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Auto/Biography as Method in Sociology
Rhea Erica D’Silva
Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai
Introduction
Biographical life writing in general can be attributed to the fields of art, literature, fiction,
sociology, science and history, among others. Since in a biography the plot is readily available, a
biographer’s work is said to be a lot easier than a novelist’s. “Yet the experience of doing biological
life –writing quickly imparts the lesson that all is not so simple. The biographer is explorer,
enquirer, hypothesizer, complier, researcher, Researcher Extraordinaire, selector and writer.”
(Backscheider in Oakley 2010: pp 428) Biography as a genre as well as, as a research method
does not only involve the gathering of data about an individual but also involves the interpretation
of the gathered data in order to create a representation of certain important aspects of the life and
times of the subject. Biographies and the biographical method are also part of larger debates. Is it
possible to have a single retelling of a person’s life that is truthful? What influence will the
researcher’s historical and social context, discourses and perspectives have on how the
biographical subject is constructed? What role will memory play in different contexts? What role
will the reader play in all of this?
The biographical method according to Denzin includes “autobiography , ethnography, auto-
ethnography, biography…fiction, history, personal history, oral history, case history, case
study…life history, life story…” (Denzin cited in Oakley 2010: pp 425). Author, Ann Oakley also
adds life histories and life stories to the mix – Life histories being the interpretive work of
researchers that come out of life stories. For the purpose of this paper I also include
‘Testimonios’ as falling within the biographical method. In order therefore, to refer to the
autobiographical and the biographical among other included methods I choose to use the more
inclusive term ‘Auto/biography’. It is more or less accepted that auto/biography is a qualitative
type of research and auto/biographical methods are most often used where their theoretical

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approaches consider subjectivity as important. The increasing interest in auto/biographical
methods also point to the importance that agency now holds in the social sciences. ‘The
biographical turn’ in the social sciences shows the willingness of social science today to explore
social change through the perspectives of individual actors1
. Mary Evans believes that it “is a
way of unwrapping the conventional sociological wisdom that we are all ‘socially constructed’,
a way of revealing the human meaning behind the formal categories of social life.” (Evans cited
in Oakley 2010: pp 426) At the same time, however we ought to remember that the tasks of an
auto/biographer is to sift through large quantities of material and in essence select information
which are then converted into accounts. Clearly then, their subjectivities also form a part of this
process.
The Rise and Fall of Life History as a Method in the Social Sciences
In 1918, Thomas and Znaniecki undertook a study titled The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America in which they explored the life experiences of Polish peasants who were moving to the
United States. For this project they mainly gathered autobiographical narratives along with diaries
and available letters. They both believed that autobiographical accounts of these migrants were
valuable as data for social scientists.
“Whether we draw our materials for sociological analysis from detailed life records of concrete
individuals or from the observation of mass phenomena, the problems of sociological analysis are
the same. But even when we are searching for abstract laws, life records, as complete as possible,
constitute the perfect type of sociological material, and if social science has to use other materials
at all it is only because of the practical difficulty of obtaining at the moment a sufficient number
of, and of the enormous amount of such records to cover the totality of sociological problems work
demanded for an adequate analysis of all the personal materials necessary to characterize the life
of a social group. If we are forced to use mass phenomena as material, or any kind of happenings
taken without regard to the life histories of the individuals who participated, it is a defect, not an
advantage, of our present sociological method.” (Thomas and Znaniecki cited in Goodson 2009:
pp130)
1
See part VII for a short critique of this idea

