Historical and Theoretical Background
Biography and life story research is conducted in multiple disciplines in related forms, including history, psychology, and other social sciences. In history, biography research has evolved from what used to be the standard life and times approach. Historians placed the life within a historical period and context for the reader to learn about the historical period. In the last forty years, historians using biography have placed more emphasis on analysis of the life itself, rather than on the historical period.
Over time historians have become less interested in selecting the lives of “great men” for biography (see Carlyle, 1841) and have instead selected subjects of study who were not necessarily famous, but interesting. In the late 1900s it became much more common for the lives of women and individuals who were Black to be the subject of the biographies of historians because of a shift in historians' thinking about the importance of the lives of ordinary people. For example, Logan and Winston (1982) wrote a collective biography of the lives and achievements of over a hundred Black Americans, a group of people who had previously been ignored as subjects of biography and as contributors to American history. Biography within history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was designed to be inspirational and entertaining. To a large extent it was not regarded as serious inquiry and scholarship.
In addition to biography and life story research's focus in the field of history, there is an interdisciplinary movement centered on the narrative study of lives called narrative inquiry (see Chapter Nine). Given the focus of Part Two of this book on qualitative research within the disciplines, as well as the long history of biography and life story research conducted within the field of psychology, the rest of the chapter will focus on the use of this research methodology within the field of psychology in particular.
Roots of Biography and Life Story Research in Psychology
Many of the most influential theories in psychology were developed using biography and life story research (McAdams, 2001; Singer, 2004). The origins of this research in the field of psychology have both formal and informal roots that began in the early 1900s. However, from the 1920s through the 1950s a branch of psychology called behaviorism, with its focus on observable behavior rather than on human thought and unconsciousness, dominated the field. This meant that there was a significant decline until the 1980s in researchers' use of biography and life story research.
Henry Murray, one of the key intellectual architects of personality psychology, most influenced the more formal development of biography and life story research. In the 1930s at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, Murray brought together an interdisciplinary group of renowned scholars and developed the personological tradition in personality psychology (Murray, 1938). Personology is the scientific study of the whole person in biographical and cultural context. This area of scientific study is distinguished from another area of research with the same name that is based on pseudoscience and involves using physiognomy and facial features to attempt to predict character traits and behavior (see Tickle, 2003). Murray introduced the concept of person-centered psychology, in which the researcher or analyst puts the person at the center of inquiry, believing that the investigator must become familiar with the person in many different contexts. Murray's goal in this research was to adopt what Gordan Allport (1937), the founder of personality psychology, coined an idiographic approach to personality study in which the researcher seeks to discover the specific and individual patterns in particular lives. This approach is in contrast to the nomothetic approach that was dominant during the 1930s in psychology and aimed to discover general principles or laws of behavior for all persons. For example, the five-factor model of personality developed by McCrae and Costa (1987) describes five dispositional traits that all humans possess to varying degrees and that are relatively stable across a person's life.
Theorists who were very famous in the field of psychology wrote psychobiographies, which in many ways more informally launched the study of lives through biography and life story methodology before Murray's formal introduction of personology. In 1910 Sigmund Freud wrote the psychobiography Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910/1955); in 1958 Erik Erikson wrote Young Man Luther, and in 1969 he wrote Gandhi's Truth. Although not as famous and influential as Freud and Erikson in the field of psychology, Robert White (1938) developed the case of Earnst, which made an important contribution to biography and life story methodology, as it is considered the first intensive and methodologically sound study of a single case.
Psychobiography is a methodology designed for understanding personality and is focused on the analysis of a single life, most often of a person who is famous, exceptional, or unusual (see Schultz, 2007). Psychobiography researchers make a distinction between biography and psychobiography: in a biography the main goal is to tell the story of a life with a comprehensive focus, whereas in a psychobiography the goal is to focus on one facet of a person's life. For example, Elms and Heller (2007) conducted a psychobiography in which they asked the question of why Elvis Presley had difficulty performing the song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” More contemporary psychobiography research has focused on dimensions of the lives of such famous people as George W. Bush, Adolph Hitler, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, Abraham Lincoln, and Marilyn Monroe (Schultz, 2007).
