Exploring normative complexity: (How) does the life history interview work in child welfare research?

The life history interview

Narratives are often understood synonymously with stories and might be understood as the stories people tell about themselves, reflecting upon their experiences both as they themselves perceive them and as they wish others to perceive them (Becker, 1997). Furthermore, narratives follow a specific structure with beginning, middle and ending, together constituting an overall plot. Elliott (2005) points out that life histories involve chronologies or sequences of events that are linked together, and the plot is often coherent; however, all life histories are more than sequences of events, because narrators ascribe meaning to them. When telling stories, storytellers might connect events into sequences that would make sense to the audience, and other stories have a distinctive sequence due to one or more unexpected plot twists (Becker, 1997).

Life history interviews are built up in accordance with the narrative tradition, focusing on less formal structure as well as giving respondents great freedom to reflect and introduce topics that are meaningful to them (Riessman, 2008). Following this, life histories can be understood as people’s oral or written autobiographies, which are based on their own experiences through the life course. They are told with reference to cultural scripts and can be described as an interplay between society and the individual, between culture and experience (Horsdal, 2012). When reflecting upon their lives, Bourdieu (1987) argues that people are constrained by expectations to provide an understandable and coherent picture of their life course. Since events take place within social settings which regulate the storytelling, societal structures are often reflected in life histories, which can be exemplified by the way respondents talk about their experiences and what expectations they feel are directed towards them.

Moreover, life history interviews are not just about storytelling, they are also constructions through which people make sense of the world. One creates oneself through the storytelling process, and respondents often tend to present themselves in particular ways (Goffman, 1959). Hence, the relationship between the researcher and the respondent in the interview setting come to matter significantly. When people present their life histories, they select what they want to share about themselves and their lives, and the same applies when one is to analyse life histories, as the researcher selects what is further interpreted.

As part of recent narrative turns, researchers should strive to document and understand the complexity of different narratives. In this article, we argue that the life history interview is significant when exploring and trying to understand the everyday life of marginalized individuals and groups; however, this approach does not necessarily fit all respondents without adjustments. We problematize who actually has the opportunity to tell their life history as well as how and who is the dominant ‘voice’ in the interview.

Questioning the interview structure

There were several reasons for using life history interviews, such as allowing parents to have the freedom to reflect upon their lives and emphasize what they regard as central in everyday life. Other arguments included that the interviewer should approach the parents in an unbiased manner. The life history interviews were supposed to be unstructured, except in interviews with parents who were medicated or otherwise ill. These interviews were more structured, and they were based on an interview guide. This guide provided the interview with a more semi-structured nature, where the parents did not speak entirely freely about their lives. Moreover, it was described as a framework used to maintain the recurrent topic (Clifford et al., 2015). An interview cannot address everything, but rather it should follow the reasoning of the respondent.

As mentioned above, life history interviews aim to provide the respondents with the freedom to tell their own life histories and to emphasize what they recognize as important in their lives. The question we explore in our analysis is as follows: How does the life history interview work with parents in contact with child welfare services?

To provide an answer to this question, we used two analytical strategies. The first strategy was to identify the content of the interviews with an emphasis on the context, structure and function of the text (Järvinen, 2005). For this, we used a smaller selection of 12 interviews. The purpose of our analysis was not to systematize the substance in these interviews; however, we did perform an analysis focusing on whether the parents were given space to construct their own life histories. Do the parents introduce new topics during the interview, or is this left to the researcher?

Second, we performed a visual analysis of all 74 transcripts, which is an analytical strategy similar to image analysis. We explored if the transcripts illustrated whether the researcher or the respondent dominated the interview. Moreover, we considered the extent to which the interviews were characterized by disruptions by the researcher or if they were coherent. In sum, these analytical strategies allow us to learn about the life history interviews in general, but also if they worked as intended. Were the whole life histories captured or simply parts? Was there coherency to the life histories?

