Biographical interviewing and analysis

The approaches used in biographical research are generally qualitative micro-sociological. Biographical methods have usually referred to forms of narrative, life history/story, oral history, biographical interpretive methods, storytelling, auto/

biography, auto/ethnography and reminiscence. Recently, biographical interviewing and analysis have taken more varied forms, allowing, for example, structured

59 questioning and topic-centredness, and using digital technologies. In addition to interviews and writings collected explicitly for research purposes, biographical research data may include older texts and documents, produced independently of the research.

(Bornat 2008; Roberts 2015.)

Biographical methods provide ‘a tool for reconnecting welfare systems with lived experience and processes of social change’ (Chamberlayne 2004, 19). Biographical interviewing is the most common biographical method in research. Joanna Bornat (2008) compared three biographical interview methods: the biographical interpretive method (Rosenthal 2004; Wengraf 2000), narrative analysis (Riessman 2008) and the oral history method (Bornat 2004). All three methods emphasise the biographical interview as a social interaction and stress subjectivity, that is, the interviewee’s expressed feelings and meanings (Bornat 2008, 349). They all see the structuring of the dialogue as methodologically relevant and the context as significant. The main differences relate to interrogation, memory and interpretation.

In the biographical interpretive method, the biographical-narrative interview, as developed from the interview method described by Schütze (2009b), starts with an initial question intended to generate the main narration, with no interruptions by the interviewer. The initial question is formulated in a way that makes the person narrate their involvement in relevant events and experiences, not merely give an account of facts and events. After the main narration, narrative questions are asked around the topics mentioned and around other themes of interest for the research topic. When the narrating is finished, descriptive and argumentative questions can be asked. In a biographical-narrative interview, the narrator structures the story in a way that they find meaningful; the memory process is supported, and fragments are chained together into a whole picture (Rosenthal 2003).

For the interpretation of biographical interviews, Rosenthal (2004) developed a biographical case reconstruction method based on biographical data, life experiences and life story. First, biographical data, retrieved not only by interviewing the

respondent but also validated from other sources, such as archive material, official files, medical records and interviews with family members, are arranged in chronological order. Independently of the meaning conveyed in the narrator’s life story, the

researcher makes several possible interpretations of biographical data and reconstructs the life history. The life story is reconstructed separately, based on text and thematic

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field analysis. Finally, the biography is reconstructed through a comparison between the life history and the life story, between past and present perspectives.

Biographical scholars maintain that, to understand the individual areas or phases of a person’s life, the structure – the ‘gestalt’ – of the entire life story must be considered.

The narrative gestalt of a biography is expressed by the way in which the narrator orders the telling of their life experiences. In his ‘socio-linguistic process analysis’⁷, Schütze (2009a, 175–191) looks for the overall gestalt in a biography by studying the preamble (introduction) and the coda (end) and by using four biographical process structures: the biographical action scheme, institutional expectation pattern, creative metamorphosis and the trajectory of suffering. The biographical action schemes, verbalising the intentional principle, are expressed in the text as formulated intentions, conveyed thoughts and plans, and they assess and evaluate the means to carry out the plans. The institutional expectation patterns express the normative principle, and the creative metamorphoses of biographical identity express the start of a new major inner biographical development.

A trajectory of suffering expresses a lack of capacity to actively shape one’s life and is a reaction to outer events that have negatively changed the person’s life. A trajectory process has six stages: a trajectory potential is built up; the person starts to think more in terms of whether something is possible rather than of when they will do it; everyday life becomes more uncertain and unstable; self-orientation breaks down; the person tries to cognitively come to terms with the trajectory; and, finally, the person works practically on the trajectory, trying to escape from it either by reorganising their life situation or by working on eliminating the trajectory potential. (Riemann & Schütze 1991.) This concept has been suggested for analysing clients’ problem situations in social work.

Narrative analysis differs from the biographical interpretive method in that the researcher is mainly interested in the story told and its meaning-making function, and seldom in whether the events related really happened. The focus is usually on particular sequences of action, on the choice of language and narrative style and on audience/reader response. (Riessman 2008, 10–13.) Two methods of analysis have been distinguished: the paradigmatic-type analysis, in which themes are analysed across narrative data; and the narrative-type analysis, in which explanatory stories are produced from narrative and/or non-narrative data (Polkinghorne 1995).

7 Term used by Gerhard Riemann at a meeting in Nürnberg on September 18^th, 2015.

61 In oral history, interviewing is semi-structured with more dialogue (Bornat 2008).

Memory takes a more active role; it plays a part in the present. Oral historians use life-history methods as an emancipatory tool and have created the concept of empowerment for welfare practices (Chamberlayne et al. 2000, 2). As a consequence, many of them seek to maintain an interpretive distance and to stress individuals’ own interpretations of past experiences, to avoid over-interpreting life stories and distancing the interviewees from their own words. Oral history draws widely on sociology and history. Narrative analysis is influenced by sociolinguistics, whereas in the biographical interpretive method, a common framework seems to be psychoanalysis. (Bornat 2008.) Many biographical researchers have determined that biographical research

interviewing often has a therapeutic side effect (Betts et al. 2009, 26–31; Golczyńska-Grondas & Golczyńska-Grondas 2013; Merrill & West 2009, 175; Rickard 2004; Rosenthal 2003;

Schütze 2009a, 159–160). Rosenthal (2003), a biographical researcher and family therapist, has described how traumatised narrators may heal during biographical storytelling. By telling and reflecting on their life story and having it validated by the interviewer in the role of an active listener, the interviewee’s self-understanding increases. The narrator interprets their story without much input from the interviewer.

This implies that biographical-narrative interviewing is indeed an intervention, and not only a method of data collection. This has implications for research, in which intervention is not intended or contracted nor the researcher prepared to deal with narrators’ traumatic memories (Golczyńska-Grondas & Grondas 2013).