Questioning the Subject in Biographical Interviewing

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2003

The purpose of this paper is twofold: It reconstructs the development of a joint endeavor of a group of social scientists trying to make their specific approaches of doing biographical research visible by focusing on one particular autobiographical narrative interview: the interview with a female labor migrant from Turkey living in a German city. The data were collected in a student research project of the late Christa HOFFMANN-RIEM. The product of this endeavor is this issue of Forum: Qualitative Social Research-a preliminary product since readers are invited to take part in the analysis of this interview, the transcription of which is made available to them (in the original German version and an English translation as well) and to offer their interpretations and critical comments in the future. In addition to this the reconstruction of this endeavor is placed in the context of research connected with Fritz SCHÜTZE, which initially led to the development of this type of interview-the narrative interview. Although today this type of interview is widely used it seems necessary to remind people of its history in order to avoid an undue and narrow focus on "method" or "technique." The paper emphasizes the linkage of theoretical and methodological concerns at the beginning of this development, the decision to methodically utilize off-hand-narratives of selflived experiences for sociological field research and the turn to autobiographical narrative interviews and their sequential analysis which proved to be fruitful with regard to the discovery of "structural processes" of the life course. Thus, this research tradition contributed to the emergence and the present shape of biographical research in the social sciences.

Human Resource Development Quarterly, 2003

Expert practitioners use research and theory to guide data collection and analysis when solving organizational problems (Swanson, 1997). Useful research is generated by practitioner researchers and scholars who have the potential to impact the field when their research is published and read by others (Jarvis, 1999). Useful research uses theoretically and technically sound data collection and analysis techniques that are appropriate to the research question or problem being investigated. The main reason that Tom Wengraf wrote Qualitative Research Interviewing is that he found the qualitative literature lacking when discussing interviewing in a manner that linked "theoretical concepts with empirical indicators through an explicit operation" as is "associated with quantitative research" (p. 56). He goes on to observe that there is a "gap between the level of theoretical concepts and theory-language and the level of empirical indicators and evidence" used by researchers in developing research proposals and in writing up methods sections. As a reviewer for conferences and journals, I have found that methods sections lack operational details and fail to link theoretical concepts to design decisions, which impacts the usefulness of the research to the field. The intended audience for this book is advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and professional researchers. Human resource development scholars and expert practitioners will find that this book helps to clarify the relationship between theoretical concepts and design decisions while providing practical solutions to the issues that arise when designing interview protocols. The purpose of the book is to address the meaning and theorizing of in-depth semistructured interviews and their meaning, preparation, execution, analysis, and presentation. The book is organized into seventeen chapters in six parts: (1) Concepts and Approaches to Depth Interviewing, (2) Up to the Interview: Strategies for Getting the Right Material, (3) Around the Interview: Contact Management-Theory and Practice, (4) After the Interview: Strategies for Working the Materials, (5) Comparison of Cases: From Contingencies to Typologies, and (6) Writing Up: Strategies of Re/presentation. Of these seventeen chapters, I will discuss a few of them specifically, but my goal is to provide an overview of the book in an effort to demonstrate what a rich resource I think it can be to all those interested in interviewing as a research and/or practice tool.

Bulletin of the „Transilvania” University of Braşov – Series VII: Social Sciences and Law, 2013

The paper herein submits the narrative technique of the interview. This is a data-collection technique, used in qualitative research, being specific to narrative researches (of the biographical or oral history type). This article presents when it is used, how it is applied and describes concrete contexts of knowledge wherein the author resorted to the narrative interview. It is a technique yielding rich, complex data; leaving the subjects to take control of the interview.

British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 2011

published in "The Evolution of European Identities: Biographical Approaches", eds. Robert Miller and Graham Day, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21-44

The Qualitative Report, 2020

An unexamined life is not worth living Socrates (470-399 BC) In this article I reveal transformative experiences stemming from non-verbal communication in the context of active interviewing in narrative research. Drawing upon my recent experience interviewing positive veteran teachers about the relationships they believe vital in maintaining their passion and enthusiasm for teaching, I explore the unique nature of narrative research in fostering intra-personal transformation. The goal of the article is to highlight transformation as an outcome in narrative research, with particular focus upon non-verbal communication in active interviewing. The article is constructed to examine transformation in thinking and understanding within the relational nature of narrative research in education; to highlight the complexity of non-verbal communication in the context of narrative research; and, to consider the nature of personal reflective practice in examining one's ontological and epistem...

