Biographical Research

Challenges and Creativity

Ana Caetano, Magda Nico, Ana Caetano, Magda Nico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Recherche scientifique et méthodologie

Studying people's lives requires acknowledging the multiple entanglements between individual singularity and processes of social patterning. This book testifies how challenging and creative the study of these connections can be. It gathers international contributions that show, in imaginative ways, how a person's life or specific domains of existence can be observed, tackled, and analysed across time.

This volume reveals the potential of biographical research in the production of social theory, in the development of methodological innovation, in giving voice and protagonism to people, and in the understanding of the social unfolding of their lives. It is a testimony of a vibrant and youthful field, with a long tradition in social sciences, and with numerous connections with other study areas, namely the life course approach. The different chapters illustrate how the challenges posed by this type of research focused on the individual level of analysis are particular and what creative responses are required to continue analysing the link between biography and society.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Contemporary Social Science.

Forever young: creative responses to challenging issues in biographical research

Ana Caetano

and Magda Nico

ABSTRACT

Biographical research has a long tradition in social sciences. Being an incredibly dynamic interdisciplinary field, it has evolved in its core mission to study the links between individuals and society, strongly anchored in its tradition while also experimenting new approaches. In this paper we discuss a number of challenges resulting from this noteworthy development (theoretical, methodological, object-related and singularity-related) and the creative strategies put into practice by social scientists to answer and overcome them (in observing subjectivity, in the methodological devices implemented and in the analytical procedures applied). These issues and creativity are transversal to the biographical research field (also in its connection to the life course perspective) and are particularly present in the 11 articles brought together in this themed volume of Contemporary Social Science. Although coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and different parts of the world, and developing approaches focused on heterogeneous research topics and methodologies, these papers illustrate how challenging biographical research can be and how resourceful, imaginative and innovative social scientists need to be to overcome those issues.

A youthful field

Biographical research is an interdisciplinary field that holds an undeniable status in the social sciences. It exemplarily evokes a constant vigilance on methodological and epistemological matters at the same time that it constantly revisits its strong interdisciplinary and multifaceted tradition. Furthermore, it manages to evolve and accumulate knowledge without succumbing to either hyper specialisation or rupture with the past.

Biographical research advocates for the superiority of life records. This superiority

over every other kind of material for the propose of sociological analysis appears with particular force when we pass from the characterization of single data to the determination of facts, for there is no safer and more efficient way of finding among the innumerable antecedents of a social happening the real causes of this happening than to analyse the past of the individuals through whose agency this happening occurred. (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1984 [1918–20], pp. 294–295)

This has held true since Thomas and Znaniecki, and although it might has been widely appropriated as if ‘life records’ are exclusively autobiographical narrative accounts, there are many other ways of embracing ‘subjectivity in research’ and ‘the role of human agency in social life’ with other kind of empirical material to be used in and through biographical research, such as visual or audio aids, life calendars and timelines, correspondence, other’s accounts, among others. Coming ‘back to basics’, and to this important statement by Thomas and Znaniecki should remind us of the endless possibilities in the formats, sources and methods of getting, sharing and co-generating individual life records.

For this reason, biographical research should not be understood as a unified method, based on consensual theoretical grounds, with standardised methodological techniques and rigid analytical procedures. Just to mention a few, Miller identifies ate least three approaches that greatly differ in terms of method, theoretical orientation, techniques used, types of questions asked, etc.: realist, neo-positivist and narrative (2000, p. 13). There are multiple ways of doing biographical research and it is in this diversity that lies one of the greatest features of this kind of approach (Goodwin, 2012). The very development of this field testifies how different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds can converge in the central idea of studying the links between individuals and their social contexts through people’s narratives (which may take different forms: oral, written, visual, among others).

If we take the work of Thomas and Znaniecki (1984 [1918–20]) and subsequent studies undertaken within the interpretative paradigm of the Chicago School, as pioneer research in the development of biographical approaches, it becomes clear that this field has evolved from a marginal approach focusing on societýs marginalised and deviant people to an interdisciplinary, multi-method and thematically heterogeneous field. Even if for a substantial period of time (somewhere between the 1940s and 1960s) biographical research remained marginal, authors such as Park, Mead, Burgess, Anderson and Shaw had already established the fundamental grounds of biographical methods (interviews, participant observation, collection of written documents, such as letters and diaries) and analysis (focusing on personal accounts to study macro social phenomena such as immigration, social change and deviation). The relative marginality of biographical research in social sciences during that period of time (even considering the subsequent contributions of phenomenological and ethnomethodological approaches) can be understood by the fact that it relies on personal accounts, which still raises today, for some researchers, issues of objectivity, reliability and validity. These questions were particularly problematic during a period under a functionalist paradigm advocating the supremacy of quantitative data and the demise of subjectivity (Becker, 1986). It was not until the 1970s onwards, when ‘there was a change in the way “science” was being seen’ (Roberts, 2002, p. 4), that biographical research started gaining a new status in social sciences, especially in Europe.

