Life History Research — Biographical Narrative Method

Both methods use extended biographical interviews, but oral history is primarily concerned with preserving historical testimony and understanding the past from participants' perspectives, often for archival or public history purposes. Life history research has an explicit social-science analytic goal — it uses the biographical account to theorise about social processes, identity, and the relationship between individual lives and social structures. The methods overlap considerably in practice, and researchers sometimes combine both purposes.

Life history research is a data-collection and study design: it defines what kind of data you gather (extended biographical accounts over time) and how you gather it (multi-session interviews, personal documents). Narrative analysis is an analytic approach that can be applied to many kinds of narrative data, including but not limited to life histories. You can conduct life history research and then apply narrative analysis to your transcripts — the two are complementary, and many life history studies use narrative analytic techniques as their primary mode of interpretation.

Sample size in life history research is deliberately small because depth, not breadth, is the goal. A single intensive life history can constitute a complete, publishable study if the case is theoretically significant. Studies with 3–10 participants are common; studies with more than 20 are unusual and are often closer to thematic qualitative interviewing than classic life history work. The guiding principle is purposive selection of participants who have the richest, most direct experience of the phenomenon under study.

Yes — triangulation is strongly encouraged. Personal documents such as diaries, letters, photographs, and official records (school reports, employment records, medical notes) can corroborate, complicate, or enrich the narrative account. Field observations and secondary historical sources add further context. The convergence or divergence of these sources is itself analytically meaningful, since it reveals what aspects of life the participant chooses to foreground or omit in their oral account.

Because life histories are so specific — naming places, dates, relationships, and events — standard anonymisation (changing names) is often insufficient to prevent identification, especially in small communities. Best practice includes: negotiating with participants exactly what can be published, composite anonymisation (merging non-essential details across participants), sharing draft representations with participants for review and approval, and being transparent with participants that full anonymity cannot always be guaranteed. Ethics approval from an institutional review board should be obtained before recruitment begins.