Using Biographical Methods in Social Research

Barbara Merrill, Linden West

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412929585, 9781412929592
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using Biographical Methods in Social Research provides an informative, comprehensive, accessible and practical guide to the nature and use of biographical methods, combining a consideration of theoretical issues with practical guidance as well as reflections on the personal experience of doing research.

Barbara Merrill and Linden West consider important questions about who and what research is for and what makes it valid, alongside the practical business of interviewing, transcribing, analyzing and writing up of biographical data. The authors draw on their sociological and psychological orientations to provide a truly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and provide numerous examples of biographical research across the social sciences.

This book will equip students with all the skills necessary to undertake biographical research as well as to fully understand what they are doing and the assumptions they make about the nature of truth, knowledge, story telling and being human. It will be useful for students and researchers using biographical methods in a range of disciplines, including sociology, social policy, social psychology, health care and education.

1

Introduction

Setting the Scene

The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embedded in real people and in a real context. (E.P. Thompson, 1980: 8)

From the outside looking in, an observer might see a ‘common’ condition: a son is killed in Vietnam, a daughter’s mind is destroyed by LSD, a woman is divorced, a man becomes subject to mandatory requirement, there is a divorce. Yet, in interior life, what happens to one is unique. Life histories, like snowflakes, are never of the same design … (Audrey Borenstein, 1978: 30)

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Overview

In this chapter:

• We explain the relevance of the book and introduce the biographical turn.
• We introduce ourselves.
• We identify who the book is for and what we seek to achieve.
• An outline of the chapters and structure of the book is provided.

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Why did we write this book and who is it for? The answer to these questions lies in our belief, based on extensive experience of doing biographical research, that such methods offer rich insights into the dynamic interplay of individuals and history, inner and outer worlds, self and other. We use the word ‘dynamic’ to convey the idea of human beings as active agents in making their lives rather than being simply determined by historical and social forces. Such an idea – with immense implications for the way we think about research – has, from time to time, been lost or marginalised in social science. Yet it has recently found renewed impetus, and if we think of people – like you and us – as actively experiencing, giving meaning to and creating their worlds, we need to know more about how this happens, how it is understood by those concerned, and how it can be made most sense of.

We think this is an opportune time to produce such a book: we are all, it seems, biographers now and want to tell our stories. The genre is pervasive throughout our culture. A glance in most bookshops will reveal the extent to which biography and autobiography serve as prime vehicles for self and social exploration, or maybe self promotion. This is an age of biography, and telling stories seems ubiquitous in popular culture: we consume the stories of celebrities, are fascinated by stories on reality TV, and are constantly intrigued by wartime narratives, as witnessed by various series being repeated on television (Goodley et al., 2004). Gossip and celebrity magazines, fun-based websites, podcasts, blogs, biopics (film) and biodramas (theatre) are all sites for biographical expression and experiment, by ordinary people as well as celebrities. New biographies of celebrities appear, it seems, almost daily. Jerry Springer, the American chat show host, is using television to explore his own story and family history – including of grandmothers murdered in the Holocaust – as part of wrestling with questions of identity. Oprah Winfrey has helped create an intimate confessional as well as controversial form of media communication, which, among other things, is said to have allowed gays, transsexuals and transgender people to tell their stories. We are all, as stated, biographers now or encouraged to be so.

Very serious writers are using a biographical approach in diverse, even surprising contexts. The universe, for example, has a recent biography, as have a number of cities (Ackroyd, 2000; Gribbin, 2007). Peter Ackroyd has employed the biographical form to weave greater understanding and connections between apparently disparate aspects of London’s history. The genre allows him, he says, to do this: ‘if the history of London poverty is beside a history of London madness, then the connections may provide more significant information than any orthodox historiographical survey’ (Ackroyd, 2000: 2). Connecting disparate social phenomena and personal experience and weaving understanding between them in new and sometimes surprising ways characterises, as we will illustrate, a great deal of biographical research.

Biographical methods have claimed an increasing place in academic research and are alive and well (if sometimes marginal and contested) in various academic disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, anthropology, social policy and education, as well as in feminist and minority studies (Smith, 1998). There is a mushrooming of PhD and Masters programmes, dedicated research centres and conferences which, in various ways, are concerned with researching lives and the stories people tell about them. The words used to describe such methods can vary – autobiography, auto-ethnography, personal history, oral history or life story, as well as narrative, for instance – yet as Norman Denzin (1989a) has observed, there are many similarities (if also differences of emphasis). There can, for instance, be shared interest in the changing experiences and viewpoints of people in their daily lives, what they consider important, and how to make sense of what they say about their pasts, presents and futures, and the meanings they give to these in the stories they tell. There can be sensitivity towards the uniqueness yet also the similarities of lives and stories, like the snowflakes referred to above. Biography enables us to discern patterns but also distinctiveness in lives. The relationship between the particular and general, uniqueness and commonality, is in fact a central issue in biographical research.

