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Penelitian Jenis Biografi
A BIOGRAPHY
A biography study is the study of an
individual and her or his experiences as told to researcher or found in
documents an archival material. Denzin (1989a) defines the biographical method
as the “studied use and collection of life documents that describe
turning-point moments in an individual’s life” (p.69). These account explore
lesser lives, great lives, thwarted lives, live cut short, or lives miraculous
in their un applauded achievement (Heilbrun, 1988). Regardless of the type of
life, I use the term biography to denote the broad genre of biographical
writings (Smith, 1994) that includes individual biographies, autobiographies,
life histories, and oral histories. I also rely on Denzin’s (1989a) approach to
biography called an interpretive
biography, because the writer tells and inscribes the stories of others:
“We create the persons we write about, just as they create themselves when they
engage in story telling practices” (p.82).
Biographical
writing has roots in different disciplines and has found renewed interest in
recent years. The intellectual strands of this traditions are found in
literary, historical, anthropological, psychological, and sociological
perspectives as well as in interdisciplinary views from feminist and cultural
thinking (see Smith, 1994, who discusses these variants).
My
particular interest is in exploring the sociological perspective, and thus I
rely on writers such as Plummer (1983) and especially Denzin (1989a, 1989b).
Evoking a “baseline” from the humanities, Plummer (1983), for example,
discusses the evolution of “document of life” research from the great literary
works of Dostoevski, Dickens, Balzac, and Austen with a focus on human-centered
research. Plummer ties biographical writings to the early works of the
Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s
through works such as Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1958) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a study of some
2,200 pages of Polish immigrants to Chicago. Other books are instrumental
across anthropology, psychology, and sociology in laying the foundation for
social science biographical writing such as Dollard’s (1935) Criteria for
the Life History, the psychological
approaches in Allport’s (1942) The Uses
of Personal Document Psychological Science and more recently, Edel’s (1984)
Writing Lives and Anthropologist Langness’s (1965) The Life History in
Anthropological Science. I could mention many
other authors who have influenced biographical writing in the social sciences in general and in sociology
in particular (Smith, 1994); however, in my biographical discussions, I rely
Denzin (1989a), who not only construct the classical approach to biography but
also espouses an interpretive approach.
Procedurally,
then, a qualitative researcher faces several decisions is undertaking a
biographical type of study (and I would not go so far as to imply an order to
these decisions). The first issue is to select the type of biographical study
to be undertaken. Denzin (1989a) reviews the various type and their
characteristics. Although biographical forms of research vary and the terms
reflect different discipline perspectives, all forms represent an attempt to
construct the history of life.
·
In
a biographical study, the life story
of an individual is written by someone other than the individual being studied
using archival documents and records (Denzin, 1989a). Subjects of biographies
may be living or deceased. Throughout this book, I focus attention on this because
of its popularity with graduate students and social and human science writers.
·
In
a autobiography, the life story is
written by persons about themselves (Angrosino, 1989a). This form seldom is
found in graduate student research.
·
Another
form, the life history, is an
approach found in the social sciences and anthropology where a researcher
reports on an individual’s life and how it reflects cultural themes of the
society, personal themes, institutional themes, and social histories(Cole,
1994). The investigator collect data primarily through interviews and
conversation with the individual (see
Bailey, 1978: Geiger, 1986). For a sociological definition, Plummer (1983)
states that a life history “the full length book’s account of the one person’s
of life in his or her own words. Usually, it will be gathered over a number of years with gentle guidance from
the social scientist, the subject either writing down episodes of life or tape
recording them. At its best, it will be backed up with intensive observation of
the subject’s life, interview with friends and perusals of letters and
photographs. (p.14)
·
An
oral history is an approach in which
the researcher gathers personal recollections of events, their causes, and
their effect from an individual or several individuals. This information may be
collected through tape recordings or through written works of individuals who
have died or who are still living.
In addition to these broader forms,
specific biographies may be written “objectively,” with little researcher
interpretation; “scholarly,’ with a strong historical background of the subject
and a chronological organization; “artistically”, from the perspective of the
presenting details in a lively and
interesting manner; or in a ”narrative” form, a fictionalized account of scenes
and characters (Smith, 1994).
One needs to decide whether he or she
is going to approach the biography from the more classical traditions stance
(Denzin, 1970; Helling, 1988; Plummer, 1983) or from the interpretive approach
(Denzin 1989a, 1989b). In a classical biography, the researcher uses statements
about theory, concern with validity and criticism of documents and materials,
and the formulation of distinct hypotheses, all drawn from the perspective of
the researcher (Denzin, 1989a). The interpretive biography, my preferred
approach to biographical writing, operates on entirely different set of
assumptions and is well identified is a slim volume by Denzin (1989a) on
Interpretive Biography. This forms of biographical writing challenges the
traditional approaches and asks that biographers be cognizant of how studies
are both read and written.
In the interpretive view, biographies are, in part, written
autobiographies of the writers, thus blurring the lines between fact and fiction
and leading the authors to “create” the subject in the next. Biographers cannot
partial out their own biases and values; thus,, biographies become gendered
class productions reflecting the lives of the writers. These point, Denzim
(1989a) alleges, need to be acknowledged
by the biographers and reflected in the written biographies.
Given these central assumptions,
Denzim (1989a) advances several procedural steps.
1. The investigator begin with an
objective set of experiences in the subject’s life nothing life course stages and experiences. The stages may be childhood,
adolescence, early adulthood, or old age, written as a chronology, or as experiences such as education, marriage, and
employment.
2. Next, the researcher gathers concrete
contextual biographical materials using interviewing (e.g., the subject recount
a set of life experiences in the form of a story or narrative). Thus, a focus
is on gathering stories.
3. These stories are organized around
themes that indicate pivotal events (or epiphanies)
in an individual’s live.
4. The researcher explores the meaning of
these stories, relying on the individual to provide explanations and searching
for multiple meanings.
5. The researcher also looks for larger
structures to explain the meanings, such as social interactions in groups,
cultural issues, ideologies, and historical context, and provides an
interpretations for the life experiences of the individual (or
cross-interpretations if several individuals are studied).
Given these procedures and the characteristics of a
biography, it is challenging for the following reasons:
§ The researcher needs to collect
extensive information from and about the subject of the biography.
§ The investigator needs to have a clear
understanding of historical, contextual material to position the subject
within the larger trends in society or
in the culture.
§ It takes a keen eye to determine the
particular stories, slant, pr angle that “works” in writing a biography and to
uncover the “figure under the carpet” (Edel, 1984) that explains the
multilayered context of a life.
§ The writer, using an interpretive
approach, needs to be able to bring himself or herself into the narrative and
acknowledge his or her standpoint.
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