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Thomas and Znaniecki clearly saw life histories as the treasure trove for sociological analysis.
Famous sociologist of the Chicago School, Robert Park also regarded life histories in high esteem
and used them as a tool in his research. Becker argues that the life history method forces us to
confront human subjectivity most often ignored in favor of more scientific social methods –
quantitative data, theoretical constructs, conceptual tools and statistical tables. When we put aside
this ‘messy confrontation with human subjectivity’ what we are really doing is making a political
decision and engaging in power politics which is a continuing problem in social science according
to the author.2
Often, the focus we place on the theoretical and the quantitative help bolster the
social and economic power of the already powerful. This could be a possible explanation as to why
beyond even methodological issues, the life history method if often considered marginal. “Life
history, by its nature, asserts and insists that power should listen to the people it claims to serve...”
(Goodson 2009: pp 131)
The decline of the life history method is explained by Becker. According to him, sociologists will
never give up on life history completely. The problem is that it has not become a standard tool of
research. While sociologists will assign life histories to their students to read it is unlikely that they
will consider gathering documents on life history or employing it as a research technique in their
own work. In addition, in the Chicago School the debate between statistical methods and those
like life history became more pronounced. The Chicago School also started giving more
importance to ethnographic methods to the detriment of life histories.
Another reason for the decline of life history came through the new sociology of Blumer and
Hughes that bridged the Chicago School from the 1920’s to the neo-Chicagoans like Becker.
Symbolic interactionism that Blumer introduced saw ‘process’ and ‘situation’ as important and
regarded biography and related method as suspicious. At the same time symbolic interactionism
is a departure from the positivist perspectives of the time, seeing social reality from the perspective
of social actors. It sees people as having the potential of agency. In addition, as soon as the
evolutionary trajectory of sociological development began to focus on the need for abstract theory
in order to gain esteem with other academic fields, biography focused methods lost their standing
in the scientific community of sociologists.
2
This idea is reiterated through the work of Mykhalovskiy in Part VII

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“The PhD student must define and test a hypothesis; the journal article must test the author’s own
or other academics’ hypotheses; the research project or program must state the generalizable
aims and locate the burden of what has to be proved. However, this dominant experimental model,
so fruitful in analogies with other sciences and, hence, so crucial in legitimating sociology as a
full-fledged academic discipline, led to the neglect of sociology’s full range of methodology and
data sources.” (Goodson 2009: pp 135)
“It has led people to ignore the other functions of research and particularly to ignore the
contribution made by one study to an overall research enterprise even when the study, considered
in isolation, produced no definitive results of its own. Because, by these criteria, the life history
did not produce definitive results, people have been at a loss to make anything of it and by and
large have declined to invest the time and effort necessary to acquire life history documents.”
(Becker cited in Goodson 2009: pp 135)
Biography managed to create a small space for itself as sociology developed through Berger and
Luckmann’s phenomenological sociology but very little empirical work resulted from this. The
new directions sociology took drew it away from the superiority of positivism and to the
importance of situation and occasion which continued to keep life histories and biographies on the
margins of sociological method. This trend seems to be changing for the better.
Some Theoretical Perspectives Underpinning Auto/biographical Research Method
All research occurs within a theoretical perspective. In other words, research cannot take place in
a vacuum and theory and method are closely inter-twined. “...we cannot make sense of the world
without having ideas of how the world works or of what it is to be human.” (Merrill and West
2009) While the theoretical beginnings of the auto/biographical method is often attributed to
symbolic interactionism, today it is used in a wide variety of theoretical frameworks. “Choosing a
theory is not a neutral process, as positivists maintain but rather a subjective and social one in
which the subjectivity of the researcher – in interaction with cultural and intellectual structures,
power, language, experience and unconscious processes – has an important role.” (Merrill and
West 2009)

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Theoretical differences change the way we view biographical narratives. The realist position may
see them as representing the reality of lives. Some are less optimistic and view them as partial
truths at best influenced by power relations, language and the interaction between the researcher
and the researched. This is the critical realist position. Other differences arise from the way human
subjectivity is understood, the status the narrative holds and the importance transparency is given.
Narratives may be taken at face value or as covers hiding deeper more disturbing psychological
issues. Stories may also involve the teller putting up appearances for the sake of their audience.
The question of the voice also arises – allowing the marginalized to speak for themselves rather
than be spoken for, others consider this naïve.
While the symbolic interactionists offer us one way of putting to use the auto/biographical method,
feminism offered another. Feminism critiqued traditional research and feminists raised the
question of who had the power to construct knowledge and mounted a critique on ‘malestream’
sociology. Traditional sociology focused on the public world that men inhabited treating the realm
of the private, largely inhabited by women, as unimportant. Feminists therefore, saw the research
of women’s personal, everyday lives as important emphasizing how the ‘personal is political’
“Feminist approaches to research stress the need for subjective arrangement and for forms of
relationship which challenge the power nexus between the researcher and the researched.
Interviews, and, in particular, biographical and auto/biographical approaches, become favored
means of doing research.” (Merrill and West 2009)
Feminist research therefore considers the biographical method a powerful tool.
Auto/Biographical Sociology as an Evolving Sociological Practice
Postmodernity, as we are well aware, has pointed out the power and privilege that exists in
dominant research methodologies and by extension, the knowledge being produced in the social
sciences. This is what we call, the postmodern crisis of representation. Biographical sociology,
which includes practices like biography, auto-ethnography, autobiography and various other forms
of life writing and narrative representations of self, epitomizes this postmodern critique of the
previously positivist mode. “Biographical sociology includes various forms of research that

