Reconstruction of life stories: principles of selection in generating stories for narrative biographical interviews

In: The narrative study of lives, Band 1, Heft 1, S. 59-91

Abstract

"What can be done with life stories?" This question was posed by Daniel Bertaux (1981) in the introduction to his "Biography and Society". At that time, research interest in life stories was largely concerned with using them as sources of information about a reality existing outside the text. Meanwhile, however, especially in West Germany, this question has taken on another meaning: the life story itself, seen as a socical construct in its own right, has increasingly become the focus of socialsientific research. Empirically founded concepts and programmatic outlines of biographical theory have been put up for discussion by sociologists like Martin Kohli, Fritz Schütze, and Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal to name a few. Methodology and methods of reconstructing life histories out of oral biographical presentations have been developed continously; the method of obtaining narrative interviews as presented by Fritz Schütze (1977; 1983) is meanwhile established in sociological methods. A conclusive argument was presented to find a way out of the deadend street of the subject-society dualism by means of the concept "biography". "Researching the biographical as social entity" implies both, the question of the social function of biographies as well as the question of the social processes that constitute biographies (Fischer-Rosenthal 1991:253).