How telling one person’s story can represent the voices of many
By Marta Eichsteller, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin
Marta Eichsteller
Dr. Eichsteller and Dr. Howard Davis co-authored Biographical Research Methods. Find their previous Methodspace post Doing Biographical Research in Challenging Times. Use the code MSPACEQ422 for a 20% discount valid until December 31, 2022.
Qualitative researchers often struggle with the issue of generalisation. The challenge of using qualitative data as evidence that stands up to scientific scrutiny but still communicates their findings clearly and coherently to academic and non-academic audiences can be tricky. For example, where quantitative research uses numbers to illustrate the strength of relationships between factors and statistical probabilities to show their distribution across the population, qualitative research often needs to present lengthy quotes to outline complex patterns that work throughout the selected case in elaborate contrasts, comparisons or typologies. This disparity between qualitative and quantitative ways of presenting findings and making arguments is often a source of tension, especially in the research community's evaluation and peer review process. Word limits on publications and a lack of methodological openness exacerbate the problem further.
In my practice as a biographical researcher in the mixed-methods world, I often face the dilemma of communicating my qualitative findings. I am working with structured and unstructured life stories, encompassing all essential aspects of life - relationships, community, poverty, health, education, work and many others. The fundamental task of my work is to present the complexities of personal experiences as an illustration for the voices of many. Depending on the exact research question and research design I am working with, life stories can be used to present complex social issues in three different ways.
Firstly, you can present biographical events as an interplay between individual agency and social structure.
Personal plans and ambitions that clash with social constraints are one of the most common types of those stories. They often touch upon conflict and oppression between individual freedom and societal norms and are used in studies on race, ethnicity, class and gender injustice. When we present the analysis of the biographical narrative of one individual struggling against the system, the aim is to identify the intersecting complexities that trap the individual within this specific social position and how they operate.
Secondly, you can present the biographical case as an interplay between historical and biographical timelines.
Biographical researchers often look at how historical events leave an imprint on the biographies of people who have lived through them – in terms of their individual and collective memories of events, but also as biographical turning points that might be responsible for changes of direction in life. Presenting a biographical case as evidence for your research in this historical timeline argument will add to the diversity of perspectives on the historical event and how that event affected an individual’s biography, who at the time was at point A and found themselves at point B afterwards.
Finally, you can present individual biographical cases as biographical trajectories of individual and social change that focus on the growth and decline of essential aspects of life.
For instance issues such as economic well-being, including poverty, health and illness, issues of social status and political power, as well as entrepreneurial careers. Presenting an individual life story can illustrate how people's biographies adjust to broader social trends, lifting some up whilst crushing others. They are also helpful in showing patterns of resilience and continuous transformation.
As qualitative researchers, we are responsible for understanding and constantly improving how we communicate empirical findings and use them to make broader claims about the nature of the world around us. To do so, qualitative researchers need to have a good grasp of the nature of their data, their assumptions about the world and the skillset that creates analytical frameworks underpinned with solid theoretical foundations. Supported by the researcher's professional skill and confidence, biographical data, like many other qualitative data, can illuminate the depth of the social processes, the complexity of the social issues and multiple temporalities of events the way quantitative data cannot.
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