Betty's Story

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Gifted Students ◽  
Textual Information ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Purposeful Sampling ◽  
The Social ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Member Checks

This life history is created within the context of a larger study. Purposeful sampling was used to identify six college-aged, self-identified intellectuals from a group of students in a University Scholars program at a large university. The group included three men and three women all around 20 years old. Multiple interviews with member checks were used to create textual data from each participant. Participants discussed personal independence, the desire to learn, the meaning of the term “intellectual,” attitudes toward schooling, their teachers, educational programs for intellectually gifted students, social and cultural interests, their personal lives, and other topics. The analysis of the data used textual information from the interviews combined with information from sociological and anthropological sources to situate the participants' life stories in social, historical, and cultural contexts thereby creating life histories. A life lived is what actually happens. A life experienced consists of the images, feelings, desires, thoughts, and meanings known to the person whose life it is … A life as told, a life history, is a narrative, influenced by the cultural conventions of telling, by the audience, and by the social context (Denzin, 1989, p. 30).

scholarly journals The (mis)uses of life histories. The linguistic turn, life histories and (women’s) life stories

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Claudia de Lima Costa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Women's Lives

This paper retraces the debates on life-histories before and after the linguistic turn in the social sciences, and, more specifically, in the anthropological tradition. It stresses how poststructuralist feminist methodological, theoretical, and political appropriations of personal narratives represent a significant textual intervention in the gendered social-cultural scripts of women’s lives.

Capturing life histories about movements into and out of poverty: A road with pits and bumps

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tineke Schiettecat ◽  
Griet Roets ◽  
Michel Vandenbroeck
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Dynamic Interaction ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Social Work Interventions ◽  
A Current

In order to take into account the power imbalances typically implicated in knowledge production about the complex social problem of poverty, social work researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of grasping the viewpoints and perspectives of people in poverty situations. In this contribution, we accordingly reflect on a current life history research project that retrospectively explores the life stories of parents with young children with regard to their mobility into and out of poverty that is examined in dynamic interaction with social work interventions. In this article, we discuss methodological and ethical challenges and complexities that we unexpectedly encountered in our research venture, as illustrated by three exemplary vignettes. These examples demonstrate issues of power between the researcher and the research participants that are not only inevitable, but also generate dilemmas, struggles and ambiguities that often remain underexposed in the ways scientific insights are reported. Rather than disguising these pits and bumps, we argue for a reflexive research stance which makes these issues of power in knowledge production susceptible to contemplation and scrutiny.

Uncovering hidden historical narratives of village women in Namibia

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Ndeshi Namhila
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Research Experiences ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
History Approach ◽  
Village Women

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the research techniques used by the author in collecting, analysing and writing life histories of women in the war during Namibia's independence struggle. The interest in recording and writing about these women arose because writing about the independence struggle of Namibia is dominated by men and little has been written about women; the little that is written tends to portray women as victims rather than as independent actors conscious of their decisions and the consequences of such decisions. This history is in danger of being lost if not tapped while these women are still alive. Design/methodology/approach – A life history approach was followed to appraise the methods used to listening to the women narrating their life stories and to listen to their life stories narrated by those who knew them, worked with them, and shared a prison experience with them. These stories were collected through open interviews followed by more structured interviews with list of open-ended questions with each woman. Life history follows an induction approach, starting with the story and using the stories to create themes and a method or framework guiding the interview recordings, analysing, writing and presentation of the story. Findings – The stories of the five women led to the demystification of woman as mere victims of repressive regimes and military conflicts. In collecting oral history sources on a subject such as the liberation struggle in a society that was torn apart by a prolonged military conflict, apartheid and repression, a researcher must respect the stories as told, but an extensive verification of the credibility and reliability of the sources may be required. Authenticity is undermined by the fact that the current society glorifies the independence struggle, and everybody wants to be on the side of the winners, even those that fought against liberation have today become its evangelists. Research limitations/implications – The sources for the paper depend on what the women could still remember and there are no local institutions such as archives and or newspapers to document the events when they happened. Practical implications – This paper argues the case that publishing women's life stories promotes interests in local history and makes significant impact on the socioeconomic status of women. It further recommends methodological approaches in documenting local histories; dealing with authenticity and integrity in each story. Social implications – The paper shows that publishing the life stories of five village women in a book with the title Tears of Courage had positive impact on their individual lives; and that publishing such oral accounts is an excellent way to lift the contributions by women out of obscurity into the mainstream of Namibian history. Originality/value – It is an original paper written from practical research experiences of identifying sources, documenting, interviewing, analysing, writing and constantly cross referencing to verify authenticity and integrity of both written and oral sources.

scholarly journals Latent Twitter Image Information for Social Analytics

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Gerasimos Razis ◽  
Georgios Theofilou ◽  
Ioannis Anagnostopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Linked Data ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Textual Information ◽  
Social Analytics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Social Images ◽  
Social Messages

