Theme 3: The social context: studying biographies in social sciences

1
Theme 3 The social context studying biographies
in social sciences

• The use of biographical studies for social
  interpretations (explanations, purposes,
  intentions)

2
Aims of research

• The social context different ways to see the
  society
• The social space
• The social structure,
• The social situations
• The social relations
• The research can aim principally
• - to gain true knowledge
• - to explain how things (affairs, objects) are in
  reality
• - to understand different phenomena, expressions
  and processes
• - to interpret what has happened (to whom?) and
  what can be expected,
• - to reach the reality under or over the
  surface (to see invisible)
• to question what was taken as given
• - to make self-clear everyday facts problematic

3
Quantities and qualities

• The quantitative approach is based on
  calculations of how many objects (cases, factors
  etc.)
• Strategic methods counting, classifications,
  estimating
• items, types, classes
• A qualitative approach is based on valuation of
  what (something) is like
• qualitative differences are evaluated by to
  experiencing subject
• It is meaningful to ask who is the subject of the
  study
• in autobiographies the author is the oneself who
  can understand best what has happened to me

4
The role of the researcher hermeneutical
understanding

• How can I understand the experiences of the
  others?
• cf. introspection to understand the inner self)
• Understanding (in hermeneutics - Dilthey) - by
  experiencing something as my own, by feeling
  sameness with the other, to understand how the
  experiences emerge from the memories
• Relatedness of experiences ? to experience
  something in common (togetherness) ? the
  universality of human experiences
• Situations and placements of experiences
  different happenings, different contexts - times
  and places, different life-phases, different
  generations

5
The role of the researcher as an interpreter

• The role of the interpreter
• the task to construct a social narrative from
  the basis of individual experiences
• a) to form a context to the experiences
  (episodes, fragments, happenings) OR
• b) to help the author (the story-teller) to find
  out what is meaningful when experiences are seen
  as the connected with the social context OR
• c) to give a voice to the subject of the study
  and to help the construction of the relationship
  between the author (storyteller) and the reader
  (the listener)
• Methodological significance of this role is
  connected to the ways of collecting research
  material

6
A structured strategy for the data collection

• In a well formulated questionnaire or structured
  interviews the researcher gives impulses to the
  people under study to react in either/or -form
  (scales, classifications, factors)
• - the researcher has to be conscious of the
  expectations concerning results - the
  hypothetic-deductive-model
• the dimensions for scales of answers or given by
  the researcher
• the model of analysis must be decided before the
  material is collected
• open questions are problematic for the analysis
  (how to analyse them without scaling?)

7
Interviews

• Interviews, thematic interviews, deep interviews,
  intensive interviews
• Structured, semi-structured or open interviews
• Answers to strictly pre-formulated questions or
• Tell your story - openly
• Group interviews
• Group discussions
• Tape-recorded interviews in forms of discussions
• Episodic stories on meaningful moments or
  specific turns (who decides what are the
  meaningful episodes?)
• Complete life-stories in chronologic order (who
  decides the order of life-happenings)

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Thematic interviews as analysed by means of types

• When themes are decided beforehand by the
  researcher the interviews as well as the analysis
  follow a pre-formulated thematic strategy the
  structure of the research
• Types (typologies) of respondents are often
  constructed by following a specific conceptual
  (thematic) strategy
• the interest is not focused on real individuals
  but ideal-type representatives of certain themes
• Social typologies used for the interpretation of
  qualitative (biographical) data
• can be based e.g. on the external and internal
  governance of life (on the interpretation of the
  life-conditions) (Roos) (cf. governmentality by
  Foucault)
• can be based on the mastery of the cultural
  capital (Bourdieu
• can be based on key-experiences of generations
  (Mannheim)

9
The voice of the storyteller

• An alternative strategy starts from this
  question
• how and why the voice of the storyteller
  (interviewed, author of an autobiography) can be
  heard when interpreting the data?
• The research as an instrument of empowerment
• An interest-based motivation for the research
  used when studying minorities in socially
  marginal positions
• Social class, gender, ethnicity taken often into
  consideration as identity-political categories
• Reflective look by means of which the dominating
  structures can be seen otherwise

10
Autobiography as a genre

• Telling ones own life who is the person called
  me
• Constructing oneself as a subject (an individual,
  a person)
• Structuring meaningfully everyday experiences
  from my own perspective
• Expectations the future
• Meaningfulness the presence
• Motives, intentions the continuation
• Memories the past

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The use of autobiographies

• Therapeutic significance of autobiography
• self-therapy, self-reflexivity
• Autobiography as an emancipating act
• enabling people in marginal positions to become
  representatives of a certain political
  action-field
• - Autobiography as a kind of anamnesis
• for a patient or a client
• - Autobiography as a pedagogical device
• a self-actualising deed which contributes
  personal growth
• - Autobiography as an artistic production-
  extremely well told a story includes
  qualification
• Autobiography as a product-like artefact
• Autobiography as a market-product

12
Paul Ricouer Oneself as another (1992, 114)

• Production of identity as it happens in the
  process of interpretation
• Narrative self-definition means that
  interpretation is needed in the construction of
  ones self historically and fictionally
• A person produces his/her identity by telling
  oneself in his/her own life-story, and mixing
  both factual and fictive elements as experiences
  by his or her own way
• Identity, as understood in this way, has no
  stable character but it is a construction,
  produced and reproduced by using narrative
  relations as its elements, in other words
  relations between personal characters, happenings
  and their contexts

13
Reflexivity as an empowering act

• indicators of reflexive understanding of ones
  own life are increasingly demanded for
  life-political purposes
• how to live a better life?
• A person how masters an emotional life
  consciously learns to narrate his/her life story
  in an interpretative way to present a heroic
  figure
• how to narrate an other (the past me) as
  estranged from the present subject (I)?
• the author sends the narrator to the past to find
  a person who experienced meaningful happenings to
  remember those happenings as internalized
• telling of ones story is an emancipating
  empowering enabling act as such