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connect the personal within the cultural, situating the researching subject within the specific social
contexts.” (Shantz 2009: pp 113)
Biographical sociology is also defined as “research undertaken on individual lives employing
autobiographical documents, interviews or other sources and presenting accounts in various
forms (e.g., in terms of editing, written, visual or oral presentation, and degree of researcher’s
narration and reflexivity)” (Temple cited in Shantz 2009: pp 114)
Biographical sociology changes the way researchers read and write in that they are not in a position
of power of explanation. They are not, for example, the experts offering their explanation in a
social situation. This new approach also allows a researcher to write reflexively about experiences
that he may not have otherwise been able to approach as social scientists. “Biographical sociology
encourages a practical rethinking of terms such as validity, reliability and objectivity, offering a
critique of representation and legitimation within social science disciplines.” (ibid.)
Biographical research in sociology, unlike in anthropology, literature and history, has been
sidelined. This phenomenon is strange, according to Shantz. He reminds us of C. Wright Mills’
exhortation that sociology must connect biography and structure and can work on the latter level
only if it works on the former as well. Mill’s term, ‘sociological imagination’ reminds us that we
“need to understand the interplay between public issues (social structures) to personal troubles
(biography)” (Shantz 2009: pp 115) Sociologists then, need to take up the connections between
the problems of individuals and what is going on in larger social structure. “According to Mills,
“[The sociological imagination] enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in
terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals …enables
us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society [and] between
‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’” (Roberts and Kyllonen
cited in Shantz 2009: pp 116)
Biographical sociology with its aims of understanding the changing experiences of people, what
they consider important and an attempt at providing interpretations of peoples narratives applies
not only to the subjects of the auto/biography but also to but also to sociologists who engage in
such work. The epistemological position, as it stands is that knowledge is not and can never be
objective. There is no way for us as researchers to make objective claims on knowledge that is
outside our own position in the social world. Since this idea works both ways, it also means that

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as a researcher, I cannot escape my social position in the word through claims of being objective
and scientific. “This does not mean that there is no reality. While sociology is understood as not
strictly referential, it is constructed within and mediates real world situations” (Roberts cited in
Shantz 2009: pp 117)
Biographical sociology understands individual-society relations a bit differently from other
methods – it has a more nuanced understanding, not quite as straight forward. This understanding
moves beyond the structure agency ideas to offer ‘a situated analysis’ – of agency working within
structure through the life of a reflexive individual. This is then, not just the study of an individual
life. Sociologists working in biographical sociology do not regard highly the conventional
understandings of structure and action or individual and collective as being sharply distinct from
one another. To understand an individual life then, is to understand a single self in communion
with ‘networks of interwoven biographies’. Biographical sociologists understand meaning as
being constructed, maintained and modified rather than fixed. In the same way, people’s
biographies are also constructed and enacted i.e. performed.
“People’s identities are complex composites of who they create themselves to be and present to
the world, and who the world makes them and constrains them to be.” (Shantz 2009: pp 117)
Auto/Biography as Critical Sociology: Reflexivity, Robert Merton’s Autobiographical
Sociology and Sociological Autobiography
Before anyone had thought to speak about auto/biography in the social sciences (in its modern
understanding) there was Liz Stanley standing as a forerunner in the field, several years ahead of
her peers. Her main focus was on the issues of ‘representation, reflexivity and voice in research’.
(Shantz 2009: pp 118)
For Stanley, the sociological discussion of what is called auto/biography originated in two parallel
locations
i. Reflexivity within the research process that came out of the feminist ideals and
therefore feminist research.
ii. Robert Merton’s writings on ‘Sociological Autobiography’

