Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences. Katherine Bischoping

      The term ‘life history’ can be traced to W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) landmark Chicago School study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which used Polish immigrants’ autobiographies and letters to preserve and represent the meanings they gave their experiences (Luken and Vaughan, 1999). Thomas was later to become renowned for the dictum that, ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 571–2). This dictum neatly sums up how perceptions and interpretations, rather than objective reality, can hold great sway in determining social action.

      The life course perspective, which includes both qualitative and quantitative methods, originated decades later with the work of Glen Elder (1974, 1978, 1994). His signal contribution was to propose that any research on how an individual’s passage through life unfolds must factor in that person’s socio-historical context, family context, and the relation of the family to other institutions (see Brettell, 2002; Dewilde, 2003). Individuals’ choices and their opportunities to exercise personal agency, Elder maintained, are simultaneously conditioned by these contexts and by the lives of others to whom they are linked. For instance, soldiers’ decisions to desert must be understood in the contexts of the war they have been waging, their families’ attitudes toward their options, and the legal, financial, employment, and social repercussions they and their families will face. Coupling the insights of these perspectives, we understand a life history to be an individual’s story of the course of their life – a story that must be understood to be created through individual perceptions and agency at the same time as it is shaped by social structure.

      Before we start discussing strategies, it is important to observe that Elder’s approach, with its emphasis on socio-historical contexts and social structures, is rather more realist than Thomas and Znaniecki’s. That the life course perspective to which Elder contributes includes qualitative methods alongside decidedly positivist/realist quantitative ones also means that life course studies are taken up more often by policy developers seeking ‘hard evidence.’ But, in our review of the recent literature, we found little discussion of the ontological and epistemological divide that this might seem to suggest. Instead, the two strategies blurred together, with an ontology and epistemology that we would again call constructionism anchored in realism. Strategy-wise, life history and life course researchers seem, like good sisters, to be glad to share what’s in their closets.

      Life history/life course researchers may focus on the story of one person or several. One concern may be how sharply marked, consequential moments of role transition, such as becoming jobless, entering university, becoming a parent, migrating, caring for an ailing partner, or living under a new regime, are negotiated. Exciting contributions to life course research can come via the strategy of uncovering how a group of respondents experiencing the same consequential transition turn out to be following one or a few conventional plots. Among the social sciences’ best-known projects of this kind is Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s (1969) interview-based discovery that, among terminally ill patients, grieving moves through five stages, from denial to anger, and then to bargaining, depression, and acceptance in turn.

      An exemplary analysis in which two conventional plots emerged is Anya Ahmed’s (2013) study of UK retirees who migrated to Spain as ‘lifestyle migrants,’ i.e., for non-economic reasons. Ahmed found some migrants to narrate a ‘quest’ plot, in which a calling to move to Spain was succeeded by unanticipated obstacles upon arrival. Although the climate proved harsh, the housing was not in a village but in a pre-built residential area, contacts with Spanish people were few, yet the ‘quest’ narrators prevailed over these obstacles by finding companions who shared their purpose. Other migrants, however, narrated a ‘voyage-and-return’ plot, in which obstacles brought them to realize that their true companions had been at home in the UK all along. A life course perspective on these plots involves observing how the narrators’ agentic choices were conditioned by the lives of the companions and others with whom they interacted, as well as structural and cultural factors, such as the trajectory of Spanish urban development, the romanticized images the narrators had held of Spain, and the cultural availability of quest and voyage-and-return plots.

      You can also analyze life histories for whether they support or dispute the plotline for a role transition that another researcher has set forth. Critics of Kübler-Ross’s model, for example, have observed that the dying may skip various stages that she had predicted, experience the stages out of order, or cycle amongst them; any stage model prescribing a lock-step sequence is open to such critiques. Another critically oriented strategy is to question to whom a plotline applies or under what conditions. For instance, while a sizable body of research shows that women with young children cannot necessarily conform to expectations that people on welfare become employable, co-author Amber’s most recent, as-yet-unpublished research nuances the understanding of the gendered character of welfare-to-work transitions by showing how criminalized men who are recovering from addiction face similar barriers.

      Instead of focusing your analysis on the transitions or life stages that social scientists have deemed significant, you might prefer to examine how research participants speak of the events that they themselves consider to have radically disrupted or changed their life courses. UK sociologist Anthony Giddens developed the concept of fateful moments to refer to the times when individuals reach ‘crossroads’ (1991: 143) in their lives, and must make choices with consequences both for the future and for how they understand their identities. In related work, American sociologist Norman Denzin had defined epiphanies as ‘interactional moments and experiences which leave marks on people’s lives’ (1989b: 70) over time and which might take a number of forms, e.g., major epiphanies pervade all aspects of one’s life, while relived ones involve arriving at a new insight about a past experience.

      As Goodey (2000) discusses, good social scientific analysis of such turning points involves connecting them to their cultural and institutional contexts. Berger (2008) does so in presenting the life history of Melvin, an undergraduate and American Paralympian who had been involved in gang sub-culture until being shot and becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Rather than casting Melvin as the hero of an individual struggle to overcome obstacles against all odds, Berger deftly shows how Melvin’s adaptation