(…) the Chicago school, despite such a promising beginning, before long became the victim of professionalisation among sociologists, and retreated from the immediacy of the city around it to the security of research doctorates based on statistical analysis and abstract general theory. (Thompson 2000, p. 63)

Introduction

This chapter will focus on a particular phase in the history of biographical life course studies, the phase of revival of a sociological research tradition that had all but been forgotten for the best part of the twentieth century. Several developments in the wider societies and in the social sciences, led up to the renewed interest in the methods and topics that had been prominent in biographical research in Chicago. The 1960s was a time when the large birth cohorts after WWII reached a phase of youth, they had better educational opportunities than former generations because of the expansion of the systems of education in tandem with the establishing of welfare states in Norther European countries.Footnote 1 Their ‘opportunity structures’ (Roberts 1968/2009) were considerably improved compared to those their parents had had.

This was a period when the notion of ‘youth’ as a particular life course phase gained a different meaning for the many in society, rather than the privileged few which had up to then been the case (Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Mitterauer 1992; Roberts 1968, 2009). The social unrest in many countries during this period had their origin at the new universities among the large group of students. There was a call for novelty not only in the way subjects were taught but also of the contents. Critique of the positivist legacy was widespread in this period, especially in the social sciences. May 1968 in Paris was a watershed moment for society at large, but also for the social sciences. In the words of one of the most important pioneers for the revival of biographical research: ‘But what really woke me up from my positivist dream was an historical earthquake: May 1968 (…) the sudden irruption of social praxis on the quiet scene of mass-consumption society was a deadly blow to my scientism’. (Bertaux 1981, p. 29). This is a snapshot of the historical context during which the revival of biographical research happened.

Changes in epistemological or methodological foci in the sciences, be they the natural or the social sciences, may happen in a variety of ways in different contexts. It is rare that such changes can be described in terms of the Kuhnian notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn 1962), which entails a turn away from what is considered ‘normal science’, to an acceptance of a novel approach that is incompatible with the existing one and replaces this. Whilst ‘normal science’ in the social sciences during the period leading up to the revival of the approach, was characterised by positivist methodological frameworks, the renewed interest in biographical life course research did not entail a complete break with this tradition. Quite the opposite, the two approaches, plus others, co-existed, and still do, if not always peacefully.

The Chicago tradition in sociology founded at the turn of nineteenth century with its emphasis on human documents was challenged as the positivist methodological approach gained ground at the same time as the post-war development of powerful computers made advanced and sophisticated statistical analyses feasible. The search for causal laws of social life could thereby apparently reach wider the more data that could be processed. Thus, life course studies, especially in America, came to rest on both well-established quantitative methodological procedures and innovations related to the increase in computer power and technology. In Europe there was more of a revival of the classic biographical tradition, and its inspiration came from a range of different approaches. The qualitative branch was more diversified than the quantitative one, especially with regards to theoretical underpinnings. Whilst qualitative methods in general did, and still do, cover a range of approaches and techniques, for biographical research the interview and autobiographical texts continue to be the primary means of collecting data.Footnote 2 However, the analysis of such material has over time been done from a variety of different practices and perspectives.

When Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss published The Discovery of Grounded Theory in 1967, there were no other books on the market that made a systematic attempt to suggest ways of collecting and analysing qualitative data and to develop theory from such material.Footnote 3 In the post-war period the survey and statistical techniques of analysis to test theories were centre stage. Starting from a pragmatist perspective with Blumer and Mills as important inspirations, Glaser and Strauss offered an approach to analysis of mainly qualitative data that would facilitate the development of new concepts and theories that were context sensitive. Ken Plummer (1983) observed that Glaser and Strauss’ emphasis on the value of studying a single case for developing theoretical insights, was an important contribution for the revival and development of biographical research, especially in Europe. The constant comparative method and the theoretical sampling they recommended were however not easily transferable to biographical studies based on life stories. The importance of their book for the advancement of qualitative research is nevertheless undoubted as they put such methods in their own right on the agenda in the discipline of sociology. In social anthropology, oral history, and social psychology methods such as interviews, observation and ethnography formed part of the disciplinary foundation. As will be discussed in a later chapter, the methodological debates in the field of biographical studies have been the site of several controversies over the years. Suffice here to say that during the historical period when sociology was dominated by quantitative research strategies a book that put qualitative methods in its title was rare indeed.