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Reflexivity in Feminist Research
Feminist research rethinks the relationship between the social, political and human agency. It
eschews conventional dichotomies because it sees them not as dichotomies but a linked to each
other. The social and the individual, the personal and political are not separate but connected to
each other. It favors social constructivism and social reproduction as concepts over individualism.
She refers to this auto/biographical work as intellectual auto/biography. We can also understand
consciousness raising through the concept of reflexivity. Reflexivity treats the self as a subject of
intellectual enquiry. Both Mertonian and feminist understandings of auto/biography point out hoe
the knowledges produced by people in different social locations are different from each other and
yet this’ difference’ does not take away from its espistemic validity.
Sociological Autobiography
Through his writing, on what he termed as ‘Sociological Autobiography’, Merton draws our
attention to the difference and ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ position makes in the kind of knowledge that
is produced. It is possible, he says for there to be different kinds of knowledge about a single piece
of reality. It may be a person, an event etc. There is no ‘one’ reality. Moreover, there is no
sociological way of deciding between these knowledges or picking on instead of the other as they
are each produced and located differently. The art and craft of auto/biography then is practiced
differently by people in different social locations be they class, employment, gender or age based.
“The social autobiography utilizes sociological perspectives, ideas, concepts, findings and
analytical procedures to construct and interpret a narrative text that purports to tell one’s own
history within the larger history of one’s times…autobiographers are the ultimate participants in
a dual participant-observer role, having privileged access – in some cases monopolistic access –
to their own inner experience.” (Merton cited in Stanley 1993: pp 43)
Here, in Merton understanding the text itself is a topic for investigation, rather than only acting as
a resource to discuss something outside the text. He is looking at the process by which a text is
constructed and interpreted i.e. the process of reading a text and writing it. Autobiography to him,
does not have to be limited by the errors of observation and distortions of memory.
Autobiographers, like biographers can use other sources like personal and public documents as

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well as testimonies of others to compare narratives. Merton therefore, is said to have revolutionized
the sociological attention given to autobiography and makes us reconsider its epistemological
stakes involved when by treating the ‘insider’ who can take on the ‘outsider’ (ibid.)
“The positionality of the sociologist is important for understanding each research activity. The
biographer is involved in the active construction of social reality and sociological knowledge
rather than discovering it. This can be impacted by the sociologists’ own biographical trajectories,
at which stage they are in their own professional development. For Merton, good sociological
autobiography is analytically concerned with relating its product to the epistemological conditions
of its own production” (Shantz 2009: pp 123)
Autobiographical Sociology
In autobiographical sociology, the sociologist is the autobiographer. The sociologist looks into his
past personal experiences and uses them to mark out and analyse something sociologically
relevant. The nature of Autobiographical sociology itself points out to its need to be primarily
retrospective. “Autobiographical sociology, as a pathway to data and idea, requires that the
sociologist introspectively recollect, reconstruct, and interpret the past phenomenon or process
he/she was involved in…Autobiographical sociology is a more valuable special and unique
approach when it introspectively past experiences that were not originally intended to be
researched more formally by prospective field work and field notes.” (Friedman 1990: pp 61)
Merton’s sociological autobiography is not the same as autobiographical sociology according to
Friedman. Where Merton’s sociological autobiography highlights the life of famous sociologist
who has profiled himself, autobiographical sociology highlights the sociological insight to be
gained from autobiographical experiences and information. While sociological autobiographies
are written because of the status of the authors, acting as a record for sociological history.
Autobiographical sociology, in contrast acts as a tool that allows the ‘everyman/everywoman
status’ of a sociologist to take precedence – which may make his experiences more similar to the
ones experienced by a layman. Autobiographical sociology therefore, in a way may seem trivial
an unimportant, causing people to ask questions like “so what?” or “who cares?” even though there
are sociological lessons to be had in the everyday nature of it.

