The “Frankfurt School” of Biographical Research – Theoretical Reflections on Reconstructive Research Methodology

Grounded in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and hermeneutics, the biographical research approach was developed as an alternative to a positivistic research tradition that was basically interested in measuring social phenomena and the testing of hypotheses in the sense of a logic of subsuming data under preconceived theory.

In contrast, the biographical research approach made it possible to gain access to social life worlds and social phenomena through the reconstruction of narratives of experiences. It opened up a new theoretical and methodological way to research social micro, meso and macro structures as embedded in biographies and thus learn about the effects of societal structures on the lives of individuals. Additionally, the biographical research methods need to be understood as a part of a larger research stream of a reconstructive research tradition. A basic assumption of the reconstructive tradition is that it is possible to find traces of broader social phenomena already in a single case study. Methodologically, this means that a single case study has to be researched in its ‘wholeness’ in order to reconstruct the intermingling of agency and social structures.

The emergence of reconstructive research logics in the social sciences goes back to the Frankfurt School and to Adorno’s critique of positivism as a social-scientific research approach. Adorno underlined the importance of analytical interpretation in order to go beneath the surface of phenomena. The reconstructive research tradition was developed further in Frankfurt in the 1980s and 1990s by Ulrich Oevermann, who integrated central concepts from Adorno’s thought into what he termed “objective hermeneutics”, which has also strongly influenced the methodological debate about biographical research.

In my paper I will discuss and reflect on the theoretical influence of the “Frankfurt School” for the methodological debate in reconstructive biographical research.