Soc 3960, NOV 22, 2006 On Life History 2.Why do we study life history

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Soc 3960, NOV 22, 2006 On Life History2. Why do
we study life history?

• Why do we study life history?

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• What can we learn about society from the lives of
  members
• How to do the life history how we learn about
  individuals,

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a method of learning about society through the
experiences of people in it.

• Interpretation of social acts from the
  perspective of Actors
• Exposure to other viewpoints get experiences
  that may not have been written down
• new explorations of apparently resolve issues

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• If you want to know the social history of a
  society, you need to know what was done that a
  focus on famous people misses
• A study of Edwardian way of life and also of the
  social history of Hamilton gathered life
  histories of ordinary people. They asked them
  about things they did that had not been written
  down. They asked about the games people played,
  what they wore, the toys they used, what they
  ate, information largely vanished except for
  diaries.

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• An everyday life describes important downsides
  and diversity in society.
• What can one life tell you about society and
  peoples experience?

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• Life histories can also be used to understand
  people deemed important.
• The difference between a life history and a
  census?

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Why do we title it the comparative life history?

• We are emphasizing the importance of contexts.
  We compare individuals as well. We want to study
  the lives of individuals, and we do so in
  comparison with others.
• Such a Comparison needs a Structure

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How do people construct their lives?

• For us is our interest in the ordinary people,
  and especially how people experience their
  everyday lives. We want to understand what
  happened to that person.
• We go to the every day experiences of people, and
  try to figure out what shapes these experiences.
• It is structural because we are sociologists, not
  psychologists. we want to make sense of their
  life from the social structure we are in.

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The external environment

• Recession and boom, affect the path we take, and
  whether jobs even exist.
• Demographic ratios
• Macro Organizational structures
• Danial Berteaux about people that went through
  cataclysmic events, like the Russian Revolution,
  they wrote about expropriation of their property,
  what they did.

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Peoples social position

• There are differences, variations in the
  sequences, by countries, and social class, and by
  region.
• Social class, comprised of educational levels,
  rural/urban geographical location, occupations of
  family members. These are central for placing
  individuals in kinds of experiences that we
  expect people like them have had.
• The kind of work we do and the kind of family we
  grow up in and form are related.
• --Structure of the work Organization of their
  parents, how they brought up, their own work, if
  older people.
• --Careers

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• Structure of the work organization of their
  parents, how they brought up, their own work, if
  older people.
• Careers

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Cohorts

• What happened at that time to people of their
  age. (Elder made famous.)
• Cohorts refer to an age grouping. a birth cohort.
  or cohort of experience that many people have
  gone through Age is embedded in a time and place.
  Because of experiences that many people have
  gone through. background factors that affect how
  people organize their lives. Living through the
  depression or a war experienced things that they
  share with others their age. The regularity of
  going through the roles shapes our life course.
• individual has no effect The cohort changes in
  different societies differ. Examples in Hong
  Kong migration, July 1 2003, others?

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• Cohort has an historical position. It
  experiences macro events over which the
  individual has no effect The cohort changes in
  different societies differ. Examples in Hong
  Kong migration, July 1 2003, others?

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Human capital

• what the individual has learned that is needed
  for the job. Their education, experience. Fit
  to their social position, work place of their
  parents, their expected niche (cultural capital
  concept) Nature of training of family to fit
  these work roles varies by family position.
  Typical kinds of skills people learn and ways
  they are expected to develop their careers.
• Things they are not supposed to do to harm
  development of their human capital

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Social groups

• When we study life history of a person, we pay
  attention to the important social groups in their
  lives. These include family circle, kin, other
  social circles that they participate in. typical
  /idiosyncratic social features, exposure to
  particular social experiences.

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• There are structural regularities that shape a
  person's life. The demographics of the time led
  to particular likelihood of exposure to
  birth/death regimes, in which patterns of loss
  and presence were common. People would lusually
  have had a large number of siblings at the early
  part of the century, and many would have died.
  Parents would have died. Social structure took
  care of typical recurrent problems. There were
  social arrangements that could enter in. Today,
  people of the same age do not have those
  individuals, the consequences of loss are
  different. There are also structural feature of
  being in a sibling position, the eldest child
  has different life courses than the youngest
  child in many periods throughout the world.