This chapter cannot do justice to the multitude and diversity of biographical research that originated in this revival period. The selection of specific studies mentioned is based on considerations of methodological varieties and impact in the English-speakingFootnote 4 part of the academic world. The sampling of studies discussed is confined to those where the temporal and processual approaches from the classic traditions are prominent. Attention will also be given to some of the variations in vocabularies that occurred in the different contexts. These could be seen as related to the historical development of ideas in the various countries as well as to what specific methodological focus that became prominent in studies of the life course.

The German and French contributions have been very influential, not only in engendering methodological debates that will be discussed in a later chapter, but also because of the particular topics they focussed on in their empirical studies. The Scandinavian case is included because of its importance in women’s studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The American revival of the life course research tradition, although mainly not in the field of biographical studies, had some notable contributions for the theoretical and conceptual development that was a continuation of Mills emphasis on the history-biography dynamic.

‘A Continental View’: Revival of Biographical Research in Europe

The European countries had different research traditions in the social sciences before the re-discovery of the biographical methods of old. The form and substance of these studies as they emerged in the various contexts therefore varied considerably.

A pioneer for the revival of this approach in Europe was Daniel Bertaux in France. His approach to the field was much inspired by C. Wright Mills and the early Chicago school. His vision for sociology was: ‘Like C. Wright Mills, a “soul brother” if I may borrow the expression, I believe in orienting the sociological imagination away from pseudo-scientificity, and towards a critical understanding of social history in today’s world.’ (Bertaux 1981, p. 43). Indeed, he referred back to the time before his acquaintance with this approach when he declared: ‘Once I was a positivist. I thought sociology could become a true science, and I was eager to make it more scientific’ (p. 29). This ambition was not surprising given that his training was in the natural sciences. Influenced by the events of 1968 in France, as stated above, his thoughts about the social sciences shifted radically and he became the leading figure for a research tradition that ran opposite to everything he had believed in earlier.

In August 1978 at the IXth World Congress of Sociology in Uppsala, Sweden, the first meeting in an ad hoc group naming themselves ‘The Life History Approach’, took place. In a preface to the volume Bertaux (1981) edited based on papers at this meeting, he observed that qualitative methods and the collecting of life histories had been ignored for decades. But he was optimistic for the future of this research tradition and thought it could help break the near universal hold of quantitative methods in sociology.

(But) the methodological orthodoxy that covered so much of the ground of empirical research has begun to thaw; and sociologists here and there are developing a curiosity for approaches to observation and empirically-grounded theory construction other than the survey. All sorts of experiments are in the making, many of which involve the collection of life stories in one form or another. (Bertaux 1982, p. 1)

The participants at the Uppsala meeting came from a variety of countries which included Canada, Britain, Poland,Footnote 5 France and Germany. Bertaux was optimistic for the future impact such research may have, and he was particularly pleased to cite John Goldthorpe’s (1980) insights from having added life story material in the form of autobiographical notes from a subsample of the quantitative material he and colleagues based their studies of social mobility on: (…) adopting a diachronic or biographical perspective on mobility produces a very different picture from that derived from the synchronic, cross-sectional view of a conventional mobility table (Goldthorpe 1980, pp. 139–140 cited in Bertaux 1981, p. 31).

In a long footnote to his introduction to the 1981 volume he suggested a need to make distinctions between the different terms used in life course research clearer. He proposed that the life history is a term reserved for a biographical account, or life story, supplemented with other material about a person’s life such as medical and other official records. This was a common method in psychology in the 1950s and was often named case histories.Footnote 6 According to Bertaux (1981) this was also a common form of data collection in anthropology from the nineteenth century onwards.Footnote 7 According to him some social scientists were more enthusiastic about the life history than the mere biography because of the added material in the form of official records. Information given by a single individual could thus be checked for truthfulness against ‘independent’ information. Although there were plenty of opportunities to get access to supplementary material, Bertaux was sceptical to this way of doing biographical research, “In fact, official records and files are now multiplying so fast in developed countries that the day might come when state institutions will know the trajectory of a given person better than the person himself” (Bertaux 1981, p. 8).Footnote 8

With Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, Bertaux had done a study of French artisanal bakeries. At the beginning of the 1970s in France 90 percent of bread was still produced by local artisan bakers whilst in most other industrialised nations bread baking was done in factories. To explore this topic they used life stories in order to get to the heart of the matter of this sector of production, both with respect to the structural features of it and to the people who worked in the bakeries. Other data included literature on the trade, key informant interviews as well as what little statistics there were available. They collected about a hundred life stories—of bakery workers and bakers both. When they early on in the study approached the latter, they declined to take part but their reluctance faded and later on they agreed to be interviewed. The researchers could thus include both the bakers and their wives. With the help of these life stories they gained insights into the structural features of the bakery trade in France and also helped revive a near forgotten research tradition in Europe.

