Life history and the critique of American sociological practice

This paper is a contribution to the uses of life histories and the dialogue regarding the "standards" for their use. Through a meta-analysis of life h istories in the United States since the publication of the Polish Peasant. we develop a typology to critically evaluate their methodological/theoretic al practices in sociology. We find a broad range of uses of life histories in the areas of substantive focus, analysis, relationship of oral history a nd the subject, relationship of oral/life history to other materials, purpo se of the re search, and relationship of oral/life history to other phenome na. We conclude that life history methods have not had the transformative e ffect on sociology that they have had in other disciplines. By and large, t he actual production of life histories continues to be ahistorical, to be c haracterized by abstract empiricism, to extinguish subjects, and to ignore the link between biography and history.