ABSTRACT

In Chapter 3, I noted that life-history research seeks to advance C. Wright Mills’s (1959) vision of the sociological imagination as an enterprise that grapples with the intersection of biography and history in society and the ways in which personal troubles are related to public issues. Moreover, life-history research has the added value of narrating people’s lives for the purpose of making connections to readers, enabling them to develop empathy with people who are often marginalized in society and whose experiences are often misrepresented and misunderstood (Berger and Quinney 2005; Goetting 1995). On the other hand, Jabar Gubrium and James Holstein (1999) are concerned that sociologists who tell stories of people’s lives not abandon their professional obligation to make analytical sense of these narratives. It is one thing, they argue, to allow “indigenous voices [to] have their own say,” it is quite another thing to abandon the responsibility to “complement and contextualize the explication of informants’ accounts, or nonaccounts, as the case may be” (1999: 599-600).