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Biographical Research Methods
Four Volume Set
Edited by:
- Robert Lee Miller - Queen's University Belfast, UK
October 2005 | 1 648 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
The life history or biographical research method was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and, after a period of eclipse caused by the rise of quantitative methods, is enjoying a resurgence of interest. This burgeoning of interest is enough that we can now speak of a biographical `turn' as the social sciences
These four volumes present the first established collection of the biographical method literature and brings together the many diverse strands. The set will serve to set the canon for this re-established research area.
The collection is organized around eight themes: the classical statements dominated by the pre-war American `'Chicago School' of sociology; the neo-classical statements of the first wave of renewed interest in the 1970s; interviewing, including reflexivity, recall and narrative structures; analysis and the principles of selection in generating stories for narrative biographical interviews; biographical concepts such as life courses and generations; transitions and social trauma; biography and social policy; and controversies in biographical research.
VOLUME ONE: TIME AND BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH
PART ONE: `THE PLACE OF HISTORY’
C Wright Mills
Uses of History
John Madge
`Peasants and Workers’
Wladek Wiszniewski
Life Record of an Immigrant
Fritz Schutze
Biographieanalyse eines Mullerlebens
Robert Miller, Robin Humphrey and Elena Zdravomyslova
Biographical Research and Historical Watersheds
Olaf Struck
`Trajectories of Coping Strategies in Eastern Germany’
PART TWO: `GENERATIONS AND LIFE COURSES’
Karl Mannheim
The Problem of Generations
J Pilcher
Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations
D I Kertzer
Generation as a Sociological Problem
N B Ryder
The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change
Michael Corsten
`The Time of Generations’
Matilda White Riley
Overview and Highlights of a Sociological Perspective
Robert Miller
`The Historical Context’
Peter Alheit
Everyday Time and Life Time: On the Problems of Healing Contradictory Experiences of Time
Martin Kohli
`The World We Forgot: A Historical Review of the Life Course’
Martin Kohli
Social Organisation and Subjective Construction of the Life Course
VOLUME TWO: THE CONSTRUCTION OF BIOGRAPHICAL MEANING
SECTION ONE: `NARRATIVE AND BIOGRAPHY’
Donald E Polkinghorne
`Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis’
Catherine Kohler Riessman
`Strategic Uses of Narrative in the Presentation of Self and Illness: A Research Note
Naomi Rosh White
`Marking Absences: Holocaust Testimony and History’
Dan Bar-On and Noga Gilad
`To Rebuild Life: A Narrative Analysis of Three Generations of an Israeli Holocaust Survivor’s Family’
Gabriele Rosenthal
‘Veiling and Denying the Past: The Dialogue of Families of Holocaust Survivors and Families of Nazi Perpetrators’
Sarah K Carney
`Transcendent Stories and Counternarratives in Holocaust Survivor Life Histories: Searching for Meaning in Video-Testimony Archives’
Molly Andrews
`Texts in a Changing Context: Reconstructing Lives in East Germany’
SECTION TWO:`THE PAST IN THE FUTURE: QUESTIONS OF BIOGRAPHICAL IDENTITY’
Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal
The Problem with Identity: Biography as Solution to Some (Post)-Modernist Dilemmas
Jerold M Starr
`Toward a Social Phenomenology of Aging: Studying the Self Process in Biographical Work’
William G Tierney
‘Undaunted Courage: Life History and the Postmodern Challenge’
Liz Stanley
On Auto/Biography in Sociology
Fritz Sch tze
`Kognitive Figuren des Autobiographishen Stegreifezählens’
Gilles Houle
`L’Idéologie: Un Mode de Connaissance’
Gerhard Riemann
`Die Haltung zur Eigenen Biographie’
VOLUME THREE: CONTEXTS
SECTION ONE: `THE “GERMAN SCHOOL”’
Ursula Apitzsch and Lena Inowlocki
`Biographical Analyis: A “German” School?’
Rosenthal, Gabriele
`Biographical Research’
Ulrich Oevermann with Tilman Allert, Elizabeth Konau and J rgen Krambeck
`Structures of Meaning and Objective Hermeneutics’
Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss
‘Accompaniments of Chronic Illness'
Gerhard Riemann and Fritz Sch tze
`"Trajectory” As a Basic Theoretical Concept for Suffering and Disorderly Social Processes’
SECTION TWO: `THE SIGNIFICANCE AND ROLE OF THE FAMILY’
Glen H Elder Jr
`History and the Family: The Discovery of Complexity’
Tamara K Hareven
`The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change’
Tamara K Hareven
`Family Time and Historical Time’
Paul Thompson
`Family Myth, Models and Denials in the Shaping of Individual Life Paths’
Brian Elliott
`Biography, Family History and the Analysis of Social Change’
Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame
Artisanal Bakery in France
Daniel Bertaux
Social Genealogies Commented On and Compared
Haiming Liu
`The Trans-Pacific Family: A Case Study of Sam Chang’s Family History’
Maria de Lourdes Monaco Janotti and Zita de Paula Rosa
`Memory of Slavery in Black Families of São Paulo, Brazil
VOLUME FOUR: DISPUTES AND CONCERNS IN BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH
PART SEVEN: `METHODOLOGICAL DEBATES AND ISSUES’
Martin Kohli
`Biography: Acccount, Text, Method’
Norman K Denzin
Interpretive Guidelines
Luk van Langenhove and Rom Harr[ac]e
`Positioning and Autobiography: Telling your Life’
Guy A M Widdershoven
`The Story of Life: Hermeneutic Perspectives on the Relationship between Narrative and Life History’
Thierry Kochuyt
`Biographical and Empiricistic Illusions: A Reply to Recent Criticism’
Daniel Bertaux
A Response to Thierry Kochuyt’s `Biographical and Empiricist Illusions: A Reply to Recent Criticism'
Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal and Gabrielle Rosenthal
Daniel Bertaux’s Complaints or Against False Dichotomies in Biographical Research
Thierry Kochuyt
Could Objective Realities Tell Us a Story? Reply to Bertaux
J P Roos
`Context, Authenticity, Referentiality, Reflexivity: Back to Basics in Autobiography'
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan
`Le Méthodologique: Implication et Explicitation dans L’Enquête de Terrain'
Ulrike Nagel
`Maintaining a Sense of Individual Autonomy under Conditions of Constraint: A Study of East German Managers'
Françoise Battagliola et al
`A Propos des Biographies
SECTION TWO: `ETHICS’
Annabel Faraday and Ken Plummer
`Doing Life Histories’
Ken Plummer
`The Moral and Human Face of Life Stories
Gary M Kenyon
`Ethical Issues in Ageing and Biography’
Ruthellen Josselon
On Writing Other People's LIves: Self-Analytic Reflections of a Narrative Writer
Gabriele Rosenthal
`The Healing Effects of Storytelling
Kaja Kazmierska
`Ethical Aspects of Biographical Interviewing and Analysis’
Carl B Klockars
`Field Ethics for the Life History’
