Methodological and Other Controversies

Abstract

This chapter addresses methodological and other controversies in the biographical research tradition. Two strands of methodological debates have run parallel; the quantitative-qualitative divide that foregrounded methodological issues, and the other debate originating in the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, that put epistemological questions centre stage. The quantitative-qualitative dispute has early origins. The discussion as it relates to life course and biographical research have been a constant since the origin of this approach. The methodological divide has persisted over the years and is also related to epistemological debates that have created dividing lines within qualitative approaches. A section discusses the meeting between the different approaches to qualitative biographical research in the social sciences and the humanities. The heated discussions from the 1980s onwards, that were in reality addressing themes in the philosophy of science, are presented in their contemporary contexts. Another line of debate is about notions and attention to historical time and is addressed in the section called ‘From history as periods to history as epoch’. Theoretical notions such as ‘the individualisation thesis’ and a ‘de-standardisation’ of life courses are terms associated with notions of history in epochal terms such as ‘late modernity’ and show how this vocabulary became influential.

Biography resets in motion the Methodenstreit. It thus presents a unique opportunity for reopening a thorough debate on the subject of the logical, epistemological and methodological foundations of sociology; an occasion for the renewal of thought on the foundations of the social. (Ferrarotti 1981, p. 21)

Introduction

From the viewpoint of the current situation two strands of methodological debates over life course and biographical research have in recent years run parallel. The oldest one is the quantitative-qualitative divide that has foregrounded methodological questions. The other originated in the 1980s in the period of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, when epistemological issues became the most significant subjects of attention.

The first debates can be traced to the beginnings of biographical research and Thomas and Znaniecki’s work. In this chapter I will revisit some of the topics that were raised in these arguments in their period specific contexts, which included a different set of vocabularies from the ones that characterise contemporary sociology. In Blumer’s 1939 volume from the Appraisal of The Polish Peasant questions about the trustworthiness of ‘human documents’ were discussed. The quantitative-qualitative methodological divide has persisted over the years partly due to technological advances that has made statistical techniques more sophisticated and of interest in their own right. Epistemological debates of newer origin have created dividing lines within qualitative approaches.

The ‘cultural turn’¹ in biographical research is discussed in a section that focusses on the meeting between the different approaches to biographical research in the social sciences and the humanities. The heated methodological discussions from the 1980s onwards, that were in reality discussions about themes in the philosophy of science, are presented in their contemporary contexts. The ‘cultural/narrative turn’ and the controversies over realism vs. constructionism as epistemological starting points were the main dividing lines in these arguments.

Different layers of temporality are at the core of a biographical life course approach. The final section of this chapter is therefore about a shift in focus at the historical level from history addressed in terms of periods to history approached in epochal terms; modernity and postmodernity eclipsed the standard life course vocabulary, especially in cultural studies approaches. Other notions associated with such perspectives include de-standardised life courses, choice biographies and increased individualisation. The writings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, that were the main figures in the debates about these issues, gained prominence in general sociology as well as in biographical research. A discussion of this trend, and its consequences in terms of rendering the structural level in the history-biography dynamic of lesser importance, concludes the chapter.

Developments in Qualitative Methods

The vocabulary in methods debates has changed significantly over time. In a discussion of the shifting terms in methodology, Platt (1996, pp. 44–46) observed that although participant observation was done in the 1920s it was not given its name until the 1940s. Methodological debates in biographical studies were mostly confined to psychology and the very terms that had been used to describe the biographical research, changed in the decades after the Appraisal proceeding. For instance, Abel (1947 cited in Platt 1996, p. 51) who had done biographical research on Nazis called what had previously been named ‘life histories’, ‘biograms’. These were defined as written ‘at the request of the researcher in order to address a chosen problem, and is solicited in large quantity from members of a specific social group who are given directions on the desired content and form’ (Platt 1996, p. 51).

The general category of ‘personal documents’ that was considered to cover many types of data that included letters, diaries, autobiographical and biographical texts, were no longer part of the vocabulary in post-war sociology. The different types of documents were rather referred to as specific kinds of data, if considered to be data at all. The term ‘survey’ had also changed its meaning from referring to a wide variety of information about particular communities to become the name of a specific method. In the pre-war era the main dividing line between what we today name quantitative and qualitative methods was named the case-study² method versus the statistical method.

