Research ethics committees and scientific reviewers may find the guiding principles in this paper a useful starting point for further reflection and discussion about narrative research studies.
Biographical research is increasingly used for understanding current historical and cultural changes and for purposes of education, training, and policy development. This "biographizing" movement is part of a broader picture of shifting configurations of concerns, concepts, and methodologies. In 2000, the introduction to the authors' The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science attempted such a picture. The authors wanted to promote greater mutual awareness and partnership between a "German" approach, seen as having a more explicit conceptual and methodological apparatus, and a "British" approach that had a greater concern for power relations around the interview relationship and in processing, interpreting, and reporting. In that text, cultural studies was relatively neglected and treated rather dismissively. The authors welcome the opportunity in this shortened, revised version to include a more extended and reflective treatment of cultural studies. They invite others to tell different stories, to supplement or correct their own The Burgeoning of Biographical Method Our choice of the phrase biographical turn for the title of our collection was a statement about the scope and influence of a shift in thinking that is currently shaping the agenda of research (and some policy applications) across the social science disciplines. This shift, which amounts to a paradigm change (Kuhn, 1960) or a change of knowledge culture (Somers, 1996), affects not only the orientations of a range of disciplines but their interrelations with each other. In general, it may be characterized as a &dquo;subjective&dquo; or &dquo;cultural&dquo; turn in which personal and social meanings, as bases of action, gain greater prominence.There is also by now a wide recognition that social science, in its longues duries of positivism, determinism, and social constructionism, has become detached from lived realities. And although structuration theory conceptualized the reproduction of social structures and cultures through the social action Cultural Studies H
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations –citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.