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This chapter explores a seven-country European project which set out to explore experiences of social change in contemporary society. The underlying thinking of the SOSTRIS research (Social Strategies in Risk Society), which was funded under the European Union Framework Four programme on Social Exclusion and Social Integration, was that, in the context of recent social structural and cultural change, social policy had become unhitched from the realities and strategies of people's lives. The research applicants also felt that greater emphasis in social policy on agency and empowerment demanded a more differentiated appreciation of subjective positionings, and a more searching understanding and recognition of informal social processes. Biographical methods were adopted as a means both of achieving a deeper and more complex understanding of social dynamics and of showing how hidden social capital might be brought into play. In seeking to explore how the dramatic scale of change in contemporary society is played out in individual experience, the research took its bearings from the broad frame of theories of modernization, and especially such concepts as individualization, risk and reflexivity. The study sought to probe the validity of some of these key concepts, but also to give them a more substantive, empirical, base. The main data derived from interviews with individuals in six social categories which spanned stages in the life course, but also built in dimensions of gender and ethnicity.

This chapter discusses the analytical shift in the Care Systems in Bremen project, a qualitative study of informal caring in two districts in Bremen, a city in Germany. The chapter also examines the shift in the analysis stage of the project, in which the hermeneutic case-study approach in analyzing personal accounts about caring and being cared for at home is modified to examine structural features of class, welfare system and family relations as emergent themes across cases. In particular, the chapter discusses the role of Giddens' structuration theory in the development of the analytical framework. The research project Care Systems in Bremen is qualitative research based on a series of interviews with frail older people and their carers about their personal experiences of caring and being cared for at home. The research adopted the biographical hermeneutic case-study approach for the analysis of interview data. In this approach, the case is an integral unit of analysis and the analytic process is driven through it by exploring the coherent and extensive reconstruction/interpretation of the case structure.

This article discusses a study which explored the role of the welfare state within changing family patterns. It is concerned in particular with mothers without financial support from men, who do not initially replace such support with their own paid employment. Instead they replace the man's share of responsibility by applying for welfare state benefits. The research involves mothers in West Berlin, Germany who unconventionally modify the gender hierarchy in the division of labor, in view of giving rise to a new mode of social reproduction, a new means of ensuring quality care for the next generation. Overall the recourse to social welfare in the lives of these women cannot be conceived as the result of a downward spiral, as passive victimhood, or as the loss of all other options. The analysis of the interviews is guided by an interpretive process, which proceeds inductively towards a reconstruction of the meaning of the biographical data, including at a latent level. This typologizing derives from a three-dimensional analysis of orientations and strategies: towards partners, professional life and children.

This chapter discusses a study which explored how the biographical interpretive method enables to identify structuring themes in people's lives. The empirical material comes from a case from the British Cultures of Care project. This focused on carers and studied two groups, one living in North London and one in East London. Some 24 interviews were conducted. Carers were asked to talk about their caring experiences, the development of their caring situation, and the support they received. Analysing carer interviews shows that the real needs of recipients of welfare services require policies that support practices which empower practitioners, by providing them with space, time and reflective skills to obtain clear insights into the real, rather than assumed, needs of their clients.

This chapter examines the use of biographical accounts in the lives of people with profound learning difficulties. There have been rapid changes over the past 20 years in the provision of care in Great Britain with the movement of people from long-term care in hospital to community-based living. The 1981 Care in the Community played a large part in bringing about this change which also resulted in an eventual shift in control from health to local authority. Between 1980 and 1986 there was a large increase in the number of people with learning difficulties who were relocated from hospital to the community. Much of the research examining the impact of these changes has focused on people who are more able and can communicate their needs. However, people with profound learning difficulties are not able to represent in any direct way their own understanding of their life and their position within the care settings in which they live. The research focused on a major change in the provision of care for a small group of adults with profound learning difficulties. None of these people could communicate verbally. Researchers adopted a strategy that provided a practical basis for being in the setting. This involved working in the setting but with an explicit brief concerned with the production of an experimental resource which it was hoped would support their transition from hospital to community-based care. Producing the biographical material for the life story books included interviewing surviving relatives and parents, nursing staff and key workers. The aim was to make available through the medium of life story books experiences of living that would not normally be part of any care plans.