The quantitative-qualitative divide has been a recurring topic of discussion in the general methodological literature. Hammersley (1990) stated that the increased influence of quantitative methods in sociology had its background in the effects that positivist ideas had in the natural sciences. He traced these ideas to Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s where they formed the basis of what came to be known as ‘logical positivism’ (pp. 96–97). European sociology also became affected by these discussions, particularly in the post-war decades.³ Of particular relevance for biographical studies is the gradual turning away from biographical accounts and to quantitative data in longitudinal designs.

This was also the main cleavage in the methods discussions relating to biographical research and is reflected in the discussions during the Appraisal proceedings for The Polish Peasant in 1938 (Blumer 1939). As stated in an earlier chapter the proceedings were mostly concerned with debates over methodological issues. The whole discussion was permeated with what were considered important topics of the day, objectivity and neutrality. In 1938 ideals of ‘scientism’⁴ were prominent in American social science and were present in the debates among the social scientists who took part in the Appraisal proceedings. Differences between objective and subjective data were discussed and argued over. Blumer was asked how he viewed the relationship between statistics and human documents, to which he replied:

I think the statistical approach will generally, though not necessarily, confine itself to what it calls objective factors, in other words, external influences playing upon human beings which can be counted, and responses which likewise can be counted. Thus, the statistical approach will tend to ignore this mediating factor of subjective experience which Thomas and Znaniecki emphasise as essential. For this reason the statistical approach will tend to remain one-sided. (p. 115)

The most heated discussions at the symposium were those involving different types of empirical evidence, particularly the use of ‘human documents’ such as letters and biographical material. Could such documents be trusted? How to measure reliability and how could ‘interpretations’ be tested? Blumer himself was unsure of whether sources that are built on subjective interpretations could be judged by criteria of representativity and generalization, ‘it is easy to see why human documents become suspect as a scientific instrument’ but he still maintained that such methods had relevance in sociology:

To renounce their use in scientific investigation of human life would be to commit a fatal blunder, for theoretically, they are indispensable and actually they may be of enormous value. The effective use which has been made of them by Thomas and Znaniecki is ample demonstration of this value. (p. 80)

In his reasoning Blumer seems to adhere to the common view of a divide between the ‘process of discovery’ and the ‘phase of justification’ (Kaplan 1964). In the first phase openness to ideas and an orientation to the problem field rather than a strict definition of research questions are important. No clear rules apply and in many studies which would otherwise not consider interviews reliable sources of data, they are allowed during this process. The context of justification on the other hand is characterized by a fixed set of rules. And Blumer’s argument in relation to human documents and their validity and reliability was clearly related to this second phase whereas his insistence on such documents’ relevance for sociology is founded in viewpoints related to the first process. The distinction between the two phases, or processes, of research stems from a ‘scientistic’ tradition. Ideals for humanistic social research with qualitative methods that would open the field up for a full inclusion of subjective experiences and human documents, had yet to be formulated. Blumer had at this point not yet articulated his critique against variable research or carved out any clear position in relation to Mead and his pragmatist ideas.

From the viewpoint of a present reader his attention to how human documents could reach a scientific standard may seem a bit peculiar. But he was clearly fond of the idea of finding a way to include such material in sociological research. He admitted that it was problematic to establish criteria of truth and objectivity for biographical material and that it therefore may be difficult to differentiate between truth and fiction in such sources. Ha also saw that there were dilemmas in relation to what kinds of documents could be included in research if human experience was to become a part of social studies. These would invariably involve subjective accounts of such experiences, and it would then be necessary to arrive at some standards of research credibility for these studies. Indeed Blumer himself at a later point in time made efforts to address this problem area, not least in his 1954 article where he lifted the issue from a mere methods matter to a case of incompatibility between the social sciences and the ideals of the natural sciences. More of this later, first a few words about an attempt to address the issues that The Polish Peasant study raised in its own right. One of its co-authors wrote a book on the advantages of human documents as data and suggestions for analysis of these.

In Florian Znaniecki’s (1934) book on sociological methods he launched the idea of analytic induction as an alternative to statistical methods. Analytic induction involved the study of a few cases in depth rather than focussing on a large number of cases with few variables: ‘Emphasis must be put not on the quantity of cases, but on the thorough acquaintance with each case under observation’ (Znaniecki 1928, cited in Hammersley 1989). Through this method, he maintained that it would be possible to produce theoretical laws that were universal in character, which in itself is an aim that is in breach with a pragmatist ideal of contextualised knowledge. According to Hammersley (1989) Znaniecki did not provide examples of analytic induction practice but his ideas influenced Herbert Blumer,⁵ who later came to become an inspiration on Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss and their formulation of Grounded Theory (1967). Analytic induction did not have much impact in its day on methodological practices that were more and more dominated by quantitative logics and advanced statistical techniques. Although starting from an approach in case studies, the preoccupation with discovering laws set Znaniecki’s book apart from later attempts to formulate practices of doing qualitative research.

