The Art of Life History: Novel Approaches,Future Directions

Understanding Life History

Unlike many other methodological approaches in the social sciences, life history blurs the spectral divide between the researcher and the participant. As a life history project unfolds over time, both parties attempt to produce, in an iterative and collaborative fashion, a wide-ranging, yet detailed, portrayal of an individual life from the participant’s early years to contemporaneous experiences. Life histories need not be comprehensive, as they may focus on specific moments in a person’s life that are of particular interest or are vital to contextualizing an explicit concern. In general, though, life histories are more expansive than other forms of qualitative inquiry, as the writing space typically reserved for myriad individual accounts about a given phenomenon can instead be devoted to greater detail about a single person’s experiences, understandings, and actions. A number of data collection techniques many be employed in service of this account, including interviews, observations, and reflective notes. Artifacts collected over the participant’s life may also inform the analysis of data and the construction of the life history narrative. Riessman (2008) has observed that a “diverse” array of artifacts can be utilized, including “memoir, biography, autobiography, diaries, archival documents, social service and health records, other organizational documents, scientific theories, folk ballads, photographs, and other art work” (p. 4). As Lincoln and Lanford (2018) will discuss in this issue, online artifacts are also important to assemble and analyze since so much of contemporary life progressively transpires in digital spaces.

Due to its flexibility and emphasis on depth, life history can be an attractive methodological approach for many scholars who enjoy writing and collaboration. Life history can also offer an expedient outlet for storytelling and an interrogation of narrative practice (Gabrium & Holstein, 1998). Nonetheless, a researcher considering a life history project should be cognizant of at least two primary concerns. First, a life history project can require a considerable investment of time and energy. In an academic environment where scholars are expected to juggle multiple responsibilities while satisfying amplified expectations for continued employment and tenure, a life history project that requires sustained attention over several months, if not years, may not be feasible. Second, a deft touch is required to contextualize the actions of a single individual while either developing or refining conceptual frameworks for greater understanding. An individual who is the subject of a life history should not have their experiences truncated and summarized, with specific characteristics highlighted for their potential generalizability (Behar, 1993; Bourgois, 1995; Lincoln, 1997). Rather, a life history honors the multiplex perspectives, behaviors, and insights that constitute a person’s identity. It also rejects the notion that an individual passively reacts to outside political and social forces; instead, it surmises that individuals have the agency to comprehend and impact their environments. Through such an approach, life history can make a substantive contribution to our understanding of complex concepts, like culture and globalization (Tierney, 2010), that continue to perplex researchers who attempt to control quantifiable variables in service of post-positivistic inquiry. It can also offer increased clarity about a variety of contemporary institutions and organizations that both support and inhibit human endeavor (Goodson, 2001).

The finished product of a life history is a contextually bound depiction of participants’ memories, auxiliary artifacts, and the participants’ relationship with the researcher. As argued by Richardson (1990), however, “the rhetorical, ethical, and methodological issues implicit in [how scholars write research] are neither few nor trivial” (p. 116). The researcher should carefully consider power dynamics, particularly during the interview process, and issues of representation in a reflexive manner (Pillow, 2003; Scheurich, 1995). As Reyes McGovern (2018) helpfully deliberates in her article for this issue, it is natural for a researcher to be concerned about capturing the voice of the participant in an authentic manner, augmenting or deleting printed material, and assuaging the reactions of family members and loved ones to the life history’s publication. According to Atkinson (2012), a relationship between participant and researcher forged by a life history project should be “mutually equitable.” To ensure that a life history is “equitable,” the researcher should clearly explain the parameters of the project to the participant, prioritize the participant’s welfare at all times, safeguard the participant’s identity and privacy, and present data as faithfully and as accurately as possible.

An explicit theoretical framework is not necessary to compose an effective life history (Watson & Watson-Franke, 1985). Nevertheless, life history is similar to autoethnography in that it seeks to collect and analyze personal experience so that a cultural and/or social experience can be better understood (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Hence, researchers have developed and articulated novel theoretical frameworks from life history research (Tierney & Clemens, 2011). They have also utilized existing theories to shape methodological decisions, examine how individuals navigate and understand phenomena, and judiciously draw transferable conclusions from findings (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

The topics accentuated by a life history frequently highlight issues that might otherwise fall through the cracks of scholarly discourse. For example, many disciplines have recognized the importance of life histories for feminist scholarship that challenges dominant, male-centered narratives. As demonstrated by Bloom and Munro (1995), such narratives “demonstrate how women negotiate their ‘exceptional’ gender status in their daily lives, and they make possible the examination of the links between the evolution of subjectivity and the development of female identity” (p. 100). Other authors have found life history to be a useful approach for investigating and portraying emotionally charged situations, such as women suffering from domestic violence (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005) and the return of incarcerated women to their communities (Richie, 2001). Whether a researcher examines a phenomenon by focusing on gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or a similar lens, life history offers an opportunity to humanize the individual while challenging inimical preconceptions about a larger group.

Reviewing the Current Issue

A life history approach could be employed to research boundless multidisciplinary topics that fall under the umbrella of several disciplines. This issue, however, was occasioned by papers presented during a colloquium on life history research at the 2017 American Educational Research Association annual conference in San Antonio. Therefore, diverse conceptual and empirical papers from the field of education serve as an archetype. The articles in this issue are motivated by three objectives: (a) to consider new theoretical, political, and social developments that can inform the future of life history research; (b) to explore various avenues for conducting life history research; and (c) to present examples of life history research in different educational contexts that demonstrate both the flexibility and the utility of the method.