The pervasive interest in biography may be understood by reference to living in a postmodern culture in which intergenerational continuities have weakened and a new politics of identity and representation has emerged among diverse groups. Women and men, gay and lesbian, black and white, young and old, may increasingly seek to live lives in different ways from parents or grandparents and doing biographical work has been one means to this end. The self and experience become a sort of reflexive life project, a focus for reworking who we are, and communicating this to others and for challenging, perhaps, some of the dominant stories told about people like us in the wider culture. Such a phenomenon can also be understood by reference to profound economic and cultural change over the last few decades, including the rise of feminism. These processes have provided more opportunities for self-definition (in the interplay of the global and local via mass communication technologies and in the celebration of diverse lifestyles, for example). Yet this historical moment, as commentators like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have observed, seems riddled with paradox: new opportunities for self-definition co-exist with deep-seated anxieties and existential doubt about our capacity to cope. The biographical imperative, at all levels, may be fuelled by the necessity to compose a life and make meaning in a more fragmented, individualised and unpredictable culture where inherited templates can be redundant and the nature of the life course increasingly uncertain in a globalising world.

A turn

There has, as indicated, been a major turn towards biographical, autobiographical, life history or narrative approaches in the academy over the last 30 or so years (Chamberlayne et al., 2000). The turn has many labels – the narrative or subjectivist turn – and encompasses different academic disciplines, including many of the social sciences. There are new journals devoted to the field and books have proliferated. In the United Kingdom, Miriam David, an Associate Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Programme (which has sponsored a major study of ‘learning lives’, using biographical methods (Biesta et al., 2008)), has welcomed the increasing use of these approaches in the study of education, higher education and lifelong learning. They offer, she states, potentially important insights into the complexities of learning across the lifespan that currently dominant evidence- based approaches, with their preoccupation with what is most easily quantified and measured, often miss or neglect (David, 2008).

The turn, in conceptual terms, has been a response to a long-standing omission or marginalisation of the human subject in research, under the banner of objectivity and generalisability, modelled on the natural sciences. The dominant story science has told itself – of objectivity, of the need to focus on the directly observable and of a methodological transcendence of the human condition in sense-making processes – came to be questioned to the core (Roberts, 2002). Social science was reconceptualised, for many, from the 1960s onwards (but echoing older themes), as a human practice, shaped by power, dominant interests and/or powerful myths, which required interrogation. The growth of feminism and oral history was especially influential in challenging the neglect of the human subject (Chamberlayne et al., 2000; Plummer, 2001). Both were concerned to engage with personal accounts in a manner respecting and valuing what people had to say. They were also about finding some means to elicit and analyse the spoken and written records of people who, more often than not, had been neglected in the mainstream social and historical record. Feminism and oral history represented, at times, a radical, questioning edge, which continues to shape the thinking and practice of many biographical researchers. Moreover, biographical researchers may frequently, if not exclusively, engage with marginalised peoples, seeking to give voice and to challenge dominant assumptions, as part of a humanist project to build a more just social order.

We should add that biographical methods, and the desire to place people and their humanity at the core of social research, are not new either. They reach back to Max Weber (a German sociologist who focused on people’s actions rather than structures) and a need for understanding in social science – by reference to the people concerned – rather than observing and measuring behaviour without engaging in dialogue with those most intimately concerned. The emphasis on engaging with people, and with understanding how they make sense of their worlds, was similarly at the heart of what was called the Chicago School. This has a central place in the history of the biographical research ‘family’. Chicago School sociologists and social psychologists, in the 1920s, developed the notion of symbolic interactionism to capture the dynamic, learned, malleable and constructed quality of human identity and society, not least through the medium of language. Symbolic interactionists treat the things that members of society do as being performed by them, as actors, rather than as if done by something called the system itself. The social order, in short, is dynamically created in, through and from the interactions of its members. The task for the researcher is how to chronicle such processes and to explain them theoretically: using a repertoire of psychological, sociological, historical, literary and narrative theories. Furthermore, symbolic interactionists believed that only particulars, and people, have real empirical substance. They saw grand theoretical abstractions – like class, progress or even love – as having no real solidity outside people, their lived experience and stories. The idea of grounding understanding in such experience and of using theory respectfully in its light, remains, for many, a core value in biographical research. Human beings – rather than overly abstract categories – are at the heart of the project.

The British social historian Edward Thompson made this point in his seminal study, The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, 1980). ‘Making’ was central to his ontology, or theory of being. Class was not so much a structure, or even a category, but something that is made in (and can be shown to have happened in) human relationships. Class is embodied in real people in real contexts, as in our opening quotation: ‘the finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love’ (Thompson, 1980: 8). You cannot have love without lovers or have deference without squires and labourers. Class happens when some men and women, as a result of common experiences (shared, inherited and even imagined), feel and articulate – to which we would add reflexively ‘learn’ – some identity of interest in comparison to another group. How people actively ‘learn’ their world, and their place in it, as well as how this may be challenged, is at the heart of much biographical research.

