“Biographical accounts as a workable strategy in educational research”
Guadalupe Rodriguez
Paper presented at the conference“Directions in educational research: postgraduate perspectives”, University of Leicester, 24-24 July 2003
Introduction
Biographies reveal the relationship between the private and the public worlds individuals experience. The recording of these two structures in a personal document is the hallmark of the biographical method (Merrill, 2002).
In qualitative research, biographical methods have been widely used. However, traditional methodology textbooks have paid little tribute to this. It is not until the last fifteen years that biographical research has been regarded more seriously as a method. As more emphasis was put into biographies and collection of life stories, biographical accounts began to be seen as points of research and discussion and not merely as components of any other ‘serious’ method (Roberts, 2002). This change has been registered as the ‘biographical turn’ in social research. The fields of study where biographies have been used have also been extended within the social sciences; however, most of the studies were conducted under positivist approaches.
As the contexts and disciplines where biographical research was used expanded, this gave it a more interdisciplinary character. One of the areas where it has been fruitful covering topics like schooling experiences, teachers’ careers and lives, is education. “The biographical or narrative turn has had an impact on the ways in which educational experiences, processes and policies are researched and understood” (Coffey, 2001: 6). The classroom, the school structure, teachers’ experience in the educational systems and students’ achievement, for example, had already been focus of study, however, now they were analysed under different approaches “It would appear that the telling of a story about a life has become an important aspect of practice and research in professional teaching and other settings” (Riessman, 1993: 5-6 in Roberts 2002: 23).Theoretically speaking, feminist theory also influenced the development of this research by appealing to the value of voice, consciousness raising and empowerment. “The insights of the women’s movement began to have a transformative effect on fields such as oral history and women’s experience were accorded value and writers began to regard oral accounts as means of recording women’s social and historical experiences” (Gluck and Patai, 1991:1 in Roberts 2002: 29).
In my interest to explore students’ identity and the interrelation of this with their educational experience, using a biographical account sounded promising. “As well as documenting individual lives and identities, the biographical turn in sociological enquiry provides a strategy for exploring personal histories and biographies, as well as the relationships between structure and agency in contemporary society” (Coffey, 2001: 54). Using this approach could open a window to try and see how students’ (re)constructed their identity as they went through university life. “Biographical research is part of a movement to reveal and understand the ‘personal’ and its interlinking with the immediate and wider social context and political practices” (Roberts, 2002: 31). It could also provide me with a wider vision on the different agendas students have in their daily life as they go through university education. What would the biographical accounts reveal about the ways students construct their identity? This was one of the key questions throughout my study.
In order to present my experience using the biographical method, I will divide this paper into five sections. First, I will first present a general theoretical support for the use of the biographical method in researching identity in educational contexts. Second, I will write about the context of my study and the aims for conducting it. Third, I will write about the methodology followed specifically to collect the students’ accounts. Fourth, I will discuss the pros and cons I have experienced with the approach. And finally, I will present some preliminary findings of my research.
The biographical approach
The term biographical research is used to refer not to one approach to research but to a different range of similar approaches, whose main field of study is ‘lives’. “Biographical research is an exciting, stimulating and fast-moving field which seeks to understand the changing experiences and outlooks of individuals in their daily lives, what they see as important and how to provide interpretation of the account they give of their past, present and future” (Roberts, 2002: 1). The methodology I used to collect the students’ accounts is guided by this concept.
The definitions of the biographical method as well as materials relevant to study with this approach vary. The definition of biographical research I have used in my study follows the lines of Roberts (2002: 3) where the term is used “to denote work which uses stories of individuals and other ‘personal materials’ to understand the individual life within its social context.” The type of accounts students produced for my research fall within this category of ‘personal materials’. Coffey’s (2001) notion of biographical research complements this definition by identifying the centrality of individual experiences as mechanisms for illuminating social processes in educational settings. According to her, biographical research has its emphasis on how social actors routinely engage in educational contexts and how they articulate and makesense of these experiences.
Sarantakos’s (1994)version ofbiographical accounts identifies two elements: how the authors define themselves and social action and how their individuality is influenced by social factors. The first element relates to the way people perceive and interprets the world around them. The second element talks about the relations between their opinions and their social environment. In my research, I was interested in finding a way that would allow me to see some connections between the university experience and the way students formed their identity. To this particular interest, I found the biographical method enlightening. On one hand, you could see, through the student’s pieces of writing, how they read the world around them, their perception of reality. On the other hand, it could also offer some insights into how their opinions were influenced by the social environment of which the university and they were part of.
