Biography Analysis on the Empirical Base of Autobiographical Interviews: How to Analyse Autobiographical Narrative Interviews - Part two

Abstract

This is the second part of a two-part article. Before it was published in "European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion" in 2008, it was presented as an educational module in the context of the research project "Invite. New Ways of Biographical Counselling in Vocational Rehabilitative Training", conducted in the years 2003-2006 under the Leonardo da Vinci programme of the EU. (The first part of this article appeared in "European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion", 2008, issue 1-2, pp. 153-242.) In this second part, this text explicates the action scheme of autobiographical narrative interviewing, and it informs about the most general research steps of doing qualitative social research on the empirical base of narrative interviewing: text sort analysis, structural description, analytical abstraction, contrastive comparison, and developing theoretical models. All these steps of research, especially the first three for the realization of a single case analysis, are explicated and demonstrated on the empirical base of one autobiographical interview. The single case analysis of this interview especially addresses the intriguing phenomenon of biographical work.