Autobiographical Narrative Interviews Research Articles

Poplecznicy, wspólnicy i kompani. Funkcje koalicji międzyosobowych zawieranych przez recydywistów w więzieniu

The aim of the article is to present types of interpersonal coalitions that convicted men conclude and a functional analysis of the particular types of alliances in prison. The subject of the research is a biographical examinations of habitual offenders, including the relationships in which they enter into with other inmates during their imprisonment. The empirical material were the records of autobiographical narrative interviews. The adoption a perspective of cognition that goes beyond the individual biographies of individuals and enables to discover the general formulas and mechanisms shaping the sense of acting of the recidivists in prison conditions was possible thanks to the methodology of the grounded theory. The theoretical framework of the analysis was determined by the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman. Studies have shown that during imprisonment, recidivists set up three types of alliances and each of them performs a different function. The supporter plays an important role during the first prison experience. The accomplice helps to sustain and strengthen the desired social position in the group, while the companion helps to reduce the problems associated with prison isolation.

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

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.

Poszukiwanie biograficznego sensu po upadku niemieckiej republiki demokratycznej. Przypadek Helgi Kuske

Artykuł skupia się na analizie autobiograficznego wywiadu narracyjnego z Helgą Kuske. Narratorka, urodzona w powojennej dekadzie, w Niemczech Wschodnich, doświadcza biograficznie uniwersum symbolicznego Niemieckiej Republiki Demokratycznej, a także trajektorii związanej z trudnościami biograficznymi radzenia sobie w okresie transformacji systemowej. Analiza przypadku Pani Kuske oscyluje między próbą uchwycenia jej biografii w kontekście powojennej historii Niemiec Wschodnich a studium historii jej życia w odniesieniu do koncepcji uniwersum symbolicznego Bergera i Luckmanna. Tekst ma także na celu wskazanie zależności między jednostkowym doświadczeniem biograficznym a procesami kolektywnymi na przykładzie działania wschodnioniemieckich mechanizmów kontrolowania przebiegu życia mieszkańców NRD.

There is more than one way – a study of mixed analytical methods in biographical narrative research

ABSTRACTThe number of studies using biographical narrative data has increased worldwide. Given the variety of analytical approaches in narrative research, a critical investigation of the relationship between the methodological procedures and the implications for research practice is needed. This article reports on a mixed analysis study applying three analytical methods to autobiographical narrative interview data: (1) formal structural analysis, (2) narrative ethnography and (3) qualitative comparative analysis. Comparing these three models exposes key methodological challenges, such as the use of operational definitions and interpretative practice. The article discusses the role of analytical perspectives for biographical research method design and application as a part of mono-methods and mixed-methods studies.

Guest, trader or explorer: biographical perspectives on the experiences of cross-border mobility in Europe

ABSTRACTLife stories of mobile individuals provide us with unique perspectives on the condition of modern societies. This article aims to establish the link between narrative accounts of mobility and the conceptual framework of migration studies. Drawing on autobiographical narrative interviews with 91 transnational individuals, this article presents three categories of mobility narratives, emphasizing the specific narrative form and socio-cultural discourse within which they are embedded. It is argued that the perception of power relations underpinning social experiences that can be observed in three distinct narrative archetypes: the story of the guest, trader and explorer. These empirically derived categories aim to systematize the conceptual framework for studies of individual agency and social relations in cross-border mobility contexts and contribute to the debate on methodological nationalism.

Dezorganizacja życia rodzinnego w sytuacji uwięzienia rodzica. Wstępna refleksja teoretyczna i wyniki badań własnych

This article is devoted to the functioning of families that are in crisis as the result of a family member’s imprisonment. The author’s description of the most important functions and tasks of the family as the primary social group leads to further reflections. The disorganization of family life caused by placing a parent in prison is described and a case study is used to illustrate the issues. On the basis of an autobiographical narrative interview, the process of reorganizing family life is analyzed from the perspective of a ‘prisoner’s child.’

EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY AS A MEANS OF RETURN MIGRATION: YOUNG POLISH DIASPORA MEMBERS FROM THE FORMER USSR

Poland has been traditionally a sending migration country. However, in recent years it receiv€es slowly growing number of return migrants. Among returnees arriving from the post-Soviet successor states the dominant group are youngsters who enroll for studies at Polish universities. The purpose of this autobiographical narrative interviews- based study is to present, firstly, the institutional conditions of conducting studies by Polish diaspora members. Particular attention is given to the latter’s arrivals as part of Poland’s return migration policy. Secondly, the article investigates biographical stories and aims at comparing two young Poles’ return paths to the ancestral homeland. It reconstructs their mobility stages in order to specify (1) relations between migration experience and transformation of their national identification and (2) impact of migration experience on their whole biography (biographical relevance). Since they stem from families of multi-ethnic background and relocate to a seemingly known place where only part of their predecessors come from, the concept of “roots migration” is utilised for the purpose of this study.