In the 1990s Bertaux collaborated with British historian Paul Thompson on cross-national studies of intergenerational relations and co-edited two volumes on such research (Bertaux and Thompson 1993/2005, 1997). Both these books demonstrate how powerful biographical methods are for examining a variety of aspects of family relations and how values of both material and immaterial kinds are transmitted between generations in various contexts. In studies of key sociological themes such as social mobility quantitative approaches dominated. Bertaux and Thompson (1997) demonstrated convincingly how biographical material may give insights into the very processes involved in social mobility over historical time that quantitative studies could only speculate on as they relied on data on outcomes rather than the processes in their own right. The specific historical contexts of countries can in biographical studies be linked to temporalties at the individual and familial levels to show how the history-biography dynamic is at play in the wider social processes.

GermanyFootnote 9 was during the revival period of the life course perspective still divided into East- and West. Bertaux and Kohli (1984), in an overview of the revival of biographical research in Europe, stated that there were two related traditions in German research. The first was named a cultural or life-world approach to topics such as class consciousness, and the second one was a focus on the structure of narratives in an interpretive tradition where Alfred Schütz’ approach was more prominent.

The earliest life story studies were done in West Germany around 1980 and were much inspired by the latter rather than taking the Chicago sociology of old as their starting point. Methodologically a particular form of interpretive sociology developed, where the thoughts of Max Weber and his notion of ‘verstehen’ was prominent within a phenomenological framework from Alfred SchützFootnote 10 were the leading ideas. In the literature there are a variety of viewpoints on the question about whether there is a particular German School of biographical studies is debated.

Apitzsch and Inowlocki (2000) observed that the term ‘The German School’ had a reputation as ‘an allegedly ‘idealist’ approach which has little concern for a sociological understanding of social reality and, instead, an overly complicated methodological interest in single case analysis’ (p. 53). They stated that this approach was not part of mainstream German sociology and that the main biographical approach used in Germany was imported from the American source in Chicago. This biographical approach was introduced in German sociology in the 1970s, and the work of Martin Kohli and his collaboration with Daniel Bertaux were significant for launching this particular branch of the discipline into the general realm of social science in the country (Apitzsch and Inowlocki 2000). These authors observed that the specific German history which included the Nazi-period, made biographical research face difficulties since accounts from persons who lived through that historical period could not be taken at face value. As a consequence,

the sociological analysis of biographical documents became more and more sophisticated, taking into account the formal features of narration, such as the distinction between narration and argumentation, or the degree of abstractness. (p. 56)

There was in other words a general suspicion against biographical accounts and whether any historical facts or truths could be found in such material.

Empirical studies in Germany during this period included Kohli et al.’s (1983) study of the ageing process in a particular industry. The focus in the study was exceptional in that it studied ‘normality’ through narrative interviews with workers in three age groups, where age itself was the focus of analysis. The aim of the study was to examine ‘how the economic system deals with age and ageing, and at the same time contributes to the construction of the age stratification system’ (Kohli et al. 1983, pp. 23–24). The analysis focussed on workers’ perceptions in the context of the workplace and their lives in general, thus including a contextualist element adopted from the classic Chicago tradition of this field.

In later years the quantitative approaches to life course studies have become more dominant in German research. The German Life History Study (GLHS) was a survey based study that covered selected cohorts. It started in 1979 and was extended to include the East when The Wall fell and unification happened about a decade later (Brückner and Mayer 1998). This pioneering research was followed by a number of others. The longitudinal studies and panels organised by Hans-Petter Blossfeld and co-researchers, are modelled on a life course design.Footnote 11 These and other similar studies will be discussed in relation to methodological topics in a later chapter.

