Life Stories

Producing life stories is an increasingly popular form of narrative-based inquiry in fields as diverse as anthropology, education, gerontology, history, law, medicine, psychology, sociology, and women's studies. Methods of inquiry into lived experience appear under such labels as autobiography, biography, autoethnography, life history, and oral history. Despite their differences, the common purpose of these methods is to inquire into lived experience and to re-present that experience in a narrative form that provides rich detail and context about the life (or lives) in question. Life storytelling can be understood as an intellectual site where the narrative turn in the social sciences meets the desire to exercise the descriptive and analytic processes that C. Wright Mills famously called the sociological imagination.

Although distinctions between life stories, oral histories, autobiographies, and life histories are contested and problematic, they typically seek to provide accounts and analyses of how people make sense of their lived experience in the construction of both individual and social identity. Some life historians claim that the analysis of the social, historical, political, and economic contexts of such experiences is what transforms a life story into a life history. That is, life histories situate stories of individual lives within a bigger picture. This contextual location of a life story (or stories of lives) allows us to explore the generative interplay between individuals and culture that characterizes a life history.

By positioning descriptions of everyday life within the contexts in which they occur, life history narratives can convey a sense of how individual lives are not free-floating, but are socially constructed. For example, from many studies of teachers' careers and lives, Ivor Goodson concludes that the significance of various limits and possibilities for individual lives are both contained and enabled by their location in the social world; otherwise, individuals are inevitably constructed as victims, powerless in the evolution of their lives.

Foci for continuing debate among life historians includes the relationship between researcher and researched and how this affects the construction of life histories. The postmodern turn in social research has also brought under scrutiny questions about the nature of identity, truth, structure, and agency and the warrantability and defensibility of claims about the veracity of individual and collective voices in the representation of lives and experience. For example, William Tierney argues that a goal of life history work in a postmodern age should be to break the stranglehold of meta-narratives that establish rules for truth, legitimacy, and identity.