The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples

by Wengraf; T H

• ISBN13: 9780415228374
• ISBN10: 0415228379
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134585373
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-13
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

Biographical research methods have become a useful and popular tool for contemporary social scientists. This book combines an exploration of the historical and philosophical origins of this important field of qualitative research with comparative examples of the different ways that biographical methods have been successfully applied internationally. Through these many illustrative examples of socio-biography in process, the authors show how formal textual analysis, while uncovering hidden emotional defenses, can also shed light on wider historical processes of societal transformation.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Notes on contributors	xi
Introduction: the biographical turn	1	(30)
Prue Chamberlayn
Joanna Bornat
Tom Wengraf
PART 1 Issues of methodology and theory	31	(134)
Reflections on the biographical turn in social science	33	(20)
Michael Rustin
Biographical analysis: a `German' school?	53	(18)
Ursula Apitzsch
Lena Inowlocki
Case histories of families and social processes: enriching sociology	71	(19)
Daniel Bertaux
Catherine Delcroix
The vanishing point of resemblance: comparative welfare as philosophical anthropology	90	(19)
Andrew Cooper
Biographical work and biographical structuring in present-day societies	109	(17)
Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal
Clinical hermeneutics: from the ontology of self to a case example	126	(14)
Anthony Hazzard
Uncovering the general from within the particular: from contingencies to typologies in the understanding of cases	140	(25)
Tom Wengraf
PART 2 Examples of biographical methods in use	165
Biography, anxiety and the experience of locality	167
Wendy Hollway
Tony Jefferson
Texts in a changing context: reconstructing lives in East Germany	181
Molly Andrews
Situated selves, the coming-out genre and equivalent citizenship in narratives of HIV	196
Corinne Squire
Extreme right attitudes in the biographies of West German youth	214
Martina Schiebel
The metamorphosis of habitus among East Germans	229
Astrid Segert
Irene Zierke