In Italy Franco Ferrarotti (1981), who was much inspired by the philosopher Jean Paul Satre’s idea of ‘mediation’ between levels of social life, had done life story research in the 1950s. He was particularly interested in studying consequences of contemporary economic development as well as technological modernisation in Italy at the time. In the process of doing this research he came to the conclusion that biographies of primary groups—rather than individuals—comprised a material that could better capture ‘the mediation between biography and the social system’ (p. 22).

The overall impression is that although many German researchers were influenced by the classic Chicago tradition (Apitzsch and Inowlocki 2000), similar to what can be found in Ferrarotti’s work, there were nevertheless a certain ‘local flavour’ to both countries’ early biographical studies. As will be discussed in more detail in the next Chapter, in Germany traditions and practices in biographical and life course studies can more easily be traced to the methodological approaches that were strongly associated with phenomenological ideas rather than with the traditions from Chicago.

The Oral History Legacy: The United Kingdom

In the UK early biographical studies were associated with the oral history tradition. Thompson (2000) observed that ‘Biography is one of the forms in which historians most often use interviews, whether explicitly or not, usually in an informal and exploratory manner to supplement written sources’ (p. 93). He traced the renewed attention to ‘human documents’ to a merging of research interests between sociology and history in Britain after WWII. EP Thompson’s (1963/1966) The Making of The English Working Class became an influential classic in that it made the experiences of the working-class focus of attention. Sheila Rowbotham’s (1973) Hidden from History, focussed on working class women and used archival material to document their lives. The expansion of higher education and the establishing of new universities with interdisciplinary departments created ‘an increasing concern with the historical dimension in social analysis’ (Thompson 2000, p. 73). During this period the large post-war birth cohorts comprised a generation that re-defined the notion of ‘youth’ and set a more radical agenda for society. Focus on lived experiences from the viewpoint of those whose lives were studied, especially groups who had been silenced and oppressed, became essential.

However, at the same time as these research approaches became more widespread, in oral history there were debates about methods. Oral historians were criticised for making use of surveys to underpin findings from interviews since this practice was considered ‘empiricism’ which did not give sufficient attention to subjective aspects of memory (Chamberlayne et al. 2000).Footnote 12

Ken Plummer’s (1983) Documents of Life was the earliest European volume to give an account of the history of the biographical life course tradition and its roots in Chicago. He made a distinction between approaches tending towards the humanities on the one hand, and those that favoured the positivistic sciences on the other.Footnote 13 Human documents, and thus biographical material, are associated with the former. The life story stood out and,

What matters, therefore, in life history research is the facilitation of as full a subjective view as possible, not the naïve delusion that one has trapped the bedrock of truth. Given that most social science seeks to tap the ‘objective’, the life history reveals, like nothing else can, the subjective realm. (p. 14)

Plummer’s book did not confine itself to a discussion in sociology exclusively, although it was his main subject, nor only to life histories. He discussed the variety of human documents and included letters, diaries, photographs and films, and their use across a range of disciplines and subjects. The bulk of the volume was however devoted to life stories in the social sciences; how these could be gathered and analysed.

A number of edited volumes about life course and life story research was published in British sociology throughout the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 14 Papers presented at a BSA conference in 1986 ‘Sociology of the Life Cycle’ were published in two volumes in 1987. One of these was dedicated to discussions about general methodological and theoretical aspects of a life course, or life cycle, perspective (Bryman et al. 1987). The chapters in this volume discussed notions of family and generations within a life course perspective. Other topics included were life course phases; intergenerational relations; labour market participation over the life course, and family. The second volume focussed specifically on women’s lives (Allatt et al. 1987). The topics covered included gender and generations; concepts of women; women in different life course phases; marriage, employment and childbirth.

In these volumes questions of concepts and terminology were prominent. Bryman et al. (1987) in a discussion about the terms ‘life cycle’ and ‘life course’ observed that the latter was the preferred term in American sociology, and referred to Glen Elder and cited Tamara Hareven’s 1982-definition which demonstrated that this concept took historical context into account. A life cycle perspective on the other hand, was considered deterministic and non-contextual and was centred on life stages that were deemed more or less inevitable in individuals’ lives. As its origin in biology refers to the reproductive cycle of an organism, it was seen to have ideological overtones that came to bear on analyses of women’s lives in particular, by referring deterministically to stages (Allatt et al. 1987).Footnote 15 The biographical perspective gained importance in Britain, perhaps most of all because of the long tradition of oral history and because of the easy access to the original literature from the Chicago tradition in a common language.