After the beginning of World War II, due to the new emphasis on laboratory methods and psychometrics within the field of psychology, there was a turn away from biographical methods and the application of broad theories to the individual life (McAdams, 2009). Yet Murray was able to keep his personological approach alive during the war through his direction of a personality assessment program for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency that later became the CIA. The assessment plan used in the OSS focused on the whole person and used biographical narrative, as well as motivational, emotional stability, and intelligence assessments (Office of Strategic Services Assessment Staff, 1948).
Key Theoretical Underpinnings of Biography and Life Story Research
Within the field of psychology there are many ways in which researchers have studied lives. Scholars have called these such different names as biography research, life story research, and psychobiography research. All of these methodologies generally share the same underlying theoretical underpinnings that are important for understanding the research design and methodology used by biography and life story researchers, which are primarily grounded in personality and developmental psychology. Within these subareas of psychology it is well established that it is part of the nature of human beings to think in storied terms (McAdams, 2001), much in the same way human beings by nature are altruistic. In other words, human beings think in terms of characters, plots, and settings as a way of making sense of human action and living.
From this perspective, the storied nature of human thought provides a way to think about human individuality and the human intention of making meaning of life experiences. Human individuality refers to the aspects of human personality that make a person unique or distinct from others. McAdams and Pals (2006), for example, have developed five principles for the science of the person. These principles describe human individuality in terms of evolution and human nature, dispositional signature, characteristic adaptations, life narratives and the challenge of modern identity, and the differential role of culture. In their emphasis of including studying life narratives as the aspect of human personality, they argue that persons develop life narratives that are internalized and evolving and that give individual lives their unique and culturally anchored meanings. Given this theoretical grounding, biography and life story researchers pursue answers to two overarching research questions:
- How do we come to fully understand the life course of a person?
- How do people make narrative sense of personal experience?
The storied nature of thought is often referred to as a narrative mode of thinking. Bruner (1986) suggests that human beings have evolved to interpret personal experiences in terms of stories. The narrative mode of thought focuses on stories and the vicissitudes of human intention organized in time (Bruner, 1986). Within this mode of thought, human needs, wants, and goals are explained in terms of human actors striving to do things over time (McAdams, 2009). In contrast, the paradigmatic mode of thought focuses on human experience in terms of tightly reasoned analyses, logical proof, and cause-and-effect relationships. In essence, the empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypotheses characteristic of the paradigmatic mode of thought is not the mode of thought persons use to make meaning of their life experiences. Instead, story, a key element of the narrative mode of thought, is the best available psychological structure that persons have for making sense of their lives in time (Bruner, 1990; McAdams, 2001; Sarbin, 1986). This narrative mode of thought helps shape behavior, establish identity, and integrate individuals into modern social life (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992; Josselson & Lieblich, 1993; McAdams & Pals, 2006). The storied nature of human thought is so important that Sarbin argues that narrative is the “root metaphor” for the field of psychology.
Another very important element of the theoretical underpinnings of biography and life story research is the concept of time. Time within human lives is conceptually relevant to the idea of life span development. The life course perspective emphasizes that life stories are shaped by historical, economic, and cultural forces, as well as by social change and chance happenings. At the same time, people have agency, which is the capacity to make choices and to impose those choices on the world in the course of their development, actively constructing their lives in a complex and evolving social context (McAdams, 2009). Murray believed that human beings are time-binding organisms and that the history of the organism is the organism. In other words, the history of the individual is what really makes up who the individual is as a person. Thus, Murray believed, this mandated the use of biographical methodology (Murray, 1938). The concept of time within biography and life story research is also important in terms of the idea of temporal order. Sarbin (1986) describes temporal order as the idea that time is a key element of story, which always contains a beginning, middle, and end.
These key theoretical underpinnings of narrative, story, and time within biography and life story research are linked to more specific and formal theories about the nature of storied thought within the life course. Storied thought refers to the human capacity to think in terms of narratives that include people, settings, plots, or complicating actions, and the personal meaning of these narrative features. During the design phase of the research process these formal theories are critical in biography and life story researchers' decisions.