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Autobiographical sociology is of importance in that it allows us to look at sociologically topics
from a new perspective. Starting from his/her own experience the autobiographical sociologist
moves outwards to more general and broader points of discussion. This is different from how
traditional sociology functions – starting and staying broad in focus, staying shallow and highly
impersonal.
Kluckhohn and Murray write “Everyman is in certain respects: a) like all other men, b) like some
other men, c) like no other man” (Friedman 1990: pp 64) Autobiographical sociology gives
prominence to the ‘no other man’ respect that other forms of social research methods while at the
same time also demonstrating the ways in which we are similar to one another.
Auto/biography as a method/tool of social research
Auto/biographies for the purpose of this paper, used synonymously with the terms life stories or
life histories are helpful in research when the aim of study is to understand how people understand
the social world in which they live. They are used in order to generate new ideas in the sense of
exploring a new field of research, as a method complementary to other research methods, as an
end to a research project by drawing in all its strands and as a standalone case history. (Plummer
2001: pp 130) In his book ‘Documents of Life’, Ken Plummer also elaborates further on the above
mentioned points in the use of auto/biography/ life stories as a tool for research.
Generating ideas and sensitizing concepts
Auto/biographical method can work to sensitize researchers to important concepts beginning in
miniature forms and slowly developed through the process of listening to people talk about their
lives. When we listen to a life story we can begin to see the world from the unique perspective of
a specific social actor. Through the words and the language used by the author we are able to
develop lines of enquiry and create broader concepts to take further, from the ones picked up form
the narrative itself. “Out of this comes the sensitizing concept – nothing formal, fixed or grand, but
a concept which ‘gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching
empirical instances…and merely suggesting] directions along which to look’ ” (Plummer 2001:
pp 130)

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Complementing Research
Life stories can complement other, more ‘objective’ research methods like survey and participant
observation combining traditional social science methods with reflexivity and lived experience.
Complementing Theory
Social science can often be very theory heavy. Life stories have the ability to provide details that
make the theory clearer and easier to comprehend.
‘Doing’ Auto/biography in India: Writing Caste/ Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s
‘Testimonios’
In his excellent article3
Eric Mykhalovskiy gives us the reasons for why auto/biographies are not
considered legitimate sources of knowledge for mainstream sociology. His own sociological work
in auto/biography was termed ‘self-indulgent’4
against which he mounted a critique. Part of that
critique he says comes from feminist critiques of social science knowledge production in which
they exposed the ‘dominant intellectual traditions’ as being gendered, raced and classed – far from
the ‘universal’ and ‘neutral’ they were thought to be. If this was the case he said, they were as
much a fiction (by removing the evidence of the author and concealing the conditions under which
the work was produced) as the auto/biographies they were calling fiction.
What using auto/biography as method, allowed the exposure of in mainstream sociology, Dalit
‘testimonios’5
aims to do with the parameters that bourgeois auto/biography sets for
auto/biography as method. “Dalit narratives challenge the bourgeois genre of autobiography and
pull at the boundaries of what are considered the parameters of the life-world.” (Pantawane cited
in Rege 1999: pp 16) Dalit narratives are a distinct genre in which there is scope to work between
the exploration and interpretation of self and society and the conflict that exists between the two.
These narratives are different from auto/biographies in that they do not represent an individual
voice but a chorus of voices representing the community. It took out the ‘I’ that was prominent in
3
“ee for details ‘e o sideri g Ta le Talk: Criti al Thought o the ‘elatio ship Bet ee “o iolog , Autobiography
and Self-I dulge e Eri M khalo ski i Qualitati e “o iolog Vol. 19 No. 1, 199
4
In this article he sets out to better elaborate why this was so through a critique of mainstream sociology
5
A Testi o io is a narrative in book or pamphlet form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real
protago ist or it ess of the e e ts he or she re ou ts a d hose u it of arratio is usuall a life or sig ifi a t
life e perie e. Be erle ited in Rege 1999: pp 1 I a testi o io the i te tio is ot o e of literari ess ut of
o u i ati g the situatio of a groups oppressio , i priso e t a d struggle.

