A moment of biographical analysis under the microscope: reading Felipe’s autobiographical narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn recent years, biographical research on the basis of narratives has attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences. The specific processes of interpreting autobiographical narratives, however, often remain non-transparent. Many authors merely allude to methodologies on which their research is based without communicating how they go about interpreting their data. The following article takes this problem as a starting point. The author presents a sequence of an autobiographical narrative interview, which she conducted during her ongoing study on the biographies of Spanish migrants who had moved to Germany and the UK in the context of the economic crisis. Readers are invited to develop their own interpretations of this excerpt before turning to and critically scrutinising the author’s structural description of the sequence (during which she also discusses the significance of a phenomenon of textual disorder, a ‘background construction’, for learning something about painful experiences of the narrator). She then gives an overview on the theoretical and methodological background of her analysis, the work of German sociologist Fritz Schütze, before finally reflecting on specific features of her own structural description and on the uses of single case studies for arriving at more general insights.