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

Abstract

This is the first 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 second part of this article appeared in "European Studies on Inequalities and Social Social Cohesion", 2008, issue 3-4, pp. 5-77.) In this first part, this text explains why autobiographical interviewing is an open avenue to the analysis of deep suffering and its biographical meaning, as well as to the analysis of all types of biographical identity developments and its infringements. The epistemic power of extempore autobiographical narration to reveal biographical processes (such as trajectories of suffering and metamorphosis processes) is demonstrated. The general features of autobiographical narrative texts are explicated and related to the social and biographical processes they express. The article explains the general analytical stance (pragmatic refraction) of how to use these features for biographical research in a non-naïve way. As this article is based on the analysis of an autobiographical narrative interview that was translated from German into English, the transcript of the translated interview is available in the appendix.