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• When we study life history of a person, we draw
  these factors together by relating them to their
  roles in the important social groups in their
  lives.
• Family circle, kin, other social circles that
  they participate in. What are the roles that the
  individual we are studying holds? Why did they
  adopt a particular role, and how did they adopt
  it?

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Social relations or social capital

• You can understand their opportunity structures
  better by asking people to compare themselves
  with others in their immediate circle they know,
  such as a brother or sister, especially someone
  of similar circumstances. One way to get at this
  is the social networks of people in relation to
  ego. We want to map the people they have contact
  with. We can use this information to do several
  things. i) we can place them in the wider
  society. with information on social roles. They
  craft their lives in relation to others.

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• The social networks that are typically social and
  part of the business. Each type of business
  has its own particular structure of relations.
  We maintain there are differences in how people
  are treated in different organizations. There
  are patterns. These patterns can be described by
  formal and informal rules and relations.
• Who are in their social networks? Multiplex
  networks, same people for most every event.
• Associations they belong to

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interaction categories

• The inner life meaning people give to their
  lives. We not only want to know what people did
  in their lives, their behavior. We also want to
  know how they felt about it. We try to capture
  the inner life meaning.
• The typical social interpersonal interaction
  patterns
• We can relate the interaction categories to
  structures., for instance where they work Are
  there typical patterns associated with this kind
  of economy?

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• The small family-based firm requires complete
  dedication to the family. Here the family and the
  formal enterprise are mainly united.
• Interpersonal styles at the Micro level
  emotional training interaction work. Severity
  and cost of noncompliance
• consensus is important in their enterprise
• routines

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Varied definitions of the situation

• In the interactionist view, this is negotiated by
  people around you. You want to know who is
  important in their lives, what are the views of
  important figures. In your papers then the most
  important issues include finding how views were
  created, and how alternative actions were created.

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The Self

• People create a sense of who they are by the
  contexts around them. negotiate these through
  everyday interaction. When you do a life
  history, you want to capture the sense of the
  negotiated self. Make sure individuals express
  their multiple choices, their doubts, their
  alternatives, their changes of minds. What did
  they take into account. Then you can figure out
  why they did what they did. If you look only at
  the outcome, you will miss their development.
  multiple paths lead to the outcome. Why did they
  take the paths they did, what were the contrary
  forces and why did they object these.

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The Concept of Turnings

• This concept was developed in a study of great
  men, like Ghandhi or Luther, who changed their
  lives suddenly, developed a philosophy, by those
  that tried to see were there specific profound
  experiences that started a person on a new track.
• People experience changes in their lives that set
  them on a new path and make a mark on them. You
  want to capture a moment that marks their
  personality, they way of seeing things.
• These can be larger, what occurs to the society
  a war, displacement, migration, move from one
  country to another,
• They can be accidental, someone offers them a job.

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How to collect it?

• Who to study?
• Whose point of view do we take?
• Does the person need to be important?
• Many people doing life histories study ordinary
  people. These people do not control the press
  and their views are often overlooked. If you do a
  social history of a period, you may not want to
  only read about peoplel so famous they fill the
  press.
• How old does a person have to be?

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• How much detail to take
• We look for a sense of the organic, not
  fragmentation

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• Bertaux- Life histories about the meaning of the
  home, he had people write about how they felt
  about and used their family home, noting the home
  meant different things to people who had estates
  and the family estate symbolized their family
  line, their heritage, versus the middle class
  that bought and sold homes as they were socially
  mobile and the family home represented their
  mobility, their position in a different way, and
  the working class whose home represents decency

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• Telling a good story
• The main thing about a life history is its
  narrative. A good story is always hard to beat.
  How do you weave in a good story? The dense
  description, the creation of the setting are part
  of our tools. Conversation analysis is also part
  of the tool, use specific quotes.
• Asking questions
• How do we gain understandings from life history?
• What questions to ask?

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• We want to ask how not why.
• This question how directs us to the mechanisms
  that shape peoples choices. They let us
  interpret. the question why suggests a
  psychological reason

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• Behaviorally, we seek to understand a persons
  choices, the paths that they take, the
  opportunities that present themselves, what they
  choose. Attitudinally, we want to know how they
  feel about these choices that they had and took.
• Structurally, how were their views created?