life-history
life-historyAn ideographic approach which provides an intensive account of a life, usually gathered through unstructured interviewing, but often also involving the analysis of personal documents such as letters, photographs, and diaries. The approach is clearly akin to the gathering and examination of autobiographies and biographies. There are many early examples of the method, but two classics are those of Wladek, whose life is displayed in some three hundred pages of William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), and Stanley, in The Jack Roller (edited by Clifford Shaw, 1930). Both are associated with the Chicago School of sociology.
The life-history approach achieved some prominence during the 1920s and 1930s in North America, and prompted a debate over the value of
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