Women’s Studies’ Contributions: Scandinavia

In Scandinavia, and in Norway specifically, life course research gained ground in sociology through women’s studies particularly. In the book series with the title ‘Women’s Living Conditions and Life Courses’, series editor was the feminist political scientist Helga Hernes, 17 books highlighted a variety of aspects of women’s lives in a welfare state society. Whereas most of the books covered a range of topics of relevance for women’s lives in general, only one of the volumes was exclusively focussed on the life course perspective (Skrede and Tornes 1983). The chapters in this book covered a range of dimensions related to women’s life course, e.g., education, childbirth, employment, marriage etc. Methodologically the empirical chapters had data and analyses based on quantitative and demographic traditions. They highlighted the concepts that were, and still are, key to a life course perspective and as such introduced this approach to a wider scholarly community. One of the co-editors, Kristin Tornes (1983), had a chapter on women and time which was among the early contributions on this particular topic both in Scandinavia and beyond. In spite of the qualitative tradition being part of Norwegian sociology (Aubert 1979; Holter and Kalleberg 1982), using life stories as data in sociology was not common at the time.Footnote 16 My doctoral dissertation (Nilsen 1992) was an early example of the use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches in the same study.Footnote 17

In Sweden the life course perspective was mainly present in quantitative approaches in demographic studies. According to Eneroth (1988), qualitative studies did not exist in any formal way in Swedish sociology. He described it as invisible in the discipline and outlined a number of reasons for the situation. One of these was the hostility towards what in a debate had been called ‘soft data’. The qualitative studies he saw emerging at the time were in social work rather than sociology. The life course perspective became important in educational research in Sweden, particularly in Nordic comparative studies of women’s education (Bjeren and Elgqvist-Saltzman 1994).Footnote 18 In the volume edited by Bjeren and Elgqvist-Saltzman (1994) the notion of ‘lifelines’ was in focus as this had been a pioneering feature of the Swedish approach to studying women’s life courses.Footnote 19

Finland had a long oral history tradition but it was only from the 1980s that the approach gain importance (Fingerroos and Haanpää 2012). In a three generation study of the upper classes of Swedish-Finns, the researchers made use of biographical interviews in combination with other sources of data such as official documents, diaries and letters (Roos and Roos 1984). Methodologically this study related itself to the writings of Bertaux, and theoretically Bourdieu’s approach to social class was an inspiration. Their conclusions drew on the importance of historical change to account for changes over generations in their resources and lifestyles.

There had been an overall tendency across Scandinavian sociology for qualitative methods to be confined to the margins of the discipline. For Norway it was only when women’s research gained ground in the 1980s in a particular companionship with the state ministries that methodological debates came to include discussions about qualitative approaches (Holter and Kalleberg 1982).

The Contextualist Approach: Life Course Studies in America

Bertaux and Kohli (1984) commented on the revival phase of biographical research that, ‘It is certainly paradoxical that the two countries - namely the United States and Poland – that had the strongest traditions of biographical research before the war (…) have not contributed proportionately to the present revival (p. 217)’. While this observation is true for biographical studies of the qualitative kind, American sociology contributed to the revival in a very significant way in Glen Elder’s (1974/1999) Children of the Great Depression. As stated in Chap. 2, Elder was inspired by C. Wright Mills and this work is a milestone for the revival of the life course approach that builds on the classic tradition where the intersection of history and biography has a prominent place.

There was much discussion about concepts, terminology and vocabularies during the revival period in America. Elder (1974/1999) said in the afterword to the 1999 edition of Children of the Great Depression that when he started out doing life course studies in the 1960s there were only the concepts of ‘career’ and ‘life cycle’, of which neither placed individuals in historical context. As life cycle is associated with the reproductive cycle of organisms common in biology, Elder found it, and the notion of ‘career’, of little use in the analysis of his data. The life cycle concept, he said, ‘is also insensitive to matters of social timing and historical location’ (Elder 1974/1999, p. 314). The term ‘life course’ was the better alternative.