Now, how could the students’ accounts based on their life experience at the university offer some insight into the way they constructed their identity?
Biographies and identities in an educational research project
“Identities are negotiated and biographies constructed through school processes, learning encounters, and curricular engagement. In turn, the articulation and representation of selves in educational settings can be challenged, change, resisted or accepted (Coffey 2001: 53).”
The relationship between biographical research and identity is important since most debates on the condition of identity construction in our times are developed in the field of abstract theory (Roberts, 2002). Therefore, a study on identity which explores the ‘lived lives’becomes appropriate and relevant. Studying through biographical accounts how identities are constructed opens up a space for insights into how factors like space, organizations and other social structures like youth and gender groups participate in this identity or identities’ formation. In my study, in particular, the university is considered as a site of identity formation by offering a spatial, organizational and grouping structure for students, “educational arenas form important sites for the active engagement of identity and biographical work” (Coffey, 2001: 53). Educational research in colleges and universities in the last 20 years has primarily been focused on academic achievement and students’ attitudes and aspirations (Pascarella and Terenzini, 2001). With the emerging interest in biographical work, “schools, and other educational arenas, have increasingly been seen as sites for the active construction, production and reproduction of biographies and identities. Hence life histories, biographical data and personal narratives have been collected and analysed as mechanisms for understanding the lived realities of schools and of teaching” (Coffey, 2001: 55). In most of the studies conducted using the biographical method, however, the interest has been put on the teachers’ agenda: academic identity, racial and gender issues (Goodson 1997; Munro 1998; Weiler and Middleton 1999 cited in Coffey, 2001). My study, on the other hand, focuses on the students’ identity.
In order to better contextualise the use of the biographical method in my study, the next section details the aims and context of my research.
Aims and contextof my research
Aims
The motivation for my research sprung up from my experience in teaching university students in Mexico and working for two types of universities, a public and a private one. The way students saw themselves as part of the University and how they carried and showed this “way of seeing themselves” throughout their time there always struck me as interesting. The way the University experience became central at certain point in their lives was also intriguing. Finding out whatthe students as related themselves to higher education and how they valued it guided the key questions in my study. A focal aim in my study was to find out how students created and (re)created their identity inside an educational institution and to what extent the university was involved in this issue of identity formation.I was not only interested in particular processes of identity formation but rather in developing a wider understanding of the role of higher education to shape the identity of people in our society and elaborate a more critical view of it.
Context of study
The study was conducted in two universities in the State of Nuevo Leon, Mexico; a private (ITESM) and a public one (UANL).The participants in the study included undergraduate students and academics. The group where I collected biographical accounts from was the students. The study comprised 365 studentsfromScience and Social Sciences and in their second year of study. The idea was to get a purposive sample of students where both systems of education –public and private university- and at least two fields of science were represented. I was also interested in students who would have been in the university for at least one year so they would have already had a ‘feel’ for university life experience that they could write about. The following table sums up the sample of students in my study:
(Please insert table no. 1 here)
The data collection was done in the university premises and in the following paragraphs I will explain how it was done.
Description of the data collection and theeducational biographical account
In order to collect information from students I used a technique which I called the educational biographical account. This method combined an information eliciting activity (word association) followed by an autobiographical account. The word association technique is one that I had extensively used as a teacher, mostly in language courses, to elicit vocabulary. Guided by a grounded theory orientation in my methodology, I found it useful to get students to write about how they valued higher education departing from their own ideas rather than from topics induced by me. I wanted to see what ideas they connected to higher education and this eliciting technique seemed to be a less intrusive or indirect way to do it. The purpose of its application is best described by Sarantakos (1994: 209) in his description of biographical methods, “In the context of qualitative research, biographical methods attempt to present a perception of the self and the world from the viewpoint of the author of the biography.”
This is how the technique was conducted. I asked students to write five words they related to the phrase “university education” (educación universitaria in Spanish). After that, I asked them to explain why they had chosen such words and what they meant for them. An example of the technique I used can be seen on appendix 1. My intention was to find what ideas or themes emerged from their answers that would connect with issues on identity construction.
