Key Ideas

• Many of the most influential theories in the field of psychology had their origins in biography and life story research.
• Biography and life story research can have the goal of theory development or of testing theory and general concepts about persons and lives.
• Historically biography and life story research has been a form of single case study research, although more contemporary research uses multiple cases as well as critical life episodes collected from a large number of participants.
• Steps followed in biography and life story research vary across researchers, but there are a few scholars who have developed data collection tools, analytic methods, and coding schemes that are guided by thematic content analysis and are widely available on the Internet.
• Biography and life story research focuses on internal validity in terms of narrative truth, as well as external validity in the form of the representativeness of the life episodes and topics within the whole life.

Biography and life story research blends elements of case study research (see Chapter Ten) and narrative methodology (see Chapter Nine) with the goal of producing rich descriptions and complex analyses of a single life or critical episodes within a person's life. As a form of case study research, biography and life story research treats the life as the case or bounded system. Biography and life story research is also a form of case study research in that the life is investigated in depth within the real-world context of meaning-making. At the same time, biography and life story research is a narrative methodology because the bounded system of a life is structured through experience in a storied form, and as such its study takes on the narrative form (Barresi & Jukes, 1997; Freeman, 2009). The core analytic goal of the biography and life story researcher is to interpret the meaning of the person's life experiences. The most influential theories in the field of psychology were developed using biography and life story research. This early grounding has led to biography and life story research's having a particular significance in the field of psychology. Narratives, autobiographical memories, self-defining memories, and personal memories are forms of biography and life story data. These types of data are collected by researchers using various interview methods. Biography and life story researchers also collect letters, personal documents, and other forms of archival data.