Blumer himself took task with the ‘variable driven’ branch of social research of his day. As discussed in Chap. 2, he made a distinction between concepts in the natural sciences—definitive concepts, and those in the social sciences—sensitising concepts. The former tells researchers what to look for, whilst the latter indicates a direction in which to look (Blumer 1954). He made comparisons between the social and the natural sciences in his debate with social scientists in the quantitative branch. The quantitative tradition had a grip on the methods field in the social sciences, and Blumer made it his mission to unmask the disadvantages for the social sciences in wholeheartedly adopting the practices from the natural sciences into studies of social life. Blumer did however not write any texts on methodological procedures.

One of the prominent sociologists who debated the situation of the discipline in post-war contemporary USA, was C. Wright Mills. He was not directly involved in methods debates but as pointed out in previous chapters, he brought more overarching arguments into the discussion and commented in critical terms on the dominance of quantitative methods (Mills 1954). The state of the discipline at the time, in his view left a lot to be desired. He made a distinction between sociologists who favoured the ‘The Theory’, a field dominated by Grand Theory, and ‘The Method’, which was the domain of statisticians as ‘Scientists’. The latter, he said, would have liked to wear white coats and ‘are out to do with society and history what they believe physicists have done with nature’ and ‘the most frequent type is The Higher Statistician, ‘who breaks down truth and falsity into such fine particles that we cannot tell the difference between them’ (Mills 1954, p. 569). He was equally critical of ‘The Theory’ and made distinctions among those who favoured it based on whether or not they claimed to understand what it was about,

To many of those who claim to understand it but who do not like it, it is a clumsy piece of irrelevant ponderosity.

To those who do not claim to understand it but who like it very much - and there are many of these - it is a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.

Those who do not claim to understand it and who do not like it - if they retain the courage of their convictions - will feel that indeed the emperor has no clothes. (Mills 1954, p. 571)

He was sceptical of the knowledge that research based on these two extremes of theory and methods could produce. The theory was too far removed from any reality to be of much help in making sense of social life. The statistical methods would be of no use either. He thus called for ‘methodological inquiries into methods and inquiry’ (p. 570). It was only well over a decade later that a book with the ambition of bridging the gap between theory and method, and thus giving methodological questions prominence in a meaningful way, emerged.

Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’ The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) was, as previously stated, much inspired by pragmatism’s knowledge foundations, and by Blumer’s naturalistic inquiry. The notion of theoretical sensitivity put forward in Grounded Theory was a close relative of Blumer’s ‘sensitising concepts’ (Blumer 1954). Glaser and Strauss noted their indebtedness to Blumer in their book, but were also critical of his preference for verification rather than generating theory,

Blumer’s solution to getting better theory, and in close relation to data, was – again – blunted because he was poised in too sharp a posture against verification and too ready to give up on the problem of how to generate better theory except by the general formula of sticking close to the data being studied. (Glaser and Strauss 1967, p. 14)

Their book did also engage in debate with the works of Robert Merton on middle range theories. They said of his attempts to overcome the theory-empirical research divide that this did not involve any generating of new theory, ‘The closest he came was with “serendipity”; that is, an unanticipated, anomalous, and strategic finding gives rise to a new hypothesis. (…) Thus, he was concerned with grounded modifying of theory, not grounded generating of theory’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967, p. 2 footnote 1). Their approach was one of flexibility throughout the research process. Theoretical notions cannot be forced but must emerge as the analysis proceeds, hence the emphasis on theoretical sensitivity.

Glaser and Strauss’ book became an important inspiration for the revival of the biographical method in that it provided methodological procedures for qualitative designs that made such approaches valuable in their own right and not only as ‘preliminary procedures’. The fact that both authors were actively involved in methodology discussions at the time, made their influence particularly important.

