Biographical Research Methods

Marta J. Eichsteller is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin. Her research and writing projects focus on the qualitative and cross-generational aspects of social inequalities from local, national and global perspectives. She has worked on projects on local civil society participation in Poland and the UK, European identifications, and sustained escapes from poverty in the context of international development across Africa and South East Asia. She is particularly interested in biographical aspects of social change and their implications for social inquiry. Howard Davis is Emeritus professor of Social Theory and Institutions at Bangor University, Wales, and a former Co-Director of the Wales Institute for Social & Economic Research & Data (WISERD). His research and writing have focused on social theories of culture; cultural formations and transitions in post-Soviet societies; and social identities at local, national and international levels. He has been responsible for a wide range of research projects on culture, language and identities, including several based on biographical methods.

Chapter 1 Discovering biographical narrative research Chapter 2 Theoretical approaches to biographical narratives Chapter 3 Interview process and ethics Chapter 4 Autobiographical Narrative Interview Method Chapter 5 Narrative ethnography Chapter 6 - Logical systems, qualitative comparative analysis, and quantitative coding Chapter 7 Designing a project using biographical methods Chapter 8 Mixed qualitative methods Chapter 9 Mixed quantitative and qualitative methods Chapter 10 Challenges ahead for biographical research

This book is a practical and thought-provoking account of the use of biographical methods in social science research. The case studies are useful for advanced students and researchers, and for anyone interested in how we tell stories about our lives. -- Rachel Wicaksono An accessible and lively text, drawing on numerous examples to demonstrate biographical narrative research in action. The fascinating and complex world of biographical research is presented in a highly accessible way. Students and researchers will learn a great deal from reading this before embarking on research projects with any degree of biographical focus. -- Candice Satchell Anchored in studies drawn from a wide variety of disciplines, Biographical Research Methods fills glaring gaps in the literature through balanced sympathetic consideration of a wide range of methodological approaches and its illumination of both established and innovative research techniques. -- Robert Miller Narrative research in social science has come a long way since its urban life heyday. Biographical Research Methods takes this forward, deftly focusing on concepts and techniques for analyzing the contours of personal experience. Outstanding is a view to the context-specific whats and processual hows of biographical construction. -- Jaber F. Gubrium The book of Eichsteller and Davis is an extremely instructive and inviting guide for getting introduced into the social world of biography research. On the one hand, the book is an empirically grounded and unbiased "sociology of knowledge" of distinctive approaches in biography research). It lucidly contrasts different basic assumptions and their implications for concrete methodical guidelines and practical research activities. On the other hand, it is an integrative guideline for the whole arc of work in accomplishing the research act of unravelling the intimate relations between individual and society and for deciphering the features and problems of society and other collective entities as seen and experienced from the perspective of individual members of society and of other collective entities. -The book is written in an elegant and deliberate style of language and presentation; it makes you want to start your own practical research work in biography analysis. -- Prof. Dr. Fritz Schuetze