The life course is age-graded through institutions and social structures, and it is embedded in relationships that constrain and support behaviour. People are located in historical settings through birth cohorts, and they are also linked across the generations through kinship. (Elder 1974/1999, p. 319)

There is and was a close affinity between concepts in life course research and demography. Concepts the two approaches share are e.g., trajectories, which refer to the chronological sequence of events in a life course (Elder 1985). The life course is thus made up of a series of trajectories in different areas of life such as education and employment. The term transition signifies a period of change from one life course phase to another, for instance, the transition from childhood to adolescence. Life course events are significant markers in life such as starting an education, finding a partner, etc. A series of events may together signify a transition.

An early and significant contribution to life course research came from demographer Norman Ryder (1965). His definition of an important concept in this research tradition, cohort, is: ‘the aggregate of individuals (within some population definition) who experience the same event within the same time interval’ (1965, p. 845). He made a distinction between two subvarieties of the concept:

Historians of the arts tend to use the term ‘generation’ for cohort, in a rebellion against conventional historians’ use of chronological sections. Demographers studying fertility time series ‘away from the period-by-period format toward an appraisal of temporal variations from cohort to cohort’. (Ryder 1965, p. 845)

Thus Ryder’s definition of generation was reserved for kinship structures only and in that sense differed from Karl Mannheim’s, whose writings on generations from the 1920s were important in their own right but came to be essential in life course research during and after the revival period. In ‘The Problem of Generations’ (Mannheim 1923) he addressed historical change through the lens of generations which he considered ‘collective agents of change’.Footnote 20

Tamara K Hareven was an American social historian who did pioneering studies in life course research. In the late 1960s she was at Harvard University and while there participated in Erik Erikson’s seminar on biography and history.

Erikson’s approach dramatized for me the importance of studying lives over time and of focusing on the interaction between life history and history. Whereas Erikson concentrated on the individual life cycle, I began to search for ways to understand the interaction between individuals and the family as a collective unit, under changing historical conditions. (Hareven 2000, p. xvii)

Hareven’s focus was thus different from that of Erikson’s. Her essential contribution to the understanding of time and temporality in life course studies, a topic on which she was a pioneer, will be discussed in a later chapter. Like Elder, Hareven started out from a life cycle perspective, and like him she found it wanting: ‘Dissatisfaction with the family-cycle approach led me in 1976 to invite Elder, who had developed the life-course approach, to collaborate with a group of historians on its application to historical analysis.’ (Hareven 2000, p. 13) and she found that this approach added a dynamic dimension in the historical study of the family. Her own definition of the life course approach was, in contrast to Elder’s, related to the family as an intermediate level between the individual and society, ‘The life course approach is concerned with the movement of individuals over their own lives and through historical time and with the relationship of family members to each other as they travel through personal and historical time.’ (Hareven 1982).

The revival in the US of the life course and biographical traditions in the form adopted from the 1970s were inspired by Elder’s study. These were mainly quantitative with some notable exceptions which included Hareven’s work on biographical approaches to the family in an historical perspective.

John A Clausen, a sociologist who did a number of studies from a life course perspective, also involving longitudinal studies, made use of biographical material (Clausen 1998). He introduced a distinction between life reviews, life stories and life histories. His research on young delinquents had started in the late 1930s. His earliest experience with the materials he called life reviews was in autobiographical accounts of young men who had been involved in delinquency and crime. ‘Their life reviews were highly subjective retrospective accounts prepared for a particular purpose’ (Clausen 1998, p. 190). He adopted this term from the work of Erik Erikson but he used the concepts in different ways from those of Erikson’s in his distinction between the spontaneous autobiographical review and the elicited accounts. The former, he said was told and written with no guidance whereas the latter involved researchers and how their study aims would give structure and direction to the review. Clausen himself preferred a combination of these two methods of collecting biographical material. In his overview of the history of this tradition he observed that William James had made use of personal accounts in a study of religious beliefs in 1906, more than a decade before Thomas and Znaniecki did their ground-breaking study. However, it is worth noting, as discussed in Chap. 2, that the women researchers and social workers associated with Hull House collected life stories and made use of human documents in their work and their research, even before James’ study cited here.