On the continent a different approach to biographical material had developed, partly inspired by the classic American tradition but with important differences. Edmund Husserl’s original phenomenology was an abstract brand of thought in the Cartesian tradition. Alfred Schütz emigrated to America during WWII and inspired by Husserl’s thought, developed a form of phenomenology—social phenomenology (Barber 2022)—which became highly influential in German biographical research. Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of an intersubjective life-world was for Schütz considered the basis of social life. The ‘natural attitude’ provided actors with ‘taken-for-granted’ life-worlds,

‘All interpretations of this world is based upon a stock of previous experiences of it, our own experiences and those handed down to us by our parents and teachers, which in the form of “knowledge at hand” functions as a scheme of reference. (Schütz 1945, p. 534)

Schütz’s ideas were, in contrast to American pragmatism, in a Cartesian tradition. He was very impressed with the writings of William James but distanced himself from Mead in a curious set of arguments that claimed Mead’s thoughts rested on a simple stimulus-response model.⁶ Several critiques have been raised against the Schützian line of thinking in its sociological application⁷ but it has nevertheless gained prominence in the sociological literature, and particularly in some European biographical research.

Quite a few of the methodological advances in biographical designs took place within quantitative research strategies and in some instances became a bridge to the revival of the biographical methods and the life story tradition.

Quantitative Methods Gaining Ground

The first wave of quantitative data in the US was driven by demands from the government to increase social research during and after the Great Depression (Platt 1996). This gave access to huge data sets and encouraged the development of statistical techniques of analysis. The Sociology Department in Chicago, where case-studies originated, saw a change in the methodological profile of its staff. During and after WWII the demand for statistical information increased manyfold as opinion research into attitudes gained ground. The technological advances in computer science were also important for the increase in quantitative studies. Case-studies disappeared in the sense the term was used in the early phase, and the methodological practices associated with these, fell out of favour among social scientists. The advanced statistical techniques that became popular gave rise to a new type of methodological literature. In the textbooks emphasis was now on how data was collected. The increase in the number of methods textbooks was driven both by the differentiation of disciplines that occurred in the post-war era, but also by the huge increase in the number of students as the systems of education were expanded across the western hemisphere (Platt 1996, pp. 50–52).

As briefly mentioned in Chap. 2, an important development within the quantitative tradition of biographical life course research was longitudinal studies. A particular form of longitudinal research is the cohort study. A cohort is defined as ‘an aggregate of individuals who experienced the same event within the same time interval’ (Ryder 1965, p. 845), the most common of which is the birth cohort. Participants in longitudinal cohort studies were often ‘deviants’, ‘delinquents,’ and other groups of people who for some reason did not fit into the ‘normal’ fabric of society and were incarcerated for a limited period or for the longer term, which meant that they were easily accessible for social scientists. An early exemplar was carried out by Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck (1930). They did another study in 1940 that included delinquent and nondelinquent white boys aged 14 and followed them up at 25 and 32 (Glueck and Glueck 1943, 1950). Their archived data was later analysed by Laub and Sampson (1998). They viewed the material and rich and was particularly impressed with the data’s variety of dimensions of juvenile and adult development, including major life course events. Glueck and Glueck’s material included interviews with the informants and their families, social workers, schoolteachers, employers, and neighbours as well as official records and criminal histories. The sheer volume of data together with the longitudinal design, set the study apart from criminological studies that preceded it. However, from a methodological and epistemological viewpoint, the study was firmly grounded in a quantitative logic with a ‘scientistic’ objective. The purpose of these studies was to arrive at causal explanations and thereby achieve the ability to predict what specific types of young people who would be at risk of falling outside of normal trajectories for the age group. In other words, to examine causal ‘mechanisms’, independent of time and contextual features of societies, of characteristics that made young boys become juvenile delinquents.

Among the most well-known cohort research is the afore mentioned study by Glen Elder, Children of the Great Depression (1974/1999). As noted in an earlier chapter Elder was much inspired by C. Wright Mills’ ‘history-biography’ connection. Thus the purpose of Elder’s research was to study how historical contexts of economic deprivation shaped individuals’ lives over time. The material he gained access to was similar to the Gluecks’ studies, but with one main difference: the cases were ‘ordinary’ children. The sample consisted of fifth graders (born around 1920)—84 boys and 83 girls, all of them white, from working- and middle-class backgrounds living in Berkeley and Oakland, California. They were continuously studied over a seven-year period from 1932 to 1939 and contacted again at five different times ending in 1964. This is indeed an impressive study in terms of the depth and range of data. It stands out from other studies of its time because, as Elder explicitly stated, when he got access to this material he chose to study effects of economic deprivation on theoretical and historical grounds, and not because he sought some de-contextualized mechanisms and predictive explanations about how deprivation in childhood would affect individuals over the life course in general (Elder 1999, p. 6).

