THE LIFE STORY INTERVIEW Robert Atkinson

THE LIFE STORY INTERVIEW

Robert Atkinson

Telling the stories of our lives is so basic to our nature that we are largely unaware of its importance. We think in story form, speak in story form, and bring meaning to our lives through story. People everywhere are telling stories about some piece of their lives to friends and strangers alike. The stories we tell of our lives carry ageless, universal themes or motifs, and are always variations of one of the thousands of folk tales, myths, or legends, that have spoken to us for generations of our inner truths. Stories connect us to our roots.

In traditional communities of the past, stories played a central role in the lives of the people. It was through story that the timeless elements of life were transmitted. Stories told from generation to generation carried enduring values as well as lessons about life lived deeply. Traditional stories followed a timeless and universal pattern that can be represented as: separation, transition, incorporation (van Gennep 1960); birth, death, rebirth (Eliade 1954); or departure, initiation, return (Campbell 1968). This pattern is like a blueprint, or an original form, within which the story communicates a balance between opposing forces. The pattern actually forms the basis for the plot of a story, and aids the storyteller in remembering the elements of a story while keeping the story on the course it is meant to be on.

The stories we tell of our own lives today are still guided by the same pattern and enduring elements. Our lives unfold according to an innate blueprint following the pattern of beginning, muddle, and resolution, with many repetitions of this pattern. Our lives consist of a series of events and circumstances that are drawn from a well of archetypal experiences common to all other human beings. It is within this ageless and universal context that we can best begin to understand the importance and power of the life story interview, and how it is fundamental to our very nature.

Storytelling is in our blood. We are the storytelling species. Stories were once the center of community life. We are recognizing more readily now that there is something of the gods and goddesses inside us, in the stories we tell of our own lives. Life storytelling gives us direction, validates our own experience, restores value to our lives, and strengthens community bonds.

The reasons why we tell our stories today can be traced to the original functions of the earliest known stories. Myths and folk tales have traditionally served four classic functions: bringing us into accord with ourselves, others, the mystery of life, and the universe around us (Campbell 1970). A living mythology contains symbols, motifs, and archetypes that speak to us on a very fundamentally human level, they reverberate beyond the personal and into the collective realm. They carry a power that connects with that deepest part of ourselves. Sacred, or traditional, stories touch a center of life that we all have within us.

Life stories, too, serve the same classic functions, by carrying the timeless themes and motifs found in a living mythology into our own lives. As we tell our life stories, ageless themes and motifs emerge that link us to our ancestors. Life stories serve these classic functions in four distinct realms. First, stories, with their deeply human elements and motifs, can guide us psychologically, stage by stage, through the entire life course. They foster an unfolding of the self, and help us center and integrate ourselves, through gaining a clearer understanding of our experiences, our feelings about them, and their meaning for us. The stories we tell of our lives bring order to our experience, and help us to view our lives both subjectively and objectively at the same time, while assisting us in forming an identity.

Second, stories can affirm, validate, and support our own experience socially, and clarify our relationship to those around us. They enforce the norms of a moral order, and shape the individual to the requirements of the society. Stories help us understand our commonalities and bonds with others, as well as our differences. Stories foster a sense of community. Third, stories can serve a mystical-religious function, by bringing us face to face with an ultimate mystery. Stories awaken feelings of awe, wonder, humility, respect, and gratitude in recognition of those mysteries around us. These feelings help us participate in the mystery of being. Stories take us beyond the here and now, beyond our everyday existence, and allow us to enter the realm of the spirit, the domain of the sacred. And finally, stories can render a cosmology, an interpretive total image of the universe that is in accord with the knowledge of the time, a world-view that makes sense of the natural workings of the universe around us. Stories help us to understand the universe we are part of, and how we fit into it.

When our life stories are told in a way that follows this ageless pattern of transformation, they can carry the power and force of a living myth for us and our listeners, by bringing about insights, sentiments, and commitments that can result in a new level of maturity, new responsibilities, and possibly even a new status. We seem to be recognizing more now that everyone has a story, even many, to tell about their lives and that they are indeed important stories. (Atkinson 1995, 1998; Kenyon and Randall 1997; Randall 1995; Gubrium and Holstein 1998).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTEREST IN THE LIFE STORY

People in many academic disciplines have been interviewing others for their life stories for longer than we recognize. As far as I can determine, and as I use it here, the life story interview has evolved from the oral history, life history, and other ethnographic and field approaches. It is a qualitative research method for gathering information on the subjective essence of one person's entire life that is transferable across disciplines.

As a method of looking at life-as-a-whole, and as a way of carrying out an in-depth study of individual lives, the life story interview stands alone. It has become a central element of the burgeoning sub-field of the narrative study of lives (Cohler 1988; Josselson and Lieblich 1993), for its interdisciplinary applications in understanding single lives in detail and how the individual plays various roles in society (Cohler 1993; Gergen and Gergen 1993).

The use of life narratives for serious academic study is considered to have begun in psychology with Sigmund Freud's (1910; 1911) psychoanalytic interpretation of individual case studies, although these were based on secondary documents. His usage of these narratives was primarily in applying his psychoanalytic theory to individual lives. Gordon Allport (1942) used personal documents to study personality development in individuals, focusing on primary documents, including narratives, while also considering the problems of reliability and validity of interpretation using such materials. This method reached its maturation in Erik Erikson's studies of Luther (1958) and Gandhi (1969). Erikson (1975) also used the life history to explore how the historical moment influenced lives.

