The biographical method in adult education research

Abstract

Adult learning cannot be separated from the life and the life history of the adult person. As such, adult learning is intimately tied to an overall, lifelong process of adult transformation. Research on adult transformation should therefore seek a better understanding of how, why and for what adults transform themselves during their lives. A deeper understanding of adults’ transformative processes, though badly needed, is methodologically difficult to achieve. That is why I will outline, in a first section, the main characteristics of a human science research approach I have developed, called the “Biographical Method”. In a second section I will present some preliminary findings from research using this method.