652.1
Why Empirical Sociology Needs Life Stories
Whatever continent they live in, women and men will act so as to try and make their life better. This universal tropism orients most of their individual courses of action: the succession of steps an individual actor takes to try and reach one of her/his significant goal(s). Indeed it takes planning, mobilizing information and means, finding support, focusing efforts, anticipating obstacles, (re)defining tactics and strategies to move a project forward through months and years. Examples are: getting a degree; looking for a decent job; moving upward in organization (‘career’); finding a place to live; attaching to oneself a desired partner; buying a flat; raising a child (long and tricky course); divorcing; changing one’s job; setting up one’s own business; fighting an illness; getting rid of some addiction; becoming an activist of some cause; emigrating and settling in another society… All these courses of action aim ultimately at changing one’s social status: from student to graduate, unemployed to employed, bachelor to married, childless to parent, ill to healthy, from passive to active citizen… In a constructivist perspective, millions of such courses of action contribute together powerfully to shape societies and their history. However none of empirical sociology’ standard methods has been designed to observe a course of action. Indeed it takes narrative interviewing with actors to try and reconstruct, admittedly with imperfections, what they did, with whom, in which context(s), how they did it (and why). For instance, only through series of (focused) life stories – the damned method? - collected in the same social world may one understand sociologically what are its inner workings, how they are re-produced, how they change. Furthermore these informative testimonies will cross-check each other, solving several validity issues.