This chapter discusses a study which explored the implications of family change for older people. Anxiety about the future of family life has been driven by reference to statistics which describe the ageing of the population and the rate of family change through divorce and separation. By the mid-1990s the proportion of the population over the age of 65 had reached 15.1 percent while four in every ten marriages in England and Wales were expected to end in divorce. The researchers interview people from different income groups and across a wide age range who had experience of family change. Their aim was to identify a sample of people who, while they might have experience of family reconstitution had not necessarily defined themselves in terms such as stepfamily or broken family. The approach to life-history interviewing was affected by their own backgrounds in sociology, social gerontology, psychoanalysis, geography and oral history. Eliciting life histories is a key method in researching family change. However, to be useful as research data, these biographies need to be heard and understood as the product of context and as accounts to be viewed from a number of perspectives. These include their recognition as a profoundly social act linking personal meanings to broader social change as well as their role in providing insight into the active individual management of those personal meanings in late life. In all they remain an unquestionably rich source of evidence about family life over the generations.

This chapter discusses a study which examined East German attitudes and patterns of behavior during the transition period between 1990 and 1997. When the researchers started to plan their empirical study they were confronted with the problem of choosing a methodology. Given that they were critical of the widespread notion that the East German way of life must fall into line as fast as possible with the model set by West Germans, they did not want to add another standardized opinion survey to the existing stock. Rather they decided quite consciously to keep the research perspective open through the use of qualitative methods. To examine such patterns of persistence and change they relied above all on biographical interviews, as a source of depictions of life stories, socialization, the social realm itself, images of self and other, as well as of networks in various social milieus. The foremost discussion motif was intergenerational social and life domains. A standardized questionnaire provided the basic biographical and social data of the respondents. The several hours of interview texts were transcribed and then analyzed in group sessions, in order to establish some basic features of the habitus of particular cases and follow up their development. The analyzed case studies were then compared with those of the parental generation, to highlight changing trends between generations.

This chapter examines the extreme right attitudes in the biographies of West German youth. Hostility towards foreigners, and acceptance and use of nationalistic and racist stereotypes, did not just appear in Germany with the recent pogromlike acts of violence against asylum seekers, nor with the electoral success of far-right parties in East Germany either. They were already part of a spectrum of political discourse, of a societal pattern of meanings. Examples can be found in debates over changes in fundamental legal rights to asylum, and over rights to citizenship, as well as in stereotyping of migrants in everyday talk. The interview took place in 1990 with Rolf Strunz, at that time 22 years old, in his own home. He had ended his associations with the extreme right three or four years before. He now felt reinforced by the recognition of his contemporaries. He was chosen as the spokesman for the extreme right in school, and could speak with pride and awe about the war injuries of his grandfather on his mother's side. At the same time he was ashamed of the trade union and social democratic membership of his grandfather on his father's side. The fact that Rolf did not actually join up was partly to be explained by his fear of retaliation from his father, on whom he was financially dependent. However he emphasizes that he would have joined a party if social and political popularity and acceptance of extreme right groups had been as strong then as they are today.

This chapter presents a narrative of how the author witnessed the social changes in East Germany between 1989 and 1992. Major social changes had occurred in East Germany between the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and when I collected my data in 1992; what I witnessed in the months I spent there was a revolution of memory and identity. By 1992, many East Germans had come to feel inferior to their Western neighbors. At this time, the postcards for sale on what were once East German streets had messages such as Greetings from the new states while showing cartoons of old dinosaurs eating each other. In old East German factories, workers received instruction on how to cleanse their language of its socialist residue--an attempt to bring the very mode of communication in line with Western standardization. In contrast, some East Germans find refuge in holding on to an East German identity. For them, their national identity has become a symbol of defiance hurled at the West Germans. There has been a very concerted effort among portions of the East German population to come to terms with their past; first to search out and document what actually happened, and then to try to understand it. However, this effort has been hampered by the judgmental atmosphere in which the work has been carried out.

