Biographical Research Method

The method of personal documents or biographical method is a concept related to a group of loosely connected, differently termed research tools, ranging from the narrative interview, life histories, life stories, oral history, (auto)biography, biographical interpretive method, story telling to ethnography (Poleti-Ćosić, 2019, p. 29).

The biographical method is one of the qualitative research methods used in sociological research. Its use is the subject of a lot of disputes. Even though it has gained the status of an independent method,  a lot of theorists do not consider it a method sufficient on its own.

It is a new data collection method, grounded on two assumptions. According to the first one, the man as an individual creates social phenomena and therefore we have to get to know the man’s psychology because his mental condition cannot be separated from social events. According to the second assumption, personal (biographical) documents contain extremely important information, collected on the basis of sincere experiences of a phenomenon and therefore can provide a very good explanation of both an individual’s life and social trends (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 137). The development of the biographical model is ascribed to Chicago School and the study of V. Thomas and F. Znaniecki ‘The Polish Countryman in Europe and America’, based on the use of personal documents (Poleti-Ćosić, 2019, p. 30).

Personal documents, which the method was named after, can be divided into two groups. The first group implies the documents that provide information about a person, and can be obtained in official institutions – formal documents. These are various archives following the happenings in the life of an individual – the court, tax administration, police archives, etc. The second group includes documents designed by individuals themselves, their records, in which they describe their roles in social events. There are different types of such documents:

• letters or correspondence with other people who had an important role in the life of a person, and took part in recording a social event,
• diaries, which deal with phenomena and events in a systematic and detailed manner,
• autobiographies, which describe the whole life of an individual, and are very important because of the accuracy of events, and the order in which they took place,
• biographies, which are an individual’s recordings about other people,
• memoires, similar to autobiographies, which describe specific events important for an individual,
• brief notes and messages related to a single event, which we are trying to preserve from oblivion (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 138).

The method of personal documents represents the planned classification of materials, and identification of categories related to the personal and social life of an individual. The classification of materials is done in the following manner:

• the main register, which contains all the collected documentation,
• the analytical register, which represents the revised main register,
• the diary register, which represents the scientist's own recording made while examining the respondents' personal documents.

In addition to these registers, auxiliary registers such as financial reports and bibliographies of papers related to the research topic can be used. The data arranged in this way dictates certain steps of the analysis. The first step of the data analysis implies their chronological ordering. The use of specific sources of information which are already chronologically ordered makes this step easier. Then the researcher identifies the relationships between specifc events and respondent’s experiences in order to critically examine the credibility of the story. The next step is dealing with individual documents, and mapping characteristic types of behavior, social relations, etc. This step of the analysis involves the use of the sequential analysis. The categories depend on the problems being researched. However, there is a general category resulting from the desired objectives of the method, and it is to determine the relationships between personal and social situations of the individual who is the object of the research.

Even though it represents a whole, the method of personal documents can be divided into several types. The most important classification is the one performed according to the types of the sources of material or the classification into the personal history method, related to formal documents, and the life story method, based on the respondents’ records.

In addition to this classification, the classification according to the types of events, different in scope and significance, is also extremely important. It is the classification into the method of personal documents about the life of the respondent, and method of personal documents about specific events.

Furthermore, there is the classification into the method of personal documents intended to be used for scientific purposes, and the method of personal documents independent of them.

The difference between the method of formal personal documents and other similar methods is that they were written by other people, and the material was processed in the mind of the person who recorded them, which makes its reliability questionable. On the other hand, there are subjective records, made by the respondent. In spite of being subjective, they can be considered as a true research method (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 139).

As for the method which relates to a majority of events which left some traces on the respondent’s life, it can be said to have a more universal meaning because, in addition to the important events in the life of the respondent, this method also reveals the way in which the respondent developed as a person, every change that took place during that period of time, changes in attitudes, etc.

The importance of the method which relates to fewer events is not in the amount of events, but in their effects on the respondents themselves on the one hand, and in some specific event itself on the other hand.

The biographical method which was developed for scientific purposes is intended to ensure achieving the goal, i.e. examine the relationship between an individual and social phenomena. Therefore, it could be said that this method yields the best results. However, even though an individual is the typical object of biographical research, the validity of this methodological approach has been confirmed in the studies based on the collective units of analysis as well (Poleti-Ćosić, 2019, p.  34).

The role of the researcher using the biographical method is opposite to the role of the researcher performing traditional qualitative research: at the beginning of the research, the researcher collects experiential data, reads or listens to the life stories of people, while doing their best to remain invisible and unnoticeable so as not to affect the data authenticity and quality anyhow, and then carefully reads the collected materials, and reconstructs the real life accordingly.

In addition to bringing some changes into the role of the researcher in a reseach process, the biographical method also brings some changes into the observation of social reality. Traditional research seeks to derive a cause-and-effect chain going from the so-called independent variables to the dependent ones, whereas the biographical method seeks to reconstruct the chronological chain of events and study the logic of their occurrence (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 139).

Example: When hiring a new worker with a company, the biographical method can be used alongside the questionnaire administration or interviewing. During the narrative interview, the initial introductory question is asked to elecit an account of events and experiences from the interviewee’s own life (the so-called ‘main narrative’), which should not be interrupted by asking additional qustions, but stimulated by non-verbal gestures and expressions of interest. This allows the interviewee to constract the narrative as they wish. During the second part of the interview, i.e. during the ‘interrogation period’, the researcher initiates the broadening of the topic by asking narrative questions or asking for further details about the aspects of life described in the narrative. Talking to a person about certain elements from their biography, in a relaxed atmosphere, is a good way of getting to know the person, and their positive and negative traits better, thus contributing to the prediction of the prospective future business cooperation.

The main advantage of the biographical method is primarily the fact that it takes into account the subjective dimension of the event or phenomenon being examined. This subjective dimension is presented directly by the subject, thus ensuring that the data is honest. However, many authors believe that an excessive emphasis on the subjective dimension of a phenomenon or event poses a risk to the objectivity and credibility of the obtained research results. This problem of the biographical method is solved by applying the principle of complementarity. The principle implies the use of different data sources which complement each other. In the case of the biographical method, these are institutional data, which are considered the objective data that the personal documents miss. 

Another advantage of the biographical method is the temporal dimension that it brings to the research process. The information sources were mostly created immediately after the event being examined took place.

Unlike other methods, the method of biographical documents is the only one directed to the role of an individual in social processes. Furthermore, it explains how events influence the development of the respondent’s personality, and how the respondent reacts both to their own problems and the problems of the social environment (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 140).

Finally, one of the advantages of this model relates to the very sources of experiential materials, which are much easier to control than other sources, which require the researcher’s presence in the data collection process.

However, the biographical data can be said to have more disadvantages than advantages primarily due to their subjectivity. The first problem or disadvantage is the inaccessibility of data. A small amount of personal documents is easily accessible to researchers, forcing them to announce the calls for submitting biographies, which leads to another problem – the problem of authenticity. The same problem appears with the sources designed for the purpose of the research, i.e. ordered sources, collected orally (narrative biographies). The problem with this type of sources is actually the degree in which the researcher influenced the development of the source. The solution to such a problem can be found in as precise a definition of the topic and research objectives as possible, and then in defining the broadest possible experiential framework of the research itself. The process of creating documents is very slow and long-lasting, and in addition to time, requires huge financial resources  (Pečujlić & Milić, 1995, p. 140). Another problem that might be encountered when using the personal documents method is the selection of participants/respondents. Finally, there is the problem of the representativeness of the results, which can be encountered when using the personal documents method, and it relates both to sampling, and the analysis and presentation of the research results.