Compare methods

	Life-History Interview	Ethnographic Mapping
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	2017
Originator	Ethnographic interviewing tradition (codified by Bernard)	Ethnographic fieldwork tradition (codified by Bernard)
Type	In-depth, often multi-session chronological interview eliciting one person's whole life	Field procedure for documenting a community's physical and social space
Seminal source	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421
Aliases	Life Story Interview, Biographical Interview, Personal Narrative Interview, Life-Course Interview	Community Mapping, Sketch Mapping, Spatial Ethnography, Field Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	The life-history interview is an ethnographic interviewing technique in which the researcher elicits one person's whole life, told chronologically, usually across several extended sessions. The narrator recounts childhood, family, work, migration, turning points, and old age in their own words, and the resulting narrative is treated as both ethnographic and historical data. Analysis proceeds thematically — coding recurring topics and meanings — and narratively — attending to how the story is constructed, sequenced, and given significance by the teller.	Ethnographic mapping is a fieldwork technique in which the researcher — rather than the participants — systematically records a community's physical and social space: the layout of households, the placement of resources such as wells, markets, and fields, the boundaries people recognize, and the routine paths along which people and goods move. Sketch maps drawn in the field and georeferenced coordinates captured with GPS are treated as primary ethnographic data, not mere illustration. The resulting map anchors observation, sampling, and interpretation in the concrete geography of social life.