Biographical Narratives

Biographical narratives are accounts of individual lives, told by the people who lived them or constructed by researchers, which link personal experience to wider social and historical context. In sociology they are both a form of data and an object of analysis, used to understand how people make sense of events, transitions, and structures over time. The approach has deep roots in the Chicago School, where William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's study of Polish peasants in Europe and America relied on letters and life histories. C. Wright Mills argued that the sociological imagination connects personal troubles to public issues, which biographical work illustrates well. Daniel Bertaux promoted life-story methods in European sociology, Norman Denzin examined interpretive biography, and Fritz Schutze developed the narrative interview. Paul Thompson's oral history approach recovered the experiences of ordinary and marginalized people. Arthur Frank studied illness stories, and Ken Plummer showed how stories become tellable when social conditions allow. Researchers also stress that narratives are shaped by memory, audience, and cultural scripts rather than being transparent records of events. Biographical narratives remain central to qualitative research on migration, work, health, identity, and social change.