Using Biographical Methods in Social Research by Merrill Barbara. West Linden. & Linden West

Author:Merrill, Barbara.,West, Linden. & Linden West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446246610
Publisher: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Published: 2009-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

What the size of such an interview sample should be will be dictated by the purpose for which the research is being carried out. The exact size of any sample in qualitative research cannot be ascertained through quantitative methods. It is for this reason that it is all the more important that the consciously chosen sample must correspond to the overall aims of the study. (1998: 5)

Generalisability can be an obsession among quantitative researchers but may be less important for some biographers. The latter can be more interested in working with people who have potentially rich experience to share while samples may be constructed with the potential intensity of experience and the possible quality of the insights generated in mind. Yet qualitative researchers, including biographers, can get defensive when other researchers criticise their work for being unrepresentative. They may take steps to ensure that their samples share characteristics with a wider population such as Shaw’s study of Stanley in Jack the Roller (see Chapter 10).

In Linden’s work on doctors, the sample size – 25 – was partly shaped by issues of representativeness (age, gender, ethnicity, working location, etc.) but also by awareness of the dominance of positivistic assumptions in the medical world and a need to appear respectable. This meant generating a huge amount of narrative material (too much, in fact, to handle, given up to five cycles of interviews over the study) and there needed to be more of a focus on a small group with particular and rich experience to share. This may be part of a larger question: whether social researchers are primarily interested in social types and categories or individual lives. There is a potential tension here between orientations informed by the humanities and the social sciences. In the humanities, more importance can be attached to what may be unique and subjective and there is less preoccupation with the general or structural. This tension exists at the heart of biographical enquiry, and our own work, and we return to the issue in Chapter 10 and at the conclusion of the book. We are searching, in the spirit of C. Wright Mills, for perspectives that incorporate social forms and inner worlds, and the dynamics between them, and do justice to what is unique but also representative.

We have also learned not to feel defensive about small samples, or doing individual biographies, which, in fact, have been the norm in psychoanalytic forms of knowledge generation as well as for historians over a long period (Plummer, 2001; Rustin, 2000). Single life histories can provide rich material while the unique and human-centred can be used as a basis for generating highly original forms of interdisciplinary understanding, drawing on historical, social and psychological imaginations (see Chapter 9). Bent Flyvberg has written that:

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