Biography
Definition:
A
biographical study is the study of an individual and his/her experiences as
told to the researcher or found in documents and archival records (Creswell, 1998).
Procedures Involved In Conducting A Study:
·
It begins with an
objective set of experiences in the subject’s life, noting life course stages
and experiences. The life course stages
may be childhood, adulthood, or old age, written in a chronology, or
experiences such as education, marriage, and employment.
·
Next, the researcher
gathers concrete contextual biographical material using interviewing. Here, the researcher focuses on gathering
stories as the subject recounts a set of life experiences in the form of a
story or narrative.
·
The researcher then
organizes the stories around themes that indicate epiphanies (i.e., pivotal
events) in the subject’s life.
·
The researcher
explores the meanings of these stories.
However, the researcher relies on the individual to provide explanations
and then searches for multiple meanings.
·
In addition, the
researcher looks for larger structures to explain the meanings, and provides an
interpretation for the life experiences of the individual. The larger structures could be social
interactions in groups, cultural issues, ideologies and historical
context. If more than one individual is
studied, cross-interpretation can be done.
Challenges:
·
The information
gathering from and about the subject is usually very extensive and demanding.
·
There is the need to have a clear
understanding of the history and context to enable one to position the subject
within the larger trends in society or in the culture.
·
It takes a keen eye
to determine the particular stories, slant, or angle that “works” in writing a
biography and to uncover the “figure under the carpet” (Edel, 1994) that
explains the multilayered context of a life.
·
The researcher needs
to be able to bring himself/herself into the narrative and to acknowledge his
or her standpoint, since this is an interpretive research.
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