Elder’s approach was grounded in a variable logic and in quantitative analysis. However, his stressing of the importance of social and historical context was important for the direction of the revival of the qualitative biographical approach in the same decade in which his ground-breaking study was published (see Chap. 2). Rather than making generalisations about how particular experiences of deprivation in childhood would affect individuals over the life course, irrespective of time and place, Elder concluded that effects of childhood deprivation related not only to the historical circumstances, but also to the points in the life course (age and cohort) in which they experienced it. But: ‘Social change can turn lives around by opening up new opportunities and careers; it may also close certain options’ (Elder 1999, p. 321). He noted that three aspects of the historical context for young boys from Berkeley and Oakland were important for their relatively unexpected⁸ success in life. The first of these was the greater access to college education for this cohort in the immediate post-war period in California. The second was opportunities to find a marriage partner. The age of marriage declined in the 1940s USA. The third important factor was military service, ‘Full-scale mobilisation for war in the early 1940s pulled men and women out of their families and local communities and broadened their exposure to life opportunities’ (Elder 1999, p. 322).

Elder’s study did not in itself build bridges between the quantitative and the qualitative camps. He did not make much explicit use of the qualitative material in his data (Nilsen and Brannen 2010) but his applying an historical sensitive frame of reference breached the ‘scientistic’ approach that had been the most prominent in post-war sociology up to that point in time, since he did not attempt to formulate laws that would be valid across time and space. As stated above and in an earlier chapter, his work became an important inspiration for the revival of the biographical tradition.

In Europe a number of quantitative and longitudinal studies have been done over the past decades, building on the life course design, if not adhering to the contextualist variety of Elder’s approach. German research stands out in this regard. The advanced statistical methods of ‘event history analysis’ (Blossfeld et al. 1989) was important for the development of statistical techniques for analysing large volumes of data in sequence. The debates within the quantitative field were mostly, but not exclusively, about the usefulness of particular statistical techniques for studying complex data related to the life course. Operationalisations of variables, what variables to include, what techniques for measuring complex relationships between variables when time series were involved, these were all questions in the debates (see e.g. Settersten and Mayer 1997). Andrew Abbott (1995) subsumed all the types of statistical analysis that involved sequences of events and/ or phases and transitions under the term ‘sequence analysis’.⁹ These could involve a number of variables in sequences that had varying degrees of contextual features associated with them.

Aisenbrey and Fasang (2010) in an article with a title inspired by Abbott’s (1995) review, made the case for a ‘second wave’ of sequence analysis that held more promise for life course research. This was related to the further sophisticated techniques for fulfilling its aim of identifying temporal patterns of sequences in life course trajectories. Exploring the timing and temporal order within sequences are a main advantage of sequence analysis for life course studies.

In all it seems that when debates tend towards the sophisticated and advanced technical sides of data analysis, concerns such as contextualisation in historical time or relating to other forms of temporal levels, tend to become of lesser importance. The sheer complexity of advanced statistical techniques has a tendency to eclipse other issues. Thus researchers whose fields of study invite quantitative designs tend to be involved in debates with other researchers in their own particular methodological field, and discussions often concentrate on which techniques are the preferred ones to measure particular relationships between variables relating to a specific phenomenon. They more often than not discuss questions of method as technique rather than methodological issues of a broader kind, hence it is very rare that researchers from the quantitative field initiate or are engaged in debates with those in the qualitative traditions.

Thus actual methodological debates between qualitative biographical researchers and those in the purely quantitative camp of life course studies rarely happen. This is understandable but nevertheless regrettable as it would have a potential for being beneficial for both. One major obstacle for full integration of methods is that survey designs have many cases and few variables, whilst case-based designs have few cases but many ‘variables’ per case (Gomm et al. 2000). There is however an overall tendency for methodological debates to take place within methodological fields rather than between them. The quantitative and qualitative ‘camps’ tend to develop vocabularies that are internal and exclusive to those who use the respective methods. This does seem to be the case in biographical life course studies as well as in sociology in general. I will return to this issue in the final Chapter to explore more recent avenues followed in order to overcome the quant-qual divide.

Debates About the ‘Cultural Turn’ in Biographical Research

This section discusses the meeting between the different approaches to biographical research based in the social sciences and the humanities. The heated methods discussions from the 1980s onwards, that were in reality discussions about themes in the philosophy of science, are presented in their contemporary contexts with ‘the cultural/narrative turn’ and the controversies over realism vs. constructionism as important ingredients.