Jovens migrantes poloneses na Alemanha de 1989 a 1999: Autoalienação e anomia interacional

This article is concerned with the Poles who left their homeland voluntarily and trouble-free in the period between the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 and some years before the eastern enlargement of the EU in May 2004. It concentrates on people who were young at the time of their arrival in Germany (i.e., not older than 30 years) and therefore constitute a group of a ‘new’ or ‘young’ generation of the Polish immigrants in Germany. An attempt is made here to describe some framing conditions that disturb the immigration process and/or enhance the development of the trajectory of suffering, i.e., to illustrate and analyse various social and biographical circumstances that make the immigration process difficult or that result in interactional anomy and enhance the trajectory dynamics. Those frame conditions emerged from very scrupulous analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews with young Poles in Germany.

Autobiographical Accounts of War Experiences. An Outline for the Analysis of Topically Focused Autobiographical Texts – Using the Example of the "Robert Rasmus" Account in Studs Terkel's Book, "The Good War"

The paper demonstrates both: firstly, a research strategy for the social science analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews, and, secondly, a research strategy for the social science use of published oral history and/or autobiographical materials. It is an attempt to demonstrate a text-oriented procedure of biography analysis in the social sciences, especially – sociology. This allows the empirically grounded generation both of general theoretical concepts for socio-biographical processes, and of conceptual provisions for the uniqueness of the features and dynamics of biographical and historical single cases, their situations, and phases. The paper deals with the analysis of autobiographical accounts of war experiences and it shows the general mechanisms of collective, social, and biographical processes, on the one hand, and the uniqueness of historical, situational, and biographical developments, on the other, coexist during wars in an especially ironical, tragic, elating, depressive, dangerous, hurting, deadly combination.

Forced migration and psychosocial health: meaning-making through autobiographical narratives in the UK

This paper explores how refugees in the UK perceive the relation between their experience of migration and their psychosocial health. Autobiographical narrative interviews were carried out with fifteen refugees residing in the UK. The findings reveal a contrast between the negative stereotypes concerning refugees’ psychosocial health and the participants’ own perceptions. Two of the three emerging narratives suggest a more balanced view of refugees’ psychosocial health, since- in contrast to the stereotypes- most participants did not perceive this through the lens of ‘vulnerability’. The third narrative revealed that a hostile social context can negatively shape refugees’ perceptions of their psychosocial health. This runs counter to the stereotype of refugees as being exclusively responsible for their ‘passiveness’ and therefore for the problems they face.

Immigrant-Background Australians' Recollections of Justice, Injustice and Agency in Stories about Starting School

This article investigates the recollections of justice, injustice and agency in the autobiographical narratives of a group of Australian immigrants who shared their experiences of starting school. The data consists of 24 autobiographical narrative interviews with participants who started school either overseas and then in Australia, or in Australia, between 1955 and 1991. By the time of starting school, they not only lived in different microsystems — home and school — but also oscillated between two macrosystems: the cultural heritage of the family and the mainstream culture of Australia. The results indicate that, for this group of people, starting school represented a significant encounter between these macrosystems. Experiences of justice, injustice and agency during the early school career had potential to shape identity construction and have a lasting impact on the life course. The stories told during the interviews were about past experience, but also about what that experience meant in the present life of the narrator. They gave voice to the experiences of the participants as children and space to the adults to make sense of their childhood experiences.

Sprachbiographien der 2. Generation deutschsprachiger Emigranten in Israel. Zur Auswirkung individueller Erfahrungen und Emotionen auf die Sprachkompetenz

Based on 62 autobiographical narrative interviews with children of German-Jewish refugees from Nazi-terror to Palestine/Israel, some representative case studies have been chosen to illustrate the interdependence of language attitudes and abilities. German was often the first, but never remained the best language of the second generation. It can be proved that the degree of the acquired competence and later maintenance, attrition or loss of the language highly depended on emotional reactions to external experiences, especially in childhood and youth, such as good or bad relations with the family, acceptance or rejection of life style and culture of the parents, mocking or scorn by class mates, stigmatisation of everything originating from Germany by the surrounding Jewish community, etc. Growing insight into the historical and political facts, as well as new cultural orientations played a role in later years — and sometimes positive experiences regarding Germany or German people today, would even further the revitalisation and improvement of the half forgotten language. The analyses show very different psychological reactions to similar situations, and they reveal/confirm that self perception and identity concepts of the individuals have the main impact on their linguistic behaviour.

