INDIVIDUALS LIFE STORIES

How and Why Do Individuals Life Stories Become Relevant to Sociological Inquiry?

How and Why Do Individuals Life Stories Become Relevant to Sociological Inquiry?

Introduction

Producing biography is a progressively more popular form of narrative-based inquiry in fields as diverse as, sociology and history. Methods of inquiry into personal experiences emerge as such labels as oral history, life history, auto ethnography, biography, and autobiography. In spite of their differences, the widespread reason of these ways is to investigate biographical experiences and to signify that previous experiences in a descriptive shape which offers rich context and detail about the individual life. This paper discusses how and why individuals life stories become relevant to sociological inquiry.

Discussion

Though differences between oral histories, life stories, life histories, and autobiographies are problematic and contested, they characteristically aim to offer analyses and accounts of how people add up their lived experience in the creation of both social and distinct identity (Bertaux 2001 18-21). A number of life historians state that the analysis of the historical, social, economic, and political contexts of such experiences is what transforms a life story into a biography. That is, life histories put stories of any person lives within a bigger picture. The background settings of a biographies let us discover the generative relationship between culture and individuals that describe a biography. (Backscheider 2001 14-20)

Charles Wright Mills and his thoughts on individuals life stories & sociological inquiry

Individuals life stories could be recognized as a scholarly site where personal story turns into the social sciences. It meets the hope to apply the analytic and descriptive procedures that C. W. Mills prominently called the “sociological imagination”. Mills stated that all enlightened publics should believe in the relationship between history and biography. In his book “Sociological Imagination”, he introduced a new method of thinking that may not only assist informed publics to better appreciate the sense of their era for their own lives but also assist them to be dynamic contributors in the making of history. Just by using a “sociological imagination” can people deal with their distinct dilemmas and manage the structural changes that lay beneath them. (Daniel 2009 75-80)

In order to highlight the relationship between biography and history, this paper employs a case study that discusses that enabling students to develop their 'sociological imagination' is best accomplished through the use of 'biographical writing.' Biographical writing is here described as writing your own experiences. This paper indicates that sociological learning can be seen to occur in three similar modes: literal, interpretive and biographical. In progressing through these modes of learning, students are able to acquire the sociological imagination more fully. Further, instructors who model these practices by being transparent about their own pedagogical practice provide an example of how the sociological imagination can be employed even within the context of sociological instruction. (Oates 2006, 66-68)

Some fifty years after the publication of the Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills, students of sociology often have difficulty grasping the "interplay of man ...