In Europe hermeneutical approaches,¹⁰ became prominent in discussions about important differences between the humanities and the natural sciences methods wise. Drawing on Dilthey’s notions of understanding meaning in context and Heidegger’s development of his ideas in Being and Time, Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer published Truth and Method in 1960 (Gadamer 1989), which became a standard reference within hermeneutical approaches. Husserl’s variety of phenomenology was important in Heideggerian hermeneutics but came into the social sciences in other ways too, notably through Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology which was developed in the intersection between Parsonian thought and Schütz’s expanding of Husserl’s work (Heritage 1984).¹¹ Hermeneutics started out as a method to examine texts. As this perspective became part and parcel of social science methods debates, aspects of language and narrative structure in biographical accounts were highlighted. Another important influence for this shift came from linguistics. As the structural linguistics of Lévi-Strauss was criticised by Foucault and Derrida, the foundation was laid for post-structuralism in language theory and in time also in social theory. These works had their origin in the humanities but as poststructuralism and post-modernism gained more ground in the social sciences in the 1980s the hermeneutical traditions also become influential in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology.

In a critique of the ‘cultural turn’, Bonnell and Hunt (1999) maintained that both structuralism and post-structuralism had contributed to the foregrounding of the cultural as linguistic and representational, at the expense of the social.¹² ‘Social categories were to be imagined not as preceding consciousness or culture or language, but as depending upon them. Social categories only came into being through their expressions or representations.’ (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999, p. 9). The semiotics of Roland Barthes, Foucault’s critique of power and Lyotard’s critique of ‘grand narratives’ were all influential for the direction social science research took throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Methodological questions were replaced by epistemological debates about whether there was a reality beyond language (Nilsen 1994, 2008).

When influence from the humanities became more pronounced throughout the 1980s, a shift of focus also occurred in biographical research. From having been concerned with analyses of life stories and biographical accounts as empirical evidence of lived life, gradually more attention was given to the narrative itself, to the told life and to the different phases of interpretation of a biography. Kohli (1981) presented an early argument for the advantages of literary and linguistic theory for biographical studies. He maintained that the structure of autobiographical narratives could be analysed by the use of linguistic theory. He observed that a narrative had two functions: the referential and the evaluative. The former, and most often used as a definition of ‘narrative’, had to do with the structure and temporal ordering of the events in the story. However, without the evaluative element which occurred in the present where the story was told, it would not be possible to clarify the meaning past events narrated had for the narrator. The past is in other words interpreted in the present. Some decades later Riessman (2008) observed that ‘the narrative turn’ was no longer a topic of literature studies alone but had seeped into all disciplines in the humanities and most of the social sciences.

Questions about the role of the researcher in the production of the biographical account, whether this had originated as a written autobiography or was the outcome of an interview between an interviewee and a researcher, became important. Demands that the researcher be self-reflective in the writing up of biographical research material were frequently heard, and in many instances the biographical experiences of the researcher and his or her reactions to the story told by the informants, became topics of interest (Stanley 1992). This shift also marked a change in epistemological focus towards a constructionist standpoint which implies a line of questioning that is premised on knowledge about reality as reality (Lewis and Smith 1980). A belief that reality is a human construction alone can lead to extreme relativism in the approach to research material. A blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, between truth and non-truth, between the factual and the non-factual, is not compatible with the pragmatist ideals of knowledge that guided biographical research in its origin.

Norman Denzin was one of the most prominent advocates of a shift in biographical research towards narrative approaches and a focus on language. A former student of Blumer’s, he changed the term used for his perspective from symbolic interactionism to interpretive interactionism (Denzin 1989a, b). The term

‘interpretive interactionism’ […] signifies an attempt to join traditional symbolic interactionist thought with participant observation and ethnographic research, semiotics and fieldwork, postmodern ethnographic research, naturalistic studies, creative interviewing, the case study method, the interpretive, hermeneutic, phenomenological works of Heidegger and Gadamer, the cultural studies approach of Hall, and recent feminist critiques of positivism. (Denzin 1989a, pp. 7–8)

This quote demonstrates that biographical research epistemologically founded in contextualist pragmatist thought was no longer seen as the underpinning of such studies. A blending of many different—and in many instances incompatible—research approaches opened up a wider field for biographical research and invited collaboration across disciplinary boundaries in ways that had earlier not been common. This was especially true in feminist biographical research (Stanley 1992). Denzin’s changed approach is symptomatic of the debates that occurred in biographical research during this period. From discussions about whether individuals’ accounts could be regarded as reliable in the sense of people telling the truth about their lives, the interest was gradually shifted towards debates on ontological and epistemological issues and about if there was such a thing as Truth (Nilsen 2008). In many instances the underlying epistemological notions were not taken up explicitly but informed research designs and choices of methods for data collection and analysis in empirical studies. The history-biography dynamic was as such not the centre of attention. The analysis shifted gradually towards more linguistic, individualistic and psychological dimensions.

