Life History Method

A life story is the story a person tells about the life he or she has lived. For Atkinson (1998), it is “a fairly complete narrating of one’s entire experience of life as a whole, highlighting the most important aspects” (p. 8). In social science, life stories exist in many forms: long and short, specific and general, fuzzy and focused, surface and deep, realist and romantic, modernist and postmodernist. And they are denoted by a plethora of terms: life stories, life histories, life narratives, self stories, mystories, autobiographies, auto/biographies, oral histories, personal testaments, and life documents. All have a slightly different emphasis and meaning, but all focus on the first persona accounting of a life. (For a discussion of this diversity, see Denzin, 1989, pp. 27–49.)

An initial, simple, but helpful contrast can be made between “long” and “short” life stories. Long life stories are perhaps seen as the key to the method—the full-length book account of one person’s life in his or her own words. They are usually gathered over a long period of time with gentle guidance from the researcher, often backed up with keeping diaries, intensive observation of the subject’s life, interviews with friends, and perusals of letters and photographs. The first major sociological use of life histories in this way is generally credited to the publication of Thomas and Znaniecki’s five-volume The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which makes the famous claim that life histories “constitute the perfect type of sociological material” (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918–1920/1958, [Page 565]pp. 1832–1833). One volume of this study provides a 300-page story of a Polishémigré to Chicago, Wladek Wisniewski, written 3 months before the outbreak of World War I. In his story, Wladek describes the early phases of his life in the Polish village of Lubotyn, where he was born the son of a rural blacksmith. He talks of his early schooling, his entry to the baker’s trade, his migration to Germany to seek work, and his ultimate arrival in Chicago and his plight there. Twenty years on this “classic” study was honored by the Social Science Research Council “as the finest exhibit of advanced sociological research and theoretical analysis” (see Blumer, 1939/1969, p. vi). Following from this classic work, life histories became an important tool in the work of both Chicago and Polish sociologists. By contrast, short life stories take much less time, tend to be more focused, and are usually published as one in a series. They are gathered through in-depth interviews, along with open-ended questionnaires, requiring gentle probes that take somewhere between half an hour and 3 hours. The stories here usually have to be more focused than the long life histories.