ABSTRACT
Biography and auto-biography are increasingly being seen as important dimensions of social and educational inquiry (cf. Erben, 1998). This is because the individual and their relations with other individuals are essential to an understanding of social life. This is not to prioritise the individual over society but to emphasise the need to preserve individual agency in the face of structural, institutional and systemic accounts of life. The essential building blocks of the biographical method are the text, the narrative, time, multiple perspectives, relationships between the structural and the agential , t radi t ions of thought and inscript ive pract ices, interpretation and identity. Though biography and auto-biography focus on the individual life, this is not to suggest that other forms of social inquiry are illegitimate and that other data-collection methods are not appropriate in other circumstances. However, it is to suggest that this form of inquiry allows appreciation of the driving force of society-the complex interactional activity of a number of individuals, all seeking to create and recreate themselves in the context of forms of life which are continually undergoing transformation.