As discussed in earlier chapters, the origins of biographical research rested on Mead’s notion of the self as developing in social relationships that changed over time. From the 1980s onwards the concept of identity came to overshadow the ‘self’. Identity was a fairly novel concept in the social sciences (Gleason 1983) and had been discussed in relation to development and particularly with reference to the life course phase of youth (Erikson 1980 [1959]). The epistemological shift towards constructionist approaches introduced terms such as ‘fragmented identities’ and ‘identities as matters of choice’ (Giddens 1991; Plummer 2001). Such notions were criticised from life course perspectives as being more spatial than temporal since identities in this sense bear no relation to development in time but could be regarded as constructed in discourse (Brannen and Nilsen 2005; McNay 2000). Where Erikson saw identity as part of a wider notion of self, in cultural studies identity in many instances replaced the notion of self as ‘selves’ were thought of in terms of being constructed in discursive fields rather than developed in social relationships (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 22).

As the 1990s progressed biographical research came to include a wide array of approaches and perspectives. The blurring of boundaries between disciplines within the social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities were called for and cross-disciplinary studies were encouraged. The suggestions for what to include in biographical and other methods of performing research became many and varied.¹³ The influence from hermeneutics and methodological approaches originating in humanistic disciplines, together with the epistemological shift towards constructionist/interpretive perspectives, led some to subsume biographical material under the wide term interpretive approaches (Plummer 2001); the story as a told story was put at the forefront of attention. Biographical accounts are stories told, but for those who believed there was reality and some factual experiences and context behind the account, the focus on the narrative element only, became too simplistic,

Every life story contains a large proportion of factual data which can be verified (e.g. dates and places of biographical events). Life stories can be used - and in effect, have been used – as a documentary source to know about realities ‘out there’. (Bertaux 1996)¹⁴

In these debates the advantages of exploring the way people talk about their lives was considered important for many reasons. It was maintained that the understanding of narrative structure was essential for the overall understanding of a biographical account, not only in terms of language used, but also with reference to the social positioning of individuals in society (Riessman 1991; Nilsen 1996). It can also give insight into and draw attention to the silences in biographical accounts, and thus make visible the taken-for-granted aspects of people’s lives that are more often than not structurally founded and thus important for understanding the interviewee in the context that the life unfolds within (Nilsen and Brannen 2002; Brannen and Nilsen 2005).

A side in the debates maintained that the ontological and epistemological foundations of the ‘cultural turn’ may make it difficult to envisage a social science that can produce convincing evidence of, for instance, social disparities between groups of people (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, Brannen and Nilsen 2005). A line in the debates stated that if the notion of culture replaces that of social structure, and individual narratives about lives become the most important objects of analysis rather than lived experiences as expressions of social and collective being in wider contexts, social science research that highlights power and inequalities between people may be challenged (Nilsen 2008).

The overarching topic of this book is the biography-history dynamic introduced by C. Wright Mills. In the classic variety of biographical studies points of reference for analysis of biographical material were historical circumstances, thus the contextualist approach. Themes that address questions in relation to the history side of this dynamic, are topics in the final section of this chapter.

From History as Periods to History as Epochs

The period during which the methods debates originated and were at their fiercest, coincided with the historical period after the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. The historical changes that took place around this time were discussed in Chap. 4. In the final section of this chapter the historical side of the history-biography dynamic will be examined in relation to the wider methodological debates. In this period there was a shift in focus at the historical level from history as periods to history as epochs; modernity and postmodernity replaced the standard life course vocabulary in the social sciences with those more common in cultural studies approaches. Other notions associated with such perspectives include de-standardised life courses, choice biographies and increased individualisation. The writings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, who were the main figures in the debates about these issues, gained prominence in general sociology as well as in biographical research.

One definition of individualisation referred to ‘...first, the disembedding and, second the re-embedding of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in which the individual must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves ‘(Beck 1994, p. 13). A further clarification of the term is given by Beck, when he said that,

...individualisation is not based on the free decision of individuals. To use Sartre’s term, people are condemned to individualisation. Individualisation is a compulsion, but a compulsion for the manufacture, self-design and self-staging of not just one’s own biography but also its commitments and networks as preferences and life phases change, but, of course, under the overall conditions and models of the welfare state, such as the educational system (aquiring certificates), the labour market, labour and social law, the housing market and so on. (Beck 1994, p. 15)

The sequences in life course development that hitherto were thought of as standard, could no longer be taken for granted. A reason for this was institutional changes in welfare states as well as in work and education that made people’s lives less and less predictable. Individual choices and decisions came to be central themes in their own right in discussions about individualisation. Beck suggested that the process of choices and decisions which constituted individualisation was lifelong and that there was more room for flexibility over the life course in contemporary society than ever before (Beck 1992, pp. 127–137). Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, p. 5) maintained that a ‘standard biography’ was being replaced by a ‘choice biography’, and that life course phases no longer followed the same pattern they used to since structural characteristics such as age, gender and social class were not as significant for shaping individuals’ lives.

