The use of personal documents in a historical perspective

The use of ‘personal documents’ in social sciences and related disciplines can be traced back to the time when the insight emerged that understanding social reality requires a profound knowledge of how people experience and interpret ‘their’ social reality. In sociology, it was the growth of the American cities during the second half of the 19th century, especially the situation of the immigrants who gathered in the cities, that formed the backdrop of the first approaches using written or told biographies. In their research The Polish peasant in America and Europe, which was formative for the evolving Chicago School, William Isaak Thomas and Florian Znaniecki developed a biographical approach to social reality for the first time.

Thomas and Znaniecki used mainly written biographical material. This was neither ‘accidental’, in the sense that they were the only available data, nor were they regarded as a mere illustration of general theoretical considerations. Thomas and Znaniecki gathered them intentionally as basic data to reconstruct and analyse changes in community life and the way these were manifested in and processed through the lives of their members. By examining the extensive migration process from Poland to America at the turn of the 20th century, they showed that the changes in migrants’ lives were not only a result of social changes in Polish society and the Polish community in America. Rather, changing life orientations had become a constitutive part of change in the community and societal sphere. Therefore, the biographical accounts were not solely analysed as an indicator or illustration of social change. The change of orientations and patterns of activity, based on attitudes and values – as Thomas and Znaniecki theorised their observations – were regarded as pivotal to the change in social institutions such as the family, community and political institutions. The personal life of tangible people was thereby regarded for the first time as a social field in which (radical) social change took place. The concrete or actual individual moved to the centre of sociological interest and investigation.

This is illustrated in the research of the Chicago School, where single case studies were carried out as part of community studies.