The appearance of images in social messages is continuously increasing, along with user engagement with that type of content. Analysis of social images can provide valuable latent information, often not present in the social posts. In that direction, a framework is proposed exploiting latent information from Twitter images, by leveraging the Google Cloud Vision API platform, aiming at enriching social analytics with semantics and hidden textual information. As validated by our experiments, social analytics can be further enriched by considering the combination of user-generated content, latent concepts, and textual data extracted from social images, along with linked data. Moreover, we employed word embedding techniques for investigating the usage of latent semantic information towards the identification of similar Twitter images, thereby showcasing that hidden textual information can improve such information retrieval tasks. Finally, we offer an open enhanced version of the annotated dataset described in this study with the aim of further adoption by the research community.

scholarly journals Adolescent Boys, Embodied Heteromasculinities and Sexual Violence

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
James W. Messeschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Adolescent Boys ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific

In this paper the author summarizes several life history case studies of adolescent boys who were identified at school as “wimps” and who eventually engaged in various forms of sexual violence. Such boys rarely are— if at all—discussed in the childhood, education and feminist literatures on sexual violence. The life stories reveal the interrelationship among inschoolbullying, reflexivity, embodied structured action, and the social construction of heteromasculinities in the commission of sexual violence by subordinated boys. The author concludes by considering the implications the research has to the evolving discourses on social scientific conceptualizations of reflexive embodiment and heteromasculinities.

Telling Diaspora Stories: theoretical and methodological reflections on narratives of migrancy and belongingness in the second generation

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Christou
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Narrative Research ◽  
Social Experiences ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
The Subject

This article explores the theoretical and methodological implications of the study of second generation migration through the use of life stories, a narrative and biographical approach. It presents a theoretical contextualisation of life history research in addressing the direction it has taken in the study of migration and identity in order to problematise how the subject and subjectivities in narrative research have been framed by social categorisations such as gender, ethnicity, class as well as social experiences such as trauma, exile, memory and imagination. The paper develops the analytical contribution of researching the biographicity of everyday migrant lives. 

Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Augmentation ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter introduces the “Perspectives” section of the Handbook of Living Machines offering an overview of the different contributions gathered here that consider how biomimetic and biohybrid systems will transform our personal lives and social organizations, and how we might respond to the challenges that these transformations will inevitably pose to our ‘posthuman’ worlds. The authors in this section see it as essential that those who aspire to create living machines engage with the public to confront misconceptions, deep anxieties, and unrealistic aspirations that presently dominate the cultural imagination, and to include potential users in questions of design and utility as new technologies are being developed. Human augmentation and enhancement are other important themes addressed, raising important questions about what it means fundamentally to be ‘human’. These questions and challenges are addressed through the lens of the social and personal impacts of new technologies on human selves, the public imagination, ethics, and human relationships.

Hormones and Behavior

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Maren N. Vitousek ◽  
Laura A. Schoenle
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life History Traits ◽  
Developmental Plasticity ◽  
Endocrine System ◽  
Phenotypic Traits ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
And Behavior

Hormones mediate the expression of life history traits—phenotypic traits that contribute to lifetime fitness (i.e., reproductive timing, growth rate, number and size of offspring). The endocrine system shapes phenotype by organizing tissues during developmental periods and by activating changes in behavior, physiology, and morphology in response to varying physical and social environments. Because hormones can simultaneously regulate many traits (hormonal pleiotropy), they are important mediators of life history trade-offs among growth, reproduction, and survival. This chapter reviews the role of hormones in shaping life histories with an emphasis on developmental plasticity and reversible flexibility in endocrine and life history traits. It also discusses the advantages of studying hormone–behavior interactions from an evolutionary perspective. Recent research in evolutionary endocrinology has provided insight into the heritability of endocrine traits, how selection on hormone systems may influence the evolution of life histories, and the role of hormonal pleiotropy in driving or constraining evolution.

scholarly journals Classical soloists’ life histories and the music conservatoire

2021 ◽  
pp. 025576142199115
Author(s):  
Tim Palmer ◽  
David Baker
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Life History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Loss Of Autonomy ◽  
Cultural Interest ◽  
Concert Pianist ◽  
Analytic Induction ◽  
Musical Excellence

This article explores the life histories of virtuoso classical music soloists with particular reference to conservatoire provision. Detailed life-history interviews were conducted with six virtuosi between May 2018 and January 2019. These participants were three singers, two cellists and a concert pianist. Resultant qualitative data were stored in an NVivo software database and understood through a process of analytic induction. Key findings spotlight the significance of Higher Education, a connection between broad creative and cultural interest and musical excellence, and a significant role for conservatoires in diversifying their training and easing transition into the career. The soloists also warned of dangers relating to controlling teachers, loss of autonomy and a need to convey their career realities to students.

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