1993

Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej

The article is a result of the discussion between the sociologists and professional psychotherapist. The authors’ aim is to consider therapeutic functions of biographical interviewing with reference to professional psychological treatment assumptions. Therapeutic aspects of the narrator–scientist encounter are especially important in the research on traumatic collective and individual experiences (such as wars, exile, disability, poverty, etc.), when informants recall painful memories or talk about the distressing present. In the article, the issues of scientific and psychological treatment aims are discussed, as well as problems regarding the relationship between narrator–patient and researcher–therapist, and professional skills in the area of biographical interviewing and psychotherapy. Also, the authors consider potential advisability of “therapeutic” interventions undertaken by a researcher in the sociological interview course in the context of ethical principles and their presu...

Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Vol. 16, 2019

In Critical Psychology biographical research has so far appeared only marginally. Key considerations on human biographies have been developed, but a subject-scientific approach of biographical research has not yet been developed. Klaus Holzkamp distinguishes between phenomenal and real biography. The 'phenomenal' is the biography as it is experienced by the subject herself. The 'real' biography captures the living conditions, abilities, needs etc. of a person together with the inherent opportunities and limitations at each point in time. From a temporal point of view, there is a reality of a person which transcends the mental state of the subject, but which only selectively becomes reality for the subject and necessarily goes beyond it. Biographical research in a subject-scientific sense therefore refers to research with the aid of the analytical categories "real/phenomenal biography". After an introductory positioning of a possible subject-scientific approach to biographical research, the second part of the paper is dealing with the question about what is and can be understood as a 'biography' and which new possibilities are offered by the categories of Critical Psychology in this context. Five theoretical horizons are presented and discussed in order to develop some kind of theory-led grid for analyzing concrete biographies in subject-scientific projects of biographical research. As an illustration the biography of the fictional person Amal is analyzed in part three. It is necessary to create a theoretical framework for subject-scientific biographical research before questions of research methodology and methodological procedure can be discussed. A short conclusion of essential methodological and methodical considerations is given in the fourth part.

The interaction between an interviewee and an interviewer in a narrative life story interview is a relevant topic in oral history as well as in empirical social sciences in general. This relationship seems to be central especially with regard to the validity of memories produced in interviews as it affects in various ways the narrative and memory alike. The interview situation has immediate influence onto what is being remembered at all, which memories are being narrated and which are not.

Narrative and Mental Health, 2023

Narrative studies today expand to such fields as narrative gerontology, introducing humanities methodology to the study of aging. From early on, a humanities perspective on gerontology has been understood as pivotal to understanding the experiential side of human life (Van Tassel, 1979), and recent studies have emphasized that narrative gerontology should shift its focus more on the act and context of storytelling instead of the content of what is told (Blix, 2016) as well as to understanding narratives as a use of symbols to understand the self (de Medeiros, 2014, pp. 2-4). This paper suggests an interdisciplinary combination of narratology originating in literary studies and psychology as a methodology to study the ways of narrating lives in interviews with the elderly. The aim is to combine discourse-narratological methodology for the analysis of the narrating self with narrative positioning theory on the various levels of positioning in the interview. Discourse narratology targets the use of language as a symbolic system, and positioning theory examines the contextual act of storytelling in relation to story contents and cultural expectations. Previous studies have indicated that richness and flexibility in the process of narration correlate with mental health (see Westerhof & Bohlmeijer, 2012). With a methodological combination geared towards the analysis of the situated act of narrating and its linguistic form, this paper proposes a possible model for analysis in narrative gerontology. The ways of narrating studied include the narrator’s discursive and evaluative relation to their former self and how these relate to the levels of story, interaction, and identity in positioning.

Plumilla Educativa, 2013

The emotional dimensions of learning and narrative auto/biographies have been treated gingerly or simply glossed over in qualitative interviewing for decades. While the qualitative biographical and life story interview has achieved a considerable degree of sophistication and wide use, the aspect of the language of the narrator, in particular with regard to experiences of emotion, seems to be still too seldom considered from up close. This paper seeks to suggest reasons for adjusting this imbalance.

Qualitative Research, 2013

The aim of this article is not only to discuss how the interview method has implications for the construction of aged identities, but also how the research area conditions the positionings that are made within the interview. Drawing on a set of qualitative semi-structured interviews with persons identifying as, and having experiences of volunteering as ‘class grandparents’ in schools for children, this article highlights and investigates three regimes that proved central in these interviews and that affected the construction of the data: the ‘confessional mode’, the ‘use of life scripts’ and the ‘theoretical identifications’ affecting the interview conversations.