Method in Practice: Autobiographical Narrative Interviews in Search of European Phenomena

Conducting autobiographical narrative interviews is a chance to approach people in their world of everyday life. Building our understanding of people’s biographies we take into account the categories, elaborations and personal theories they construct around their own lives. Hence, autobiography is not only a methodological model for hermeneutic understanding of individual lives, but also a privileged way of approaching social reality. It gives access to the complexity of social life ‘from within’, uncovering the meaning that actors attribute to their actions. In an attempt to understand people’s ways of acting, a biographical researcher visits the life world of an interviewee through a controlled listening to their story, which relates the course of events and their importance for a narrator. Events and actions are interpreted with regard to a certain structure of meaning (Prawda, 1987), and the narration is treated simultaneously as a reliable account of individual history and a symbolic construction.