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the bourgeoise autobiography replacing it with the voice of the collectivity. “In consciously
violating the boundaries set by bourgeois autobiography, dalit life narratives became testimonios
that summoned the truth from the past; truth about poverty and helplessness of the pre-
Ambedkarite era as also the resistance and progress of the Ambedkarite era.”(Rege 1999: pp 17)
In testimonios, the narrator claims agency in the act of narrating and asks the readers to actively
judge the situation. “As subjects of historically and culturally specific understanding of memory,
experience, embodiment and identity, narrators both reproduce the cultural modes of self-
narrating and critique the limits of these modes.” (Smith and Watson cited in Rege 1999: pp 17)
Dalit testimonies, in other words are pushing the envelope of auto/biography as method. Dalit
testimonios then, like auto/biographies require to be read differently.
Dalit women’s narratives in particular, go a step further. They also bring into the public domain
and therefore begin to challenge the control of the self by community. There is a dialectics between
the self and community which, in the caste of testimonios by Dalit women, make a unique
contribution.
Another focus the Dalit women’s testimonios brings up is the idea of ‘memory’. Abrahao, in her
article ‘Autobiographical Research: Memory, time and narratives in the first person’, calls memory
a key element in autobiographical research. Memory is a process through which meaning is
created. It is a constant reinterpretation of facts of the past brought into the present which the
narrator and the researcher create together as a memory they now share. The investigator therefore,
also participates in the narrative. In the act of production of the narrative it is reconstructed from
possibly selective memory.
“This is exactly how I feel: with my hands tied by what I am today, conditioned by my present when
I try to narrate the past in which I re-do, re-build, re-think with the images and the ideas of today.
The selection of what I include in the narration obeys the criteria of the present: I chose what
bears relations with the system of references that direct myself today. The (re) construction of my
past is selective: I do it from the present, because this is what tells me what is important and what
is not; I do not describe; I interpret.” (Soares cited in Abrahao 2012: 31)
Dalit women’s testimonios engage in a process of ‘rememory’. They do what Soares says in
Abrahao’s article – reconstruct histories and institutions but what is unique in this case is that they
remember that which the nation is actively trying to forget. The representation of women in Dalit

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male testimonios is very selective and tend to be limited to a woman’s role in the private sphere,
moreover, as expected they do not touch upon patriarchy. “Their public articulation of relational
identities of caste and gender, thus inscribes into history not only what dominant groups would
like to forget or think of as belonging to another time but also the selective memory of a
community.”(Rege 1999: pp 99)
Conclusion
Testimonios, like other auto/biographical methods study both history (what happened) and the
memories (what is remembered). Memory (re)constructs and forgets and therefore represents a
challenge, according to Alexandra de Heering in her article ‘Dalits and Memories Remembrance
of Days Past’. It produces documents “collected here and now about there and then.” Europe, with
its history in the Holocaust experienced a “memory craze” (Megill cited in de Heering 2016: pp
71) in around the 1970’s. In India, a few important studies were done on memory relating to
partition but they are few and far between.
Auto/biography is an interesting method to consider in social science research.
“Auto/biography replaces the ‘power over’ of scholarly authority offering instead a ‘power with’
the researching self and others. An auto/biographical text reflects a space in which truth and
reality are not fixed categories, where self-reflexive critique is sanctioned and where heresy is
viewed as liberatory.” (Spry cited in Shantz 2009: pp 123)

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References
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person. European Journal for research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 3(1),
29-31
De Heering, A. (2016). Dalits and Memories remembrance of days past. Economic and Political
Weekly, 52(11), 70-77.
Friedman, N. L. (1990). Autobiographical Sociology. The American Sociologist, 21(1), 60-66.
Goodson, I. (2009). The Story of Life History: Origins of the Life History Method in Sociology.
Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 1(2), 129-142.
Merrill, B., & West, L. (2009). Identifying some theoretical issues. In Using biographical
methods in social research (pp. 57-76).
Mykhalovskiy, E. (1996). Reconsidering Table Talk: Critical Thoughts on the Relationship
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Oakley, A. (2010). The social science of biographical life-writing: some methodological and
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Plummer, K. (2001). Getting and Doing Life Sciences. In Documents of life 2: An invitation to a
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Rege, S. (1999). Debating the Consumption of Dalit 'Autobiographies' The Significance of Dalit
'Testimonios'. In Writing Caste/ Writing Gender Narrating Dalit Women's Testimonios(
2nd ed., pp. 11-121). New Delhi: Zubaan.

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Shantz, J. (2009). Biographical Sociology: Struggles over an Emergent Sociological Practice.
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