This chapter presents stories of people living with HIV which would act as responses to an exemplary fateful moment around which identity must be shaped. Organizations and activities that have arisen around HIV in the overdeveloped world are often presented as exemplars of new political forms. Each of these accounts assumes individuals with identities strongly determined by HIV--via their sexuality, their politics or their HIV positivity--united in communities of shared ethics and action. It has however been pointed out that notions of community current around HIV need careful qualification. The uncertainties of HIV identity and community also raise more general questions about the unity of the self and the viability of community. In the field of HIV, these questions are intensified by the epidemic's breaching of physical, social and psychic barriers, its heavily allegorical character, and rapid developments in the condition and understanding of it, all of which serve as dramatic instances of the limits of comprehension and symbolization. The stories continually disprove suppositions that they exemplify a late-modern social or emotional zeitgeist, through their reiteration of highly specific HIV selves, genres and citizenships. This reiteration calls attention to the requirement for theories that are particular to HIV.

This chapter discusses the role of anxiety and the experience of locality in the biographical method in social science research. It is fashionable nowadays for sociologists to argue the importance of biography for an understanding of social identity. Implicit in such a shift of attention is an idea about the limitations of demographic factors like class, gender, race, age, to encapsulate fully the diversity of individuals' lived experience; either because the demographic factors are too reductively broad to do so; or because the social is now hopelessly fragmented; or because such a structural approach effectively denies appropriate individuality and agency to subjects. Biography is to post-structuralism what demography is to structuralism. Nonetheless, the postmodern insight that subjectivity is discursively produced, and is not some inner essence, is a reminder for all producers of biography that the biographical I is always the product of a set of mediations. The theorization of unconscious intersubjective defenses against anxiety provides researchers with certain methodological axioms for doing biography.

This chapter addresses two questions concerned with interpreting biographical interviews in the social sciences. The first question has to do with the limits of staying with the interview text. The second has to do with the way that analyzing the interview text of one case can already generate considerable--but normally neglected--resources for understanding other cases, for typologising, and for elaborating general models. Biographic narrative interviews are constructed around enabling the interviewee to provide an uninterrupted narrative of their own life. They are asked to tell their story in their own way, beginning wherever they like, for as long as they like. This initial narrative--which can last ten minutes or three hours--is their told story. Treated as text, it is the pivotal focus of analysis, supplemented by material developed by further questioning which starts only when the initial narration is brought to an end by the interviewee.

This chapter explores the principal perspectives within the hermeneutic movement in social science research with reference to the works of Dilthey, Gadamer, Habermas and Ricoeur. As a science of interpretation and philosophy of understanding, hermeneutics is implicated whenever human communication takes place. Originally developed for the purpose of interpreting ancient and classical texts, hermeneutic thinking has in more recent times become adapted to the needs of the human and social sciences. The implications of the development of hermeneutics for the human sciences have been considered by philosophers from Vico to Ricoeur and beyond. To some extent, clinical practice has to take account of models of human and social science as well as of the natural sciences that properly inform biomedical explanation. Dilthey's hermeneutic methodology intends that the self of the interpreter should become as neutral and transparent as possible, in the same way as the self of the observer in natural science. Gadamer considers that Kant's account of aesthetic judgment excessively emphasizes the primacy of the reflective self. According to Gadamer, Kant's conclusions imply the presence of a subjectivity, or judging self, that stands over against the art object.

This chapter describes biographical structuring as an alternative tool in social science research. Biographical structuring is a practice and form of temporalization that allows both the individual and society to deal with more contingency, maintain complex social structures and balance more options. Biographical structuring thus is one way to connect individual and society in modernity. Biographical structuring is a general social phenomenon preceding the micro-macro distinction in sociology. The very process of social differentiation in modernity calls for flexible reproduction and transformation of the person in relation to society. If the thesis of biographical structuring as a means of creating and transcending consistency holds, then general sociological research on all levels of society can be done as biographical research, stating how social order is achieved in contemporary societies. Biographical structuring as an orienting practice has reached the helping professions. Therapy, social work, education in many institutions, secular and clerical counseling, supervision, organizational development, all use biographical restructuring and intervention. The internal conceptions differ from one profession to another, as does the degree of explicit consciousness that one is operating with biographical concepts.

This chapter discusses conceptual and methodological issues arising from a program of comparative welfare study resting on different assumptions and research methods than those deployed by traditional comparative social policy. The program of study centered on comparative analyses of systems and practices in child protection work in various European countries, largely from the point of view of social work professionals who operate the systems and implement the practices. The problem in cross-national comparative method is to find a relation of identity or sufficient similarity between the object of study in each country so that differences can be brought into a comparative relation. In the original study of France and England, researchers decided upon the use of a case study with accompanying questionnaires as a simple means of testing variations of response to an identical situation among practitioners in different child protection systems. However, this identical situation proved more elusive than they suspected. Precisely because of differences between systems, any individual case narrative from either country involves system-specific elements from early in its history, and ceases to be neutral with respect to both countries.

