This book considers the methodological and theoretical questions associated with the use of life stories, oral histories, personal narratives, autobiographies, and biographies, as they are incorporated into sociological, ethnographic, and narrative studies. The collection and interpretation of materials, the uses of biographical research, the interview relationship, the construction of the story, memory, and audience are all considered. Roberts teaches sociology at the University of Huddersfield. The book is distributed by Taylor and Francis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book explores how narratives are deeply embodied, engaging heart, soul, as well as mind, through varying adult learner perspectives. Biographical research is not an isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and networks – that can create or destroy hope. Telling or listening to life stories celebrates complexity, messiness, and the rich potential of learning lives. The narratives in this book highlight the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. Yet, despite living in a precarious, and often frightening, liquid world, biographical research can both chronicle and illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations. Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research aims to generate insight into people’s fears and anxieties but also their capacity to 'keep on keeping on' and to challenge forces that would diminish their and all our humanity. It provides a sustainable approach to creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by showing how building meaningful dialogue, grounded in social justice, can create good enough experiences of togetherness across difference. The book illuminates what amounts to an ecology of life, learning and human flourishing in a sometimes tortured, fractious, fragmented, and fragile world, yet one still offering rich resources of hope.

This volume reveals the potential of biographical research in the production of social theory, in the development of methodological innovation, in giving voice and protagonism to people, and in the understanding of the social unfolding of their lives.

Using Biographical Methods in Social Research provides an informative, comprehensive, accessible and practical guide to the nature and use of biographical methods, combining a consideration of theoretical issues with practical guidance as well as reflections on the personal experience of doing research. Barbara Merrill and Linden West consider important questions about who and what research is for and what makes it valid, alongside the practical business of interviewing, transcribing, analyzing and writing up of biographical data. The authors draw on their sociological and psychological orientations to provide a truly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and provide numerous examples of biographical research across the social sciences. This book will equip students with all the skills necessary to undertake biographical research as well as to fully understand what they are doing and the assumptions they make about the nature of truth, knowledge, story telling and being human. It will be useful for students and researchers using biographical methods in a range of disciplines, including sociology, social policy, social psychology, health care and education.

Biographical research may take a range of forms and may vary in its application and approach but has the unified and coherent aim to give 'voice' to individuals. The central concern of this collection is to assemble articles (from sociology, social psychology, education, health, criminology, social gerontology, epidemiology, management and organizational research) that illustrate the full range of debates, methods and techniques that can be combined under the heading 'biographical research'. Volume One: Biographical Research: Starting Points, Debates and Approaches explores the different biographical methods currently used while locating these within the history of social science methods. Volume Two: Biographical Interviews, Oral Histories and Life Narratives focuses on the more established, interview-based, biographical research methods and considers the analytical strategies used for interview-based biographical research Volume Three: Forms of Life Writing: Letters, Diaries and Auto/Biography considers the value of 'data' contained within letters, diaries and auto/biography and illustrates how this data has been analyzed to reveal biographies and their social context. Volume Four: Other Documents of Life: Photographs, Cyber Documents and Ephemera focuses on the 'other' human documents and objects, like photographs, cyber-documents (emails, blogs, social networking sites, webpages) and other ephemera (such as official documents) that are used extensively in biographical research.

This collection examines the many influences of biographical inquiry in education and discusses methodological issues from the perspective of veteran and novice biographers. Contributors underscore the documentary, interpretive, and literary concerns of biographical and archival work, and their essays reveal the complexity, distinctiveness, and sense of exploration of scholarly endeavors.

Rooted in a long and diverse genealogy, biographical approaches have developed from a focus upon a single story, a ‘life story’ and personal documents (e.g. diaries), to encompass (more routinely) autobiographical secondary and archival research and analysis - as well as multi-media, arts based creative multi-sensory methods. Biographical Research and practices as part of human understanding helps people to make sense of what has been and what is happening in their lives, cultures, communities and societies. Advances in Biographical Methods: Creative Applications takes up these themes: theorising, doing and applying current advances in biographical methods. It demonstrates the momentum with which they areas are developing as a field of scholarship, especially in relation to creative innovations and applications, such as in new forms of interview and other practices, and debates on its interlinking with art, performance and digital methods.