In an edited volume that gave an overview of the development of life course sociology Giele and Elder (1998)Footnote 21 observed that it had been difficult to find approaches that could integrate the structural qualities of societies with those of the dynamic ones. Each co-editor had in their respective ways contributed to the development of the American revival of the life course approach: Elder in his studies of the California cohorts, and Giele in her research on women where she had compared women’s life courses across cohorts (Giele and Elder 1998, pp. 7–8). They suggested that fields that had particularly benefited life course perspectives in post-war American research were the social sciences as well as history and demography. Methodologically they underlined life history and longitudinal surveys. The sociology of ageing had gained from this perspective in particular (Riley 1998). Within research strategies to ageing, psychological approaches that divided the life course into phases and stages had been particularly influential. On inspiration from the life course perspective this research area developed novel approaches to the field that were less static.Footnote 22 The life course perspective in the USA has mainly been applied in longitudinal and cross-sectional quantitative studies. Over the years Elder himself has refined and made his definition of this concept more detailed. What he has named ‘the emergent life course paradigm’ (Elder 1994) has been adopted widely in American sociology and social psychology and will be addressed in a later chapter.

The pioneering qualities of the post-war American research in a life course perspective have been in what topics researchers deemed important to investigate. These included, in addition to areas such as ageing, life course transitions between phases of childhood and youth; transition to the phase of adulthood, and that of retirement. A variety of aspects of age and ageing were thus prominent themes in studies of the life course in general (Riley 1988). The work of Norwegian sociologist Gunhild Hagestad, in collaboration with established American life course researchers, were of great significance for the understanding of changing age norms for transition phases in the life course as well as aspects of ageing relating to varying historical contexts (Hagestad and Neugarten 1985; Settersten and Hagestad 1996).

The women’s movement was important in American society as it was in Europe from the 1960s onwards. There were considerable contributions to the understanding of the lives of American women from a life course perspective during the revival period (Neugarten 1985; Riley 1985; Rossi 1985a). These studies had different foci compared to most European, and particularly Scandinavian studies, where the welfare state was vital for the improvement of women’s lives in all age groups (Hernes 1987).Footnote 23 What little welfare state existed in America, was described as a positive contribution to women across the life course:

The relationship of women to the welfare state hardly needs documenting. Women with children are the overwhelming majority among the beneficiaries of the main “means-tested” income maintenance programs (…) the programs that make women a little less insecure also make them a little less powerless. The availability of benefits and services reduces the dependence of younger women with children on male breadwinners, as it reduces the dependence of older women on adult children. (Fox Piven 1985, pp. 277–278)

So whilst most, but not all, of the American studies were done from a contextualist life course approach, a good many were not as they had ambitions of finding causal relationships that could be used for predictive purposes independent of time and space. This latter point is related to the dominant position of the quantitative methods in American sociological empirical research in general, as well as in the biographical research’s revival period and beyond.

Summary

This chapter has discussed some important contributions to sociological research during the revival period. The selection of countries and studies has been limited to those that in some sense took the Chicago heritage into consideration and developed it further in their own contexts. Qualitative methods did again come on the sociological methods agenda in many countries during this period. Glaser and Strauss book on Grounded Theory and the debates on qualitative methods that emerged at this time, lay the grounds for a re-discovery of the Chicago tradition since the authors made direct references to American pragmatism, Blumer, and also to the work of Thomas and Znaniecki, as their main inspiration.

The chapter has demonstrated that the revival took on different forms and directions depending on specificities of the national contexts. In some countries, like France, the time for this tradition’s re-emergence coincided with social events on a large scale. In the UK the critique of positivist approaches had links to the well-established oral history research, whilst in Germany the debates about biographical research took place in the long shadows of the Nazi period. Other research topics that emerged during this time, such as feminism and women’s studies, called for alternative methods and approaches to the established ones that were founded on positivist ideals. In this way they opened the field for biographical and other qualitative research designs. As Chap. 6 shows, the methods debates that gained traction in the 1970s continued in the following decades, and they are still a force to be reckoned with in academic discussions.

During this period there were many discussions about terms and concepts and their usefulness in biographical research. Particular attention was paid to differences between static versus dynamic notions. Some of the variations in vocabularies are associated with specificities of national contexts. Ideas and approaches have developed different hues depending on the history of the countries and contexts they originated in. These are again associated with variations in methodological focus. For instance, in the USA where quantitative methods came to dominate, the types of concepts discussed were different from those in France and the UK; the generation concept has its origin Germany, whilst cohort is a term associated with American research. Such differences are also evident in approaches to terms relating to time in biographical life course studies, as the next Chapter shows.