Biography

Typical Methods Utilized in Biographic Research

Whether one is interested in researching and representing the biography of a deceased individual or one who is living, qualitative researchers typically first must attend to ways and reasons why they have chosen particular persons as subjects for biographical research. Researchers also must locate and decide on which pertinent archival or repository materials might be further researched and analyzed, whom they might wish to interview in relation to the subject, and in what document analyses, beyond formally archived materials—including, for example, newspapers, letters, diaries, journals, video- and audiorecordings of the subject—they might need to engage further. Also, researchers might wish to involve themselves in some form of participant observation or nonparticipant observation (the researcher observes, but is not an active participant) to research places and contexts in which their subjects live(d) and work(ed).

The Biographer's Relation to the Subject

Biographers traditionally have chosen exemplary or well-known individuals as subjects of their inquiry. However, recent theorizing in the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, literature, education, and psychology as well as within women's studies and ethnicity studies, for example, have highlighted a need to attend to historically underrepresented individuals. Such emphases also highlight the necessity of attending to ways in which these potential biographical subjects both have constructed themselves and have been constructed by particular historical and social-cultural circumstances, power relations, and prevailing discourses.

Therefore, qualitative researchers, no matter what their subject choices, must attend to their reasons for [Page 62]selecting the particular subject of their biographical inquiry. Researchers initially should spend some time examining motivations for their choices, including their degree of attachment or nonattachment to their intended subjects as well as the ways in which their own autobiographic positions and social, historical, or cultural contexts will influence their data interpretations and representations. Such self-reflexive work, further including attention to which details the researcher chooses to discuss or not discuss in the final account, is crucial in order that the contemporary biographer not appear either as omniscient or as absent in the portrayal of an individual's life and work.

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