Henry Murray (1938; 1955) was one of the first to study individual lives using life narratives primarily to understand personality development. The recent interest in story on the part of personality psychologists, other social scientists, and scholars in diverse disciplines, reflect the broader interest in narrative as it serves to illuminate the lives of persons in society. Theodore Sarbin (1986) uses narrative, identifying it as the "root metaphor" and placing it at the core of self-formation, for understanding human experience, while Jerome Bruner (1986) uses narrative as an important means for discovering how we "construct" our lives. The narrative study of lives, as presented in the series by Ruthellen Josselson and Anna Lieblich (1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999), aims to further the theoretical understanding of individual life narratives through in-depth studies, methodological examinations, and theoretical explorations.

The life history has long been a primary methodology of anthropological field work. As James Spradley (1979) points out, some life histories are heavily edited by the ethnographer (often only 60% of the description is actually in the insider's own words or language), while others are presented in the same form in which the recording occurred. The life history and life story are very similar in their approach and what they cover, but the specific information sought and final product can be very different. In folklore, the term life story (Titon 1980; Ives 1986) is used much as life history is in anthropology, with the focus usually being on the role of the interviewee in the community as a tradition bearer.

Because of its broad interdisciplinary use, as well as the particular approach of each interviewer, or researcher, the final form of a life story can vary greatly. On the one hand, it can read as mostly the researchers own description of what was said, done, or intimated. On the other, it can be a 100% first-person narrative in the words of the person interviewed.

As a research tool that is gaining much interest and use in many disciplines today, there are two primary approaches to life stories, the constructionist and the naturalistic. Some narrative researchers conceive of the life story as a circumstantially-mediated, constructive collaboration between the interviewer and interviewee. This approach stresses the situated emergence of the life story as opposed to the subjectively faithful, experientially oriented account. In the constructionist perspective, life stories are not so much evaluated for how well they accord with the life experiences in question, but more in terms of how accounts of lives are used by a variety of others, in addition to the subjects whose lives are under consideration, for various descriptive purposes (see Gubrium and Holstein 1998; Holstein and Gubrium 2000a, 2000b).

My own interest in the life story approach, which takes a naturalistic view, has evolved from an interdisciplinary context, beginning over thirty years ago with my graduate study of folklore when I interviewed an elder tradition bearer for his life story. I went on to a second master's degree in counseling, and began to see the power not only in telling but in retelling, or composing and recomposing, recasting and reframing, one's own story, and especially in getting to one's deeper or larger story. In my doctoral work, focusing on cross-cultural human development, I further expanded this interest by using the life story interview to explore how cultural values and traditions influenced development across the life cycle.

I have felt that it is important, in trying to understand another's experience in life or their relation to others, to let their voice be heard, to let them speak for and about themselves first. If we want to know the unique perspective of an individual there is no better way to get this than in their voice. I am also interested in having the person tell their story from the vantage point that allows them to see their life as a whole, to see their life subjectively across time as it all fits together, or as it seems discontinuous, or both. It is, after all, this subjective perspective that tells us what we are looking for in all our research efforts. This is what constitutes their reality of their world. The storyteller is the first interpreter of the story they tell. It is through their construction of their reality, and the story they tell about it, that we, as researchers, learn what we want to from them. This is what is new about the "new ethnography" (Holstein and Gubrium 1995).

Since creating the Center for the Study of Lives at the University of Southern Maine in 1988, I have tried to merge all these interests not only in building bridges across disciplines, but also in building a growing archive of life stories, currently numbering over 500, to offer researchers with various purposes and interests a unique data base. Most of the life stories in the archive were gathered by my graduate students for class projects designed for them to learn as much as possible about how one person views their own development over time and across the life cycle. The life stories in the archives are available to all researchers for secondary usage, and can be searched by topics or categories on the cover sheet.

I believe that there is much in each life story to identify the unique value and worth of each life, and that there are many common elements, motifs, and issues that all life stories express, indeed that we all share as human beings, along with some differences that exist. As an example of how I have used life stories, I have looked for important life themes that emerge in the telling of one's story. These might explain coherence, how and why the story holds together, even if it also contains disruptions. Life themes also highlight important influences and relationships. In a small group of life story interviews with elders, I looked for the life-as-a-whole perspective and explored how the themes of continuity, purpose, commitment, and meaning were expressed in their lives (Atkinson 1985).

Life stories have gained respect and acceptance in many academic circles. Psychologists see the value of personal narratives in understanding development and personality (Runyan 1982; McAdams 1993). Anthropologists use the life history, or individual case study, as the preferred unit of study for their measures of cultural similarities and variations (Spradley 1979; Langness and Frank 1981; Abu-Lughod 1993). Sociologists use life stories to understand and define relationships and group interactions and memberships (Bertaux 1981; Linde 1993). In education, life stories have been used as a new way of knowing and teaching (Witherell & Noddings 1991). Literary scholars use autobiography as texts through which to explore questions of design, style, content, literary themes, and personal truth (Olney 1980). Historians find in using the oral history approach that life story materials are an important source for enhancing local history (Allen and Montell 1981).

The movement toward life stories, where we tell our own story in our own words, is a movement toward acknowledging personal truth from the subjective point of view, as well as a movement toward the validity of narrative. A life story narrative highlights the most important influences, experiences, circumstances, issues, themes, and lessons of a lifetime. As such, a life story narrative can be as valuable an experience for the person telling their story, as it is a successful research endeavor for the one gathering the data.

This movement is championed by Bruner (1986, 1987, 1990, 1991), the cognitive psychologist who has illustrated that personal meaning (and reality) is actually constructed during the making and telling of one's narrative, that our own experiences take the form of the narratives we use to tell about them, and that stories are our way of organizing, interpreting, and creating meaning from our experiences while maintaining a sense of continuity through it all. James Birren (1996), the gerontologist, has also long been using guided autobiography (a variation of form on the life story: the story of a life written by the one who has experienced it) as a source of psychological and social science research material.