Abstract
The purpose of the article is to present how, if used to aid the conduction and analysis of interviews, biograms enable the peculiarities of biographical narrative to be incorporated more effectively in the life course perspective. The advantage of this tool is to promote the life course not only as an empirical category, but also as an analytical perspective capable of combining time, process and context, in order to bring out possible biographical paths. At the same time, biograms enable different types of identity-building process, such as analytical syntheses, to be drawn up. As a result, empirical cases can be transformed into theoretical cases (referring to the unit of analysis), moving from an individual story to a sociological ideal type in which to embed the biographical story. This article will first present how biograms can facilitate the conduction of a biographical interview by bringing out the main features of the life course as an analytical perspective. Then, it will be described how the device allows the researcher to inductively order, summarize and categorize the empirical materials collected in order to enucleate suitable conceptual categories for outlining possible identity profiles. For methodological purposes, the application of the biogram to three biographies collected to explore paths of social exclusion will be presented, defining conceptual categories for three identity profiles: The Combative Subject Fighting the Risk of Exclusion, The Intermittently Excluded Subject and The Chronic Outsider.
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The researcher decides how many years to insert in the rows and which life domains to insert in the columns based on the question under investigation and the people whose life stories he/she has collected.
The completed grid did not always include direct references to the socio-historical context. However, from the information entered, the interviewer was able to introduce some references such as the economic crisis of 2009 or social and economic policies in support of precarious work and housing.
Analytical induction overcomes some of the limitations of simple induction. Indeed, the latter bases the relevance of arguments on the accumulation of the observations made: the higher the number of observations that give the same result, the greater the argumentative force of the rule found. However, in qualitative approaches the criterion of “saturation” should not be overestimated, since it seems to refer to a criterion of generalization typical of quantitative research (Cardano 2020).
Therefore, the aim of the sociological ideal type is to unify in a conceptual construct the set of features that the analytical path chosen by the researcher leads to emphasize as relevant. According to Max Weber (1904/1949, 90): “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent, concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct […] In its conceptual purity, this mental construct […] cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality”.
Interview excerpts can be inserted to add to the analysis produced by the biograms. None have been included here so as not to make the text too long. The analyses are reported in a very concise manner for the same reason.
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Acocella, I. Using biograms to promote life course research. An example of theoretical case configuration relating to paths of social exclusion. Qual Quant 58, 2763–2787 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01777-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01777-7