be more involved in the design, conduct, and analysis of the inquiry.” More involvement in the research process was another dimension of difference between life history and narrative approaches and other qualitative research modes mentioned by individuals responding to our questionnaire:

Life history has greater potential to develop collaborative modes of engagement in which greater control and status is given to the subject. In relation to this, it has greater potential to develop knowledge that has relevance and meaning to the subjects or story tellers. (Andrew Sparkes)

Sparkes’ statement about relevance and meaning leads to a discussion of the practical orientation that many of our respondents saw as distinguishing life history and narrative.

Practical orientation

Because of their central focus on individual lives as lived, these approaches were seen by our respondents as producing “findings” that have more practical value for wider populations of readers than other forms of qualitative research. Mary Jean Herzog noted “the orientation to practice and change and also the real world” as a distinguishing characteristic of this approach. Two British scholars independently identified as characteristic the ability of life history to place theoretical understanding in a practical light, making it possible to bridge gaps between understandings from micro and macro perspectives:

Of supreme importance is the way in which life history can get at lived experience and in so doing can make the familiar strange. It can reveal what theory means in practice. To use obvious examples, what it means to belong to a particular social class, gender or “race,” to have certain sexual orientations, or to be in...