This chapter describes the method of family case histories. A case history of a family is made up of narrative accounts of persons belonging to several generations of the same family. The method of family case histories was initially developed for teaching purposes. One of the properties of case histories of families is indeed to reflect general cultural and social patterns, of societal dynamics and change; and the idea is, by multiplying them, to grasp these patterns and their dynamics of reproduction and historical transformation. The method is a natural extension of the life stories approach which have used in research projects to study various social worlds or various social situations. Case histories of families bring forth materials which concern not only family life, and therefore not only family sociology, but also, for example, gender relations and how they have changed historically. One way to bring some order within the extraordinary wealth of possible topics is to refer to a simple framework. Anthropologists have shown that all kinship ties may be decomposed into a combination of three basic kinship relations: union (the relation between spouses), filiation (the relation between parents and children), and germanity (the relation between siblings).

This chapter presents an overview of how the concept of biographical analysis has been introduced into the social sciences in Germany. Positions about biographical research have been taken by referring to a German School, 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. While biographical research has become of interest to a number of sociologists, a certain impatience with the methodological aspects of biographical analysis, as well as a seemingly weak theoretical benefit from such efforts, have led to some critical judgments, mainly concerning the concepts of cognitive figures and process structures in the analysis of narratives. Biographical research is not a method in need of a theory, and that it derived not from a subjective hermeneutic approach in the tradition of idealist philosophy, but on the contrary from the rediscovery of wider theoretical and methodological sources, including those which were excluded from sociology in Germany in the 1930s. For different reasons, disregard continued up until the 1970s, mostly because of the predominance of survey research, and of nonempirical theoretical studies.

This chapter presents a historical account of the use of biographies in social science research. Individual subjects were discovered and became the principal focus of cultural attention at an earlier stage in modern history. This first happened in the culture and society of early modern Europe. From the late sixteenth century, with increasing momentum, European society became interested in individuals, in their differences from one another, in their imputed psychological depth, their moral value, their capacity for change and development. There were two major exceptions to the dominant approach in the human sciences. The first of these was a minority idealist or subjectivist tradition within sociology originating with Dilthey. This influenced the mainstream of sociology through Max Weber, leading to the compromise between idealist and empiricist methodologies embodied in his prescription that explanation should be adequate at the level of cause and adequate at the level of meaning. A second important exception to the dominant anti-subjectivist current of social science was psychoanalysis, which was unusual among the social sciences in rejecting the opposition between scientific and imaginative methods, between typification and the investigation of the particular.

This section presents an overview of the book, The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science. The late 1990s have seen an intensified search to take better account of the interweaving of human and socio-political development and to find research tools which could open the different dimensions of lived totality, and reconnect with the vitality and the reality of everyday lives. It is this concern to link macro and micro levels of analysis which explains the burgeoning interest and development in biographical methods. For biographies, which are rooted in an analysis of both social history and the wellsprings of individual personality, reach forwards and backwards in time, documenting processes and experiences of social change. And biographical methods, with their long and diverse genealogy, provide a sophisticated stock of interpretive procedures for relating the personal and the social. One feature of this book is to place developments in biographical methods within a history of social theory, and a second is to provide working examples of processes of interpretation, laying bare the methodological premises of particular protocols. A third feature of the book lies in its consideration of the push-and-pull relationship between developments in policy and the turn to biographical methods.

This section presents information on the book, The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science, which explores the origins and development of biographical approaches in social sciences. Through many illustrative examples of socio-biography in process, the authors show how formal textual analysis, whilst uncovering hidden emotional defenses in individual experiencing, can also shed light on wider historical processes of societal transformation. Topics discussed include: linking the personal and the social; generational change and social upheaval; political influences on memory and identity; biographical work in reflexive societies; individual and researcher narratives; biography and empowerment in professional practice; typologizing, theorizing and generalizing in case study research. The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science will promote debate and provide models for students and researchers to deepen their understanding and widen their practice of socio-biographical research.