전북농촌 여성노인 A의 생애구술에서 드러난 삶의 원동력

본 연구는 전북농촌에서 평생 살아온 여성노인 A의 삶의 주제를 찾아본 생애구술사 연구이다. 약 40여회의 면담에서 드러난 A 삶의 주제는 본인의 자율학습과 자식교육을 향한 끊임없는 노력인데 구체적인 연구결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, A는 어려서 야학당에 다니며 공부를 했다. 둘째, 일곱 자녀의 교육비 마련을 위해 농사를 짓고, 가마니 짜기, 삼베 짜기, 누에치기 등을 하고, 농산물과 해산물을 팔고, 쌀계의 계주역할을 수행하기도 하였다. 셋째, 아들교육이 우선되어 딸들 교육은 어려웠으나 누에가 크면 팔아서 갚는다고 "외상입학"을 시키기도 하면서 어렵게 이어갔다. 동시대 많은 여성노인이 교육기회박탈에 아쉬워하기만 할 때 본인과 자녀의 교육 환경 개선을 위해 노력한 A의 삶은 매우 주목할 만하다. 사회변화의 힘이 개인의 능동적인 노력에서 기인한다는 점을 생각해 볼 때 비슷한 삶의 주제를 가진 이들의 구술생애 연구가 활성화되어 능동적이며 주체적인 농촌 여성노인에 대한 체계적인 이론화가 필요하다고 하겠다. This autobiographical narrative interview study aims at exploring how A, one Korean 82-year-old female farmer strived vigorously to learn by herself and to teach her children (4 boys and 3 girls) despite the fact that she was not afford to pay tuitions on time. From 40 times of interview-data three major findings emerged: (1) A learned how to read Korean Japanese and Chinese characters and how to calculate at a free-of-charge teaching center although her father didn't approve of her learning; (2) A tried very hard to earn money inside and outside home to support her children's education, organizing many mutual fraternity meetings to seek mutual financial support, selling mostly farm products as well as farming almost all day and everyday; (3) Although it was so hard to educate three daughters, A was proud of the fact that she was able to put her second daughter to a high school with a promise to pay her tuition later. Some implications of the findings are added.

Erkenntnismöglichkeiten und Fragestellungen einer rekonstruktiven und prozessanalytischen Beratungsforschung

The author discusses some phenomena which can become the object of investigation in a counselling research which is reconstructive and tries to discover social processes. These phenomena become visible in some excerpts from qualitative data: a narrative interview with a social worker on his work with a client, an autobiographical narrative interview with a client of a counselling centre, and transcriptions of an initial contact with clients and the subsequent professional case discussion. He attempts to show which insights can be achieved in applying procedures of narrative and interaction analyses and in triangulating different types of data - insights which are relevant for research on counselling. When (future and currently practicing) professionals become familiar with such procedures they can acquire a self-critical and self-reflexive stance on their own practice.

An introduction to "doing biographical research"

The purpose of this paper is twofold: It recon structs the development of a joint endeavor of a group of social scientists trying to make their specific approaches of doing biographical research visible by focusing on one par ticular autobiographical narrative interview: the interview with a female labor migrant from Turkey living in a Ger man city. The data were collected in a student research pro ject of the late Christa HOFFMANN-RIEM. The product of this endeavor is this issue of Forum: Qualitative Social Re search?a preliminary product since readers are invited to take part in the analysis of this interview, the transcription of which is made available to them (in the original German version and an English translation as well) and to offer their interpretations and critical comments in the future. In addi tion to this the reconstruction of this endeavor is placed in

Transformative experiences of a Turkish woman in Germany: a case-mediated approach toward an autobiographical narrative interview

