Product Description

Biographical research is used as a general term to describe the rapidly growing interest in how to study individual lives in a range of disciplines and fields - by using autobiographies, biographies, life histories, life stories, and oral histories. The increase in the study of individual lives can be seen in the inclusion of biographical research on many courses in research methods and the number of books and journals now being published. There is also a general revival of interest in the nature of autobiographical and biographical writing, which has led to an increased examination of why such writing takes place, how it is defined, what materials should be considered 'autobiographical', and how audiences respond to it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #411027 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 212 pages

Review
‘Brian Roberts’ book is a highly accessible introduction to biographical method…The author deftly and confidently addresses the available work in a variety of disciplines ranging from education through oral history, feminism to memory… I warmly recommend this book to any historian interested in biography and what its study can tell them about what they do’. -Alun Munslow (Rethinking History 20030101)

‘Biographical Research is by Brian Roberts…who has been writing and working in this field for a long time…the book offers an extremely clear and concise review…an excellent introduction to the field for students’. -Ken Plummer (Sociological Review 20020101)

‘He examines methodological issues in such a lucid way that it is impressive…He is cognizant of the way very different disciplines use the taped life story approach…The clarity and writing style makes Brian Roberts’s Biographical Research a very readable text, and the breadth of this interdisciplinary book makes it especially informative’ -Valerie Yow (Oral History 20020101)

‘Anyone who set out to encompass the whole of biographical research in around 200 pages faces a formidable task…Roberts is certainly successful in conveying a sense of the rich diversity of biographical research. This is a book based upon a formidably wide-ranging bibliography together with his own, by no means insignificant, contributions to the field…[the]…reader will be left in no doubt as to the central importance of biographical research and of its legitimate position within the social sciences’. - David Morgan (BSA Study Group Journal )

‘It wasn’t long ago that a course in life history was a new idea ...I struggled to find a text book that could encompass and unify its several strands…It is a sign of the establishment of life history as a field that a text that would suit such interdisciplinary undergraduate courses has now arrived in the form of Brian Roberts’s Biographical Research…a very clear sense of the academic questions that have occurred…a broad brushstroke review of several biographical turns across the social sciences, and it reminds us of their richness in the British context’. -Margaretta Jolly (Biography )

About the Author
Brian Roberts is Principal Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences, University of Huddersfield. His writings have included work on time and identity in biographical work, communal change and Welsh labour history. (20030201)