Compare methods

	Life-History Interview	Free Listing
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	1988
Originator	Ethnographic interviewing tradition (codified by Bernard)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (formalized by Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	In-depth, often multi-session chronological interview eliciting one person's whole life	Elicitation procedure for the items and salience of a cultural domain
Seminal source	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	Life Story Interview, Biographical Interview, Personal Narrative Interview, Life-Course Interview	Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting
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.	Free listing is a foundational elicitation technique in cognitive anthropology in which informants are asked to name, in any order, all the items they can think of that belong to a cultural domain — for example 'all the kinds of fruit' or 'all the things that can give you a cold.' Aggregating these lists reveals both the content of the domain (which items belong) and the salience of each item (how culturally central it is), inferred from how frequently and how early it is mentioned.