Around this time the epochal terms that took over as historical periodisation markers included words such as modernity, postmodernity, late modernity, post-industrial societies, information society, and so forth. These were widely used in non-specific ways and they became part of a distinctive and wide sweeping vocabulary within a variety of disciplines, sociology included, for describing broader social change and trends. There are however problems of demarcation in relation to both time and place with these terms. Historian Perry Anderson (1998) pointed out in an examination of the term postmodernity that its origins lay in aesthetic categories of poetry in Latin America in the 1930s. He observed that in the currently influential writings of Lyotard and Habermas, postmodernity remains vague on these aspects; no precise periodization can be found in either author’s writings (Anderson 1998, p. 45).

As stated elsewhere, the ‘new’ vocabulary for describing the history-biography dynamic that was suggested in the 1990s may be related to characteristics of the historical period itself. Individualisation and an emphasis on the agency side of the agency-structure divide, or the biographical side of the biography-history dynamic, became prominent from the late 1980s as wide sweeping historical changes at the end of the Cold War happened.¹⁵ Although social inequalities increased steadily in most countries from the late 1970s onwards and structural changes impacted on people’s lives for better, but mostly for worse, popular social theory concepts that were launched in the early 1990s lacked the specificity necessary for addressing such issues in sociology in general, and in biographical life course studies in particular. Non-specific and general notions of historical periods in terms of epochs, seemed to serve to obscure important features of specific contexts. Biographical research with this type of theoretical backcloth may have left analyses at a level of abstractions where discourse and narratives were more meaningful starting points than the intersection of history and biography.

The paradox is that both the positivist and interpretive sides of the divide question the validity of biographical research founded on a realist pragmatic starting point. From an extreme interpretive side of the divide debates about representativeness are easily rejected as irrelevant since they are considered positivist. Extreme positivism on the other hand would question biographical material because it does not qualify as objective data. This chapter has thus argued that a third position needs focusing on. In order to map out this third position the case has been made for a closer look into the premises that underpin the methodological and methods debates within biographical research. The parameters for the discussion have been the starting point in debates about ‘method as technique’ that highlighted the initial quantitative-qualitative divide, to a methodological focus where epistemological questions and discussions across the boundaries of a realist-constructionist divide became prominent.

Summary

This chapter has discussed methodological and other controversies in biographical life course research. Two strands of methodological debates over life course and biographical approaches have run parallel; the quantitative-qualitative divide that foregrounded methodological issues, and the other originating in the ‘cultural/narrative turn’ in the social sciences, that put epistemological questions centre stage (Nilsen 2008). The chapter has shown how these debates each in their ways have impacted on sociological research generally and biographical research in particular.

The quantitative-qualitative dispute has early origins. The discussions as they relate to life course and biographical research were prominent in Blumer’s (1939) volume about the Appraisal of The Polish Peasant. Questions about the trustworthiness of ‘human documents’ were hotly debated there. This methodological divide has persisted over the years partly due to technological advances that has made statistical techniques more sophisticated and of interest in their own right.

The chapter has shown how epistemological debates that took over from methods discussions have created dividing lines within qualitative approaches. The methods discussions from the 1980s onwards, that were in reality discussions about themes in the philosophy of science, have been presented in their contemporary contexts. Another line of debate was to do with naming of levels of temporalities, specifically with reference to historical time. The writings of Beck and Giddens with their emphasis on ‘the individualisation thesis’ and a de-standardisation of life courses in discussions of history in epochal terms such as ‘late modernity’, has been shown to be influential in general sociology as well as in biographical research. A discussion of this trend and the impact it has had over decades concluded this chapter.

In Chap. 7 these debates will be revisited but this time the topic is to show attempts that have been made to overcome dividing lines in sociological thinking in general, and biographical research in particular. As will be demonstrated, hotly debated issues are nothing new in academia as a whole, and suggestions for bridging the gaps that have been identified are as old as the debates themselves.