Using biographical methods in social research

This book may be for you if, like me, you have ever found yourself profoundly alienated from positivist notions of research, whilst at the same time being fascinated by the complex and vibrant stories you hear, and also the stories these encounters bring forth in you. Barbara Merrill and Linden West are concerned with the question of how biographical interviewing can be best used as a source of knowledge generation in social research. This text positions the biographical genre as offering particular insight into the production of selfhood seen as a dynamic interplay between social structure and individual lives. Creating meaningful and critical biographies of ourselves and others for the purposes of social research makes particular demands of the researcher in terms of skills, theoretical resources and capacity for reflexivity, and Merrill and West set out to plot this complex terrain in this book. Merrill and West take as a starting point the notion that as researchers we cannot ‘write stories of others without reflecting our own histories’ (p. 5). I come to this book as someone who struggles with my own researcher identity. The available discourses of research, with their perceived emphasis on objectivity and rationality, often seem to me to negate the values I bring to my work as an adult educator and counsellor. It is exciting and liberating to be offered guidelines as to how practitioners in human development disciplines, who often listen to others’ stories for a living, can come to see such storytelling and gathering as research. The first three chapters situate biographical research methods within a history and a context. Historically these methods have developed out of the narrative turn in the social sciences that seeks to honour and include subjectivities as a legitimate and necessary aspect of the research process. Doing so entails creating and using research methods that tap into, record and theorise complex processes of both subjectification and agency. The authors offer insight into the significance of the book in their own biographies while also situating biographical methods in the context of oral history, feminist research methods and the Chicago school among others, including the disciplines of psychology, sociology and adult education. Merrill and West further situate themselves in the book by drawing on their own autobiographically located theoretical repertoires to illustrate the key role that theory has in allowing biographical research to be made meaningful. There is a full and clear presentation of key theoretical perspectives such as symbolic interactionism, object relations theory, feminism and critical theory. In each chapter case examples are given, such as the longitudinal study West did of the Sure Start programme and studies of adults returning to learning that Merrill conducted. In addition there is one full chapter devoted to presenting extracts from a variety of research projects. These examples are used to illustrate and illuminate the complexity of researching lives over time, together with the murky but fertile component of the researchers’ own reflexivity and the role it plays in presenting and interpreting this research. Interdisciplinarity as a value in biographical research methodology is represented strongly here and other examples from a wide range of 506 Book Reviews