Life-History Interview

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.