Bringing us into the text

We want, at this early stage, to introduce ourselves and bring our work, lives and orientations directly into the book. The book, in a sense, seeks to combine notions of biographical research as a personal journey with being a textbook of how to make good and meaningful research. The business of doing research is, we believe, made more alive in such an approach. Liz Stanley (1992) also draws attention – in her use of the term auto/biography (with a slash) – to the inter-relationship between the constructions of our own lives through autobiography and the construction of others’ lives through biography. We cannot, in a sense, write stories of others without reflecting our own histories, social and cultural locations as well as subjectivities and values. Moreover, choosing a topic for a biographical study tends almost always to be rooted in our own personal and/or professional biographies (Miller, 2007). A topic we choose in others’ lives may be motivated by or raise profound issues in our own. We, therefore, argue the case for bringing the researcher, and processes of relationship, into the research frame – and for interrogating this quite explicitly – rather than pretending, as many researchers do, that our interests and ways of making sense of others is, or should be, divorced from the people and experiences we are.

Barbara

Barbara’s interest in using biographical approaches is rooted in her own life history. As a sociologist, Barbara writes, working in adult education, I am interested in researching the stories and experiences of adults who decide to return to learning later in their lives, in community, further or higher education. In particular, I am interested in looking at marginalised groups of adult learners whose life histories have been shaped by inequalities of class, gender and race. The latter have been central concerns throughout my life. Being female and working class, I soon became aware of class and later gender discrimination and inequalities in society through my own experiences and those of my family. Later, as a teacher in a multicultural comprehensive school, I became very conscious of the pervasiveness of racism in society through the lives of the black pupils.

My life experiences of being female and working class drew me towards Marxist and feminist politics at the age of 17 in the early 1970s. Studying sociology at school and university enabled me to articulate, understand and politicise my life experiences. Like many young people at that time, I was optimistic that the injustices of capitalism could be challenged and that through collective political action society could be changed. It was a belief in the importance of subjectivity in building agency and in overcoming the determinism of structural forces. This is probably one reason why, in relation to the biographical research I undertake, I am interested in the dynamic of structure and agency in people’s lives.

However, despite my political awareness as an undergraduate student at the University of Warwick from 1973 until 1976, I felt overwhelmed by the middle-class culture and the privileged lives of the majority of its students, and the culture of the institution. This led to feelings of not always belonging – of being an outsider – despite enjoying my academic studies and having a circle of friends, as well as being involved in political groups. My confidence was occasionally undermined despite this political background and sociological knowledge.

My first experience of doing biographical research was in the mid-1980s when I was studying part-time for a Master of Philosophy degree in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, while also teaching at a school. The topic of my research was racism in schools and involved interviewing black pupils and getting them to talk about their life experiences. Looking back on my first encounters with life history interviews, my approach was not embedded in any particular theoretical underpinning. It was more about taking the plunge and engaging with people in what may have been a naive way. Luckily, all the pupils were willing to talk and talk intimately about how racism affected their own and their family’s daily lives. What struck me was how articulate they were in discussing personal and political issues of racism and what they felt about other pupils, teachers and the school. They illustrated how powerful biographical approaches could be in understanding everyday lives.

Later, I made a career change from teaching 14–18 year olds to teaching adults at the University of Warwick. I entered academia feeling excited about the opportunity to undertake research but also experienced some trepidation. Echoing my earlier time as an undergraduate student, I was concerned about whether or not I would be good enough to work in the academic world. It was hinted to me that if I wanted to remain at Warwick I would need to obtain a PhD. My biography helped me to choose an area of study. I, therefore, became interested in how working-class adult students who had been out of the education system for a long time coped with the middle-class environment of a ‘traditional’, although relatively young university like Warwick. I reflected back on my pupils at the school where I had taught because many of them had been alienated by the middle-class and white school system and, as a result, left school having underachieved. Did the adult students at Warwick share similar life experiences? If so, why had they chosen to return to learn and why at this moment in their lives?

Here was my second encounter with using biographical approaches. However, this time I was part of a research team and environment. Although the focus was on mature women students, I also interviewed male adult stud...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Setting the Scene
• 2 Biographical Methods: An Introductory History
• 3 Mapping the Contemporary Uses of Biographical Research
• 4 Identifying Some Theoretical Issues
• 5 Illustrating Good Practice: Case Studies
• 6 Getting Started in Research
• 7 Interviewing and Recording Experience
• 8 Making Sense of Biography: Analysis
• 9 Representing the Stories: Writing Up
• 10 Is Biographical Research Valid and Ethical?
• 11 On Being a Biographical Researcher
• Glossary
• References
• Index