Before students started writing, I explained to them the aims of my research trying to get their writings directed towards my purpose. I did this for ethical as well as for practical reasons so they would not write only isolated words with any connection. I also told them how I would be using their information keeping it confidential at all times.
I have typed and analysed 365 documents in total; the amount of documents not processed was a low percentage and it was mainly due to inability to understand the students’ handwriting or when the students failed to provide basic information that would allow a proper classification of the document.
Data analysis
In order to analyse my data I followed the process of qualitative analysis suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994: 10-12) which includes four basic principles: data reduction (through coding), data display and conclusion drawing and verification (for detailed information of the model see Miles and Huberman 1994). While typing the students’ documents was a time consuming task it helped me elaborate the memos or commentary documents suggested by Miles and Huberman’s model for a preliminary analysis.
I had originally planned using the qualitative research software NVIVO to facilitate the management of my data; at this moment, I am still evaluating its usefulness since the analysis I have conducted so far has been done manually. One drawback I found using NVIVO was that entering the documents and codes could take a long time. However, I still found it useful to manage the data. The fact that it can organise the data into big categories and be used to find correlation among data categories such as age, gender and field of study groups is a positive feature. Furthermore, its quantitative output of data could be used to complement a primarily qualitative analysis and this is the benefit I am planning to use in my research (Kelle, 1995).
Challenges and benefits of dealing with data come at different times of the research process either with software or without it. From collection to data analysis they pose interesting questions and bring the research to new stands and ways to develop. In the following section, I will write about the challenges and benefits I have experienced using the biographical account.
Challenges and benefits of using the biographical approach
As Silverman (2000) states, there are only ‘useful’ or ‘more useful than’ techniques to fit a theory and a methodology and it is important to address the issues and limitations as well as the positive impressions experienced with a certain method.
The relatively new appearance of the biographical method as a trend in social science research make it susceptible, as any other method, to hard criticism in terms of lacking unity in its epistemological and methodological assumptions. This is in part due to its eclecticism in the way decisions are made as to what constitutes relevant material to study, how it is gathered and further on how it is analysed. “This expansion of interest in the study of lives and the use of biographical material raises the immediate issue of whether there is really common ground –in epistemology, methodology, interpretation and theoretical framework: a shared approach” (Roberts 2002: 169). This biographical turn, as Roberts calls it, challenges the researchers and the audiences to doing research in different ways; to exploring old concepts in new lights and to continue refining their methods of enquiry. It is in this fashion that emergent methodologies develop and become recognised; the biographical turn may just as well follow the same path.
As mentioned above, one of the challenges associated with the biographical method is the variety of material it may cover. Although some clarifications have been made in respect to some terms such as life history vs. life story (Atkinson, 1998), the main term remains at times elusive of definition. According to Miller (2000: 19) “life history refers to a series of substantive events arranged in chronological order.” Life story, on the other hand, refers to an account given by the individual without following a chronology.In my research, the type of material produced by students falls into this category.Although it is not written as a biography per se, it does include aspects of the students’ lives as they go through university. The challenge here is to make the material fit the description of a ‘biographical piece’ which in itself remains elusive in standard literature. An ethical and epistemological issue arises with my accounts because I am giving students a central idea to write about, different from life stories. This is an advantage as well as a risk. By channelling their answers to one topic I make sure they write about what my study is looking for; the other hand, I may as well be confining their writings to one particular aspect of their lives. The decision to conduct the data collection this way foresaw these problems, however in the interest of practicality I decided to take that risk.
Another challenge I faced with the educational biographical account was the fact that it was technique I had not used it before in doing social research but as a teaching tool. I was not sure if the writings were going to come out clear and focused. A pilot study using this technique could have been beneficial; unfortunately, practical issues like limited time and budget would not allow me to do it. The first groups I worked with had a rougher experience with a less focused explanation of what to do on my part. I even changed the format of the activity later on as I realized there was some information I would need from students and I had not included that in the original format. This let me experience one of the benevolent sides of qualitative research where rewriting your process along the way is part of the research experience and opens a space for reflexivity, especially if novice in the field. Here also lies the basis for my argument that the flexibility of the biographical method to accept as valid a wide range of materials opens spaces for innovation and development of the methodology itself. It offers a field where new methods can be tried out and the possibility to explore social issues in a different light, from different angles, perhaps not yet explored.