Interpretive Biographical Research

Both work with personal accounts, but the scope and analytical logic differ. Interpretive biographical research focuses specifically on the whole life trajectory and systematically compares the lived life (chronological events) with the told story (the participant's narrative construction). Narrative inquiry tends to focus on specific story episodes or sequences and is more diverse in scope — it may not examine the whole life. Interpretive biographical research also carries a stronger explicit commitment to social-structural analysis alongside the hermeneutic reading.

There is no standard minimum, and single-case studies are legitimate in this tradition when the case is particularly illuminating. Studies commonly involve between three and fifteen participants. The criterion is not statistical saturation but analytical depth — whether the interpretive account is sufficiently grounded in the biographical material to support the theoretical claims made.

The dual reconstruction separates the lived life — the chronological sequence of events reconstructed from all available sources — from the told story — the sequence and emphasis the participant chose when narrating. Comparing the two reveals meaningful discrepancies: events omitted from the narrative, episodes placed out of chronological order, or periods that receive disproportionate attention. These discrepancies are analytically significant because they point to the interpretive work the participant is doing in constructing a coherent life story.

Yes. Personal documents — diaries, letters, memoirs, online life-writing — can serve as primary biographical data, especially when the subject is deceased or unavailable for interview. The interpretive logic remains the same: read the document as a constructed account, attend to what is said and what is not, and situate the biography in its social and historical context. However, documents offer less opportunity to probe or clarify than interviews.

Yes, and it has been productively combined with both. Critical and feminist biographical researchers explicitly foreground how power relations — of gender, race, class — shape both the lived life and the conditions under which it can be told. The interpretive frame is widened to include structural critique, and the researcher's own positionality is interrogated as part of the analysis. This combination is well established in the literature.