Biographische Forschung

Biographical Research Methods and Their Use in the Study of Senior Tourism

“…Life history (experiences, events and actions in the past) and life story (the remembered, processed and narrated history and its written account) are not necessarily identical, which can create a bias in the reinterpretation of the past. This difficulty of a temporal gap between the experience in the past and the recall of the experience and its ascribed meanings in the present (Fuchs‐Heinritz, ; Rosenthal, ) is not only apparent in biographic research but exists also in any research designs that rely on retrospective recall.…”

“…The analysis of key life events as turning points in an individual's life course for example demands a retrospective perspective because such watersheds can only be identified from a temporal distance (George, ). The biographic interview method allows the researcher to ‘reconstruct the social phenomena in the process of becoming’ (Rosenthal, , p. 50), which enables a better understanding of the complexity of social reality (Fuchs‐Heinritz, ) and the exploration and generation of theory (Faraday & Plummer, ). Levinson () also advocates the biographic research approach when he states the following:

The biographical method is the only one that enables us to obtain a complex picture of the life structure at a given time and to delineate the evolution of the life structure over a span of years.

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“…Phase III consists of a within‐case analysis of each travel history and is largely descriptive in nature. Fuchs‐Heinritz () classifies this approach as a ‘journalistic’ biographic research technique where the researcher reconstructs the unique experienced life course of each informant. The objective of this approach is for the researcher to become familiar with each case as a ‘stand‐alone entity’ (Eisenhardt, ).…”

“…A limitation of cross‐sectional data analysis is that this method lacks the ability to provide a historical and social contextualization of themes (suggested for example by theories on cohort effects), which is the key strength of the biographic research approach. As a result of this shortcoming, valuable information may remain unexploited (Fuchs‐Heinritz, ). It is important to note that in this study, life events of the informants occurred at differing ages and stages.…”