A theoretical paper titled “Life History’s Second Life” by Yvonna Lincoln and Michael Lanford stimulates this issue’s themes and subsequent empirical articles. Citing political shifts that have witnessed the emergence of neoliberal philosophies throughout much of the Western world, Lincoln and Lanford first consider how life history might illuminate the plight of individuals affected by global economic shifts, furtive international alliances, and the breakdown of the social compact between employer and employee. The authors argue that a deeper understanding of these impacted lives, especially due to technological advances and increased immigration between nations, requires an extension of life history strategies and a recommitment to the documentation of their lives and struggles. The authors also discuss what the resulting ontological and epistemological concerns, methodological approaches, and data might look like for such a research agenda. Drawing on the work of Kenneth Gergen (1991), Lincoln and Lanford contend that identity, for many individuals, may no longer fit a “fixed” and “essentialized” framework. Instead, narratives may need to be suitably fractured, heterogeneous, and perhaps uneven to adequately represent the “saturated self” Gergen diagnoses as a central dilemma of contemporary life.

After Lincoln and Lanford’s theoretically situated consideration of life history’s “second life,” four papers follow that epitomize distinctly-individual approaches to conducting an empirically based life history. First, William G. Tierney, Nidhi Sabharwal, and C. M. Malish draw on the life histories of four lower-caste, male Indian adolescents to examine the societal factors that hinder success both during and after university studies. The remarkable aspect of their paper is not in its detailing of overt discrimination, as one might expect; rather, the paper is a careful, yet convincing, account of how the caste system limits ingress to the networks that ultimately determine success in India. In service of their compelling qualitative data, the authors use a social capital framework to illustrate the limitations of governmental and institutional policy to have a positive effect on marginalized individuals from lower castes—especially when cultural and social limitations have not been comprehensively addressed.

The second empirical paper by Elexia Reyes McGovern uses the art of “storytelling” to craft a vivid portrait of Ms. Luna Martinez, a Mexican American teacher who worked in the Pasadena, California Public School District for more than 30 years. McGovern’s article embodies the spirit of life history in its effortless depiction of the city and school district’s historical evolution through the U.S. civil rights era, the struggles faced by the Mexican American community in Pasadena and the larger Los Angeles metropolitan area, and the multiple roles Ms. Luna Martinez takes on as a Spanish Language and English Language instructor, surrogate mother, and community activist. Reyes McGovern additionally demonstrates the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy by detailing impactful moments in the classroom when Ms. Luna Martinez uses a “funds of knowledge” approach to both validate her students’ experiences and draw useful ties between their backgrounds and emerging classroom concepts (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). By similarly drawing connections between qualitative approaches and Chicana practices that value storytelling and collective memory, Reyes McGovern invites the reader to a deeper understanding of the Mexican American community in Southern California while celebrating the life of an outwardly reserved, yet remarkable individual.

Continuing the theme of female leaders in education, Valerie Janesick profiles two superintendents who received educational leadership and administration doctorate degrees in the U.S. state of Florida. Along with a series of interviews, Janesick encourages her participants to embrace an arts-based methodology that employs letters, reflective journals, and poetry in the service of qualitative data production. Through such an inclusive and varied process, the raw emotion that underlies deteriorating labor conditions in the Florida public school system is conveyed in a profound manner. At the same time, the optimism, imagination, desire for community, and belief in the value of education that grounds both superintendents and causes them to persist in their demanding jobs are brilliantly underscored.

The fourth empirical article is Michael Lanford’s exploration of “outsiderness” through the life histories and educational experiences of two nontraditional students—Demetrius and Christine—enrolled in a Florida state college. Through multiple interviews and observations conducted over a full year, it is revealed that Demetrius was compelled to drop out of high school in 10th grade due to his father’s tragic death. After a protracted period of homelessness, he attempted to return to college, only to find the environment alienating and the hurdles associated with financial aid daunting. Christine, in turn, dropped out of school in sixth grade due to family pressures. At the age of 21 years, Christine not only works multiple jobs while attending college classes, but she homeschools her younger siblings for several hours each week. Both students are wary of their own college readiness, primarily due to their “non-traditional” educational trajectories and a lack of clarity about instructors’ expectations. Lanford’s paper explores both the positive and negative feelings associated with “outsiderness” that are experienced by Demetrius and Christine as they progress through coursework. He then considers the ramifications such experiences might have for the retention of similarly promising nontraditional students who are returning to college.

This issue comes full circle with Marc Spooner’s intriguing theoretical interrogation of this question: “What happens when ‘place’ becomes the central character—the complex, entangled protagonist—of a life history focus?” As Spooner demonstrates, life history is replete with examples of human-centered inquiry. Following the work of St. Pierre (2017) and Koro-Ljungberg and Hendricks (2017), however, Spooner argues for a consideration of the nonhuman—or, as he memorably phrases it, the “other Other”—as a way to understand human activities and social arrangements. The concept of a life history of “place” already has a foundation in narrative inquiry, where literature on bioregionalism, critical geography, and place-based education flourishes (Greenwood, 2010). Spooner, though, finds inspiration from Phil Jenkins (1996) and his history of a single acre of land near Ottawa, Canada, to extrapolate a theoretical vision of life histories that focus on place, rather than the individual. Through his discussion of Jenkins’s work, Spooner encourages us to consider other innovative ways in which we might resituate life histories to examine post-humanist spaces, expand the purview of our research, and share narratives that harmonize with our new understandings of technology and time.

Conclusion

This issue is premised on the belief that a thorough understanding of the 21st century social and cultural milieu necessitates scholarly inquiry that prioritizes depth, nuance, and context. Each of these attributes, we believe, is exemplified by the life history method. In gathering these articles together, we hope to spark greater interest in life history and a reassessment of its import as a methodology that can produce valuable knowledge on a broad array of social science topics. Through such a discussion, it is also our goal that the articles in this issue will shed light on current and future research trends while highlighting novel life history projects that can stimulate further dialogue about the future of qualitative inquiry.