What’s Your History? Methodological Prospects and Challenges of Using Life-History Narratives as an Alternative Method to Assess Nonprofits’ Impacts

Author(s):  
Sonia Tello-Rozas ◽  
Valérie Michaud ◽  
Jacques Rhéaume
Inner Asia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuki Konagaya

AbstractIn this article I introduce our collection of oral histories composed of life histories recorded between 2001 and 2006. First, I discuss some devices implemented in the process of collecting life histories, which was to make oral histories 'polyphonic'. I then suggest that oral history always has a 'dual' tense, in that people talk about 'the past' from the view point of 'the present'. This is illustrated by six cases of statesmen narrating their views about socialist modernisation. Finally, using one of the cases, I demonstrate the co-existence of non-official or private opinions along with official opinions about the socialist period in life-history narratives in the post-socialist period. I call this 'ex-post value'.


1994 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Kathleen Weiler ◽  
Kathleen Casey ◽  
Sue Middleton

2020 ◽  
pp. 136346152090312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Kimmell ◽  
Emily Mendenhall ◽  
Elizabeth A Jacobs

The symptomatology for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) narrowly focuses on particular diagnostic frames and a single triggering event. Such narrow definitions of trauma and recovery have been heavily critiqued by anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists for overlooking cultural complexity as well as the effects of multiple and overlapping events that may cause someone to become “traumatized” and thereby affect recovery. This article investigates how subjective reporting of traumatic experience in life history narratives relates to depressive and PTSD symptomatology, cultural idioms, and repeated traumatic experiences among low-income Mexican immigrant women in Chicago. We interviewed 121 Mexican immigrant women and collected life history narratives and psychiatric scales for depression and PTSD. Most women spoke of the detrimental effects of repeated traumatic experiences, reported depressive (49%) and PTSD (38%) symptoms, and described these experiences through cultural idioms. These data complicate the PTSD diagnosis as a discrete entity that occurs in relation to a single acute event. Most importantly, these findings reveal the importance of cumulative trauma and cultural idioms for the recognition of suffering and the limitation of diagnostic categories for identifying the needs of those who experience multiple social and psychological stressors.


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