The interviews were analysed using the principles of the socio-biographical method.

The techniques developed for the analysis are based on an understanding of life stories as having a ‘Gestalt’. Within this approach, the telling of a life story is an act of narrative composition, in which the life experiences are selected and related to each other to create a construction of biography (Fischer-Rosenthal, 2000). When people tell their life story, it can be seen as a re-evaluation of the past life experiences, based on the context of the present experience and reaching out into the future. People present a theory of their own lives: out of the infinite details of one's past, only those are included which present a ‘picture’ of a life course from a present perspective. As such, life-story accounts present a theory and history of the self, based on the selective recall of the past (Rosenthal, 1993; Wengraf, 2000).

The aim of the analysis is the reconstruction of the underlying ‘rules’ which govern the life-history account. The guiding principle is the comparison of the lived and told life story (see chapter one, Introduction). Both aspects of the life story are analysed separately, with no references between the two. It is through this analytic step that the inter-relationships between structural determinants and personal experiences can be brought into relief. Reconstruction of the life story thereby does not imply the subjective meaning of the individual, but it has an objective quality which exists outside the intentions of the narrator.

The analysis of lived and told life story

Abduction

The principle of analysis used in this method is that of ‘abduction’. Developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, it involves generating hypotheses contained in a given unit of empirical data, progressing to hypotheses as to the further developments and then testing these with the empirical outcome (Peirce, 1979). By formulating hypotheses about the other options available to a person within a particular historical and social context, the procedure reconstructs the range of possibilities open to the subject in a certain situation.

This analytical procedure is applied to each individual step of analysis, and the hypotheses that have been generated are tested in their plausibility at subsequent points of the process of analysis.