Mithilfe eines fallvermittelten Ansatzes im Umgang mit einem bestimmten Text werden zentrale Charakteristika der transformativen Erfahrungen des Individuums, um das es hier geht (es handelt sich um Hulya, eine Turkin, die in einer deutschen Grosstadt lebt), herausgearbeitet. Die entscheidenden analytischen Prozeduren dieses Ansatzes bestehen aus sechs miteinander verbundenen Aktivitaten: den Aktivitaten des 1) wiederholten Aufspurens, 2) des Generierens, 3) des Ausdehnens und Verbindens, 4) des Klarens, 5) des Uberprufens und 6) des erneuten Klarens und Rekonfigurierens. In der Durchfuhrung des ersten Schritts der Textbearbeitung – des wiederholten Aufspurens – werden drei bestimmte zeitliche Einschnitte und funf Perioden identifiziert, und potentiell wichtige Ausdrucke werden registriert. Die zentralen Merkmale des ersten Stadiums – namlich des Stadiums, in dem sich Hulya vor ihrer Migration nach Deutschland befunden hat – und des zweiten Stadiums – d.h. des Stadiums, in dem sie sich wahrend des Interviews befand – werden miteinander kontrastiert. Unter Berucksichtigung solcher Dinge wie der Episoden, die Hulya durchlebte, bewusster Schritte, die sie unternahm, und der Wert- und Krankheitsfaktoren werden verschiedene Phasen der Transformation des ersten in das zweite Stadium vorgeschlagen. Einige Implikationen ihrer Reflexionen uber das, was sie zum Zeitpunkt des Interviews vor allem beschaftigte, fur die Charakterisierung des zweiten Stadiums werden ebenfalls diskutiert. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0303220

Extended Processes of Biographical Suffering and the Allusive Expression of Deceit in an Autobiographical Narrative Interview with a Female Migrant Worker in Germany

Gegenstand des Beitrages sind tiefgreifende biographische Prozesse des "Erleidens", wie sie im Zusammenhang mit der Kategorie der "Verlaufskurve des Erleidens" grundlegend von Anselm STRAUSS und Fritz SCHUTZE untersucht wurden. Den Hauptteil der Darstellung bildet eine detaillierte sequentielle Analyse und strukturelle Beschreibung der Verbalisierungsprozesse im Zusammenhang mit Verlaufskurven des Erleidens. Ziel ist es zu zeigen, dass im Zusammenhang mit Verlaufskurven des Erleidens wesentliche Wirkmechanismen innerhalb der Biographie undurchsichtig bleiben und vom Informanten gar nicht auf dem expliziten Niveau der Darstellung benannt werden konnen. Um zu diesen Verlaufskurven Zugang zu erhalten, ist eine symptomatische oder dokumentarische Interpretation notwendig, die explizit geauserte Bedeutung mit Prozessen der Versprachlichung im allgemeinen und im Kontext des Interviews sowie mit Prozessstrukturen des Lebensablaufs vergleicht. In Ubereinstimmung mit dem Arbeitsauftrag fur alle Beitrager zur Konferenzsektion und zum Band bezieht sich das Paper auf ein spezielles autobiographisch-narratives Interview und expliziert Analyseschritte und Ergebnisse im Kontext eines theoretischen Frameworks, hier der autobiographischen Erzahlanalyse und der Analyse von Prozessstrukturen des Lebensablaufs. Das Interview steht im Internet unter http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-03/Huelya-e.htm. Es wird durch Zeilenangabe zitiert. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0303240

PRESSURE AND GUILT: WAR EXPERIENCES OF A YOUNG GERMAN SOLDIER AND THEIR BIOGRAPHICAL IMPLICATIONS (PART 1)

The psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich claimed in their widely discussed article (1977) that Germans would be incapable of mourning about and repenting of the disaster of the Second World War, the millions of deaths and suffering of the victims of Nazi terror. They argued that Germans would repress or deny what had happened to avoid suffering from severe depression. The Mitscherlich thesis is criticised in this study by displaying the wide landscape of deep personal involvement (called a `trajectory') in various autobiographical differentations of living within a world of total collective moral deterioration. The research necessary to prove or disprove such a thesis works with `autobiographical narrative interviews' conceived by the author. The research style of meticulous structural descriptions is developed to utilise formal text indicators for localising such phenomena like fading out, delayed recollection, and compartmentalised phases of working-through. Typical for this method, its data arise from interviewing single cases, here that of an ideologically non-committed German. As a young German soldier in the Second World War, he too showed phases of incapacity to mourn and repent. But the informant did not remain in that state. Severe crisis experiences in his later private life led to sudden recollections of encounters with victims of Nazi terror. He started to mourn and repent. Besides empirical evidence of the feeling of personal entanglement in collective guilt also among those not engaged in intentional acts of immoral behaviour, we encounter the interesting phenomenon of delayed mourning about and repenting of the moral deterioration within the collectivity of `We, the Germans'. This finding is corroborated by data from many narrative interviews with other Germans who were non-committed to Nazi ideology but active in the German war machinery.