Authors such as Daniel Bertaux in France, Fritz Schütze in Germany and Franco Ferrarotti in Italy (just to name a few) revitalised the field bringing new insights and proposals into the debate. In a context strongly marked by structuralism, Bertaux (1981, 1997; Bertaux & Kohli, 1984) developed a structuralist biographical approach based on the idea that life stories have the potential to reveal the effects of structural constraints. The focus is directed at individual practices, from which the researcher can infer general socio-structural patterns. Responding to claims of lack of objectivity, the author suggests a saturation strategy to argue that interviews should be carried out until the structural traits emerging from individual accounts start to overlap and repeat. Following a phenomenological tradition, Schütze (1992, 2014) developed the autobiographical narrative research method, which allows researchers to reconstruct social events from the individual’s perspectives and describe the sequence and structure of biographical processes. In Italy, Ferrarotti (1983, 2003) was a central figure in the defence of biographical research, arguing that each individual is simultaneously singular and universal, and that the connection between macro processes and personal experiences should be analysed considering the mediation role of primary groups (family, neighbours, colleagues, etc.).

From the 1990s onwards, the idea of socio-historically constructed actors, ‘whose biographies are necessary to render fully intelligible their historical action in context – its conditions, meanings and outcomes, whether such conditions, meanings and outcomes be conscious or unconscious’ (Chamberlayne, Bornat, & Wengraf, 2000, pp. 7–8) gains ground with the substantial changes taking place in the social sciences’ research agenda. Such transformations give shape to what Chamberlayne et al. (2000) have called the biographical turn, when analysing the multiple connections between the French, German and British traditions.

The mobilisation of biographical approaches and methods has been increasing both in number and scope with the proliferation of concepts and methodological tools being at the service of different paradigms and theoretical insights. Making use of interviews (Gubrium, Holstein, Marvasti, & McKinney, 2012; Miller, 2000) and life documents (Plummer, 2001) such as letters, diaries, autobiographical texts, photographs or personal objects, we can access oral history (Bornat, 2004; Thompson, 1978), life histories and life stories (Atkinson, 1998; Pujadas, 1992; Roberts, 2002), life as lived, as experienced and as told (Bruner, 1984), life narratives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and individual case studies (Elias, 2005 [1991]; Lahire, 2011 [1998]). This material can then be analysed through different procedures: narrative analysis (Apitzsch & Inowlocki, 2000; Riemann, 2003; Riessman, 2008; Rosenthal, 2004), sociological portraits (Lahire, 2002), Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (Wengraf, 2001), interpretative biography (Denzin, 1989), among others. Despite their epistemological, theoretical and methodological differences, all these different notions, procedures and approaches share three central ideas. One is the need to give voice and listen to the individual who, being the protagonist of her/his own life, is the only one who can provide first-hand information and insights on her/his personal experience. A second one is the fact that the narratives collected through biographical methods are not an expression of a socially isolated individual, but rather the singular configuration of multiple social dynamics, processes, contexts and relations. And the third one is the connection between macro and micro levels of analysis.

There is always a central concern that the combination, openness, mixture of these multiple methods and approaches provide a certain life with a wider context that can shed light on its specificity or eccentricity, on one hand, and to its ordinariness, on the other. And as the bridge between the individual biography and its historical context – as Mills (1959) puts it – is the ultimate role of biographical research, then any bridge, as fragile and insufficient as it may be, is welcome.

This is not a field trapped in its own long lasting scientific reputation. On the contrary, it is auto-reflexive, innovative and challenged by its own community of social researchers. It is characterised by unity but also diversity, by identity but also fragmentation (Atkinson, 2005). Biographical research is, in many ways, still a young and vibrant field, with a world of possibilities ahead, namely those of how to creatively tackle the challenges brought about by: (i) the contemporary changes in the subject of analysis (new social relevance of certain social groups, such as refugees, migrants, deaf people or disabled women, or the urgency of collecting oral histories in such groups); (ii) the emergence of new instruments and techniques of data analysis (the new graphic options and other potentialities of the most recent versions of computer assisted qualitative data analysis software, for instance); (iii) or the imminent momentum of the bridge with life course research (which would allow biographical research to be exposed to mixed methods and quantitative techniques that nonetheless respect its very nature and main principles).

Life course research has been developing remarkably simila...