When the researcher structures the storytelling

As Goodson (2008) argues, the ‘best’ life history interviews are often those with the least interviewer questions. Some life history interviews are incomplete, because people have their own reasons for not fully disclosing certain details (Becker, 1997). This selectiveness does not invalidate what they actually do tell; however, such limitations have consequences for the researcher’s questions and how they are asked. In our analysis, we are concerned with whether questions support or lead away from the respondents’ life histories. The life history interview aims to get close to the respondents’ own concerns; however, this is not always achieved. In some of the life history interviews, we found that the questions asked by the researcher led away, rather than followed up on the respondents’ concerns. The following transcripts in Figures 1 and 2 illustrate this.

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Figure 1.

Transcripts of life history interviews highly structured by the researcher. Questions or comments by the researcher are marked in red.

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Figure 2.

Transcripts of life history interviews highly structured by the researcher. Questions or comments by the researcher are marked in red.

These four examples from four different interviews show that the researcher strived to come close to the respondents’ descriptions of their own lives. They clearly show that the researcher was the dominant ‘voice’ in the interviews; consequently, the parents were not in charge of the storytelling. Rather, they provided short answers to the researcher’s questions. The frequency of the questions created distance to the respondents’ narratives. Visually, the transcripts of life history interviews should ideally have a particular structure based on sequences of events that are linked together, as well as fewer questions and richer answers (Riessman, 2008).

In the life history interviews that were highly structured by the researcher, there was little or no account of the actual life history. There were many questions back and forth between the researcher and the respondent about one or few specific topics. We noted a connection between the structure of the interviews and the parents’ class affiliation, as their life situation in the past and in the present significantly affected the flow of the interview. The interviews with parents who were non-employed and affiliated with the working class were to a higher degree structured by the researcher. The stories of some parents, and in particular those who were non-employed, did not seem to include the variations or coherency of their lives. There were shorter answers and consequently fewer coherent narratives. In addition, the respondents had less control over the narratives that were told as the researcher was the one introducing the topics.

When respondents run the interview

In contrast, some parents were more in charge of the interview. They told their life histories without much involvement from the researcher. Ideally, respondents should speak freely and create their own life stories. Riessman (2008: 25) argues that ‘it is preferable, in general, to ask questions that open up topics, and allow respondents to construct answers in ways they find meaningful’. Some parents were prone to fit into the life history format; however, why would that be the case? An important finding is that parents with a high-class affiliation introduced new topics more frequently than parents with a lower class affiliation, and they used more words in telling their life histories. As a result of this, the interviews were usually much longer. As shown in Figure 3, which presents transcripts from two different interviews, the researcher asked fewer questions along the way.

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Figure 3.

Transcripts of respondents running the life history interviews. Questions or comments by the researcher are marked in red.

As is shown in the figure, the respondents dominated the interviews. After the researcher asked a question, the respondents provided complementary answers, and they often introduced new topics extending what they had said earlier. In this way, they were able, or rather enabled themselves, to create richness in their life histories. Compared to interviews that were highly structured by the researcher, it seemed as though the parents with a high-class affiliation were more proactive in the execution of their agency, while the parents with a lower class affiliation were more defensive in the interview setting. In other words, they performed agency differently in the interview setting, which may be due to normative complexity, i.e. the researcher’s having a different class background than that of the respondents. Consequently, the narratives were followed up in other ways or no way at all by the researcher’s structuring the respondents’ narratives based on their class background.

Parents who find it difficult to present their own life histories

Several respondents also directly expressed that they felt uncomfortable with the premises of the life history interview. They felt that their actual life course did not match the life history format, and they therefore found it difficult to speak freely about their own lives. One respondent with a working-class background said the following during the interview:

Researcher: But was this while … after you were removed from [the child]?

Several of the respondents who did not feel comfortable or were unsure of how to present their life histories were non-employed. Talking about life can be regarded as a narrative exercise partly linked to class affiliation, which again can be related to the logic of cultural capital and taste, perceived as key elements in our habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). Habitus links people’s social conditions, thinking and actions. In the book The Weight of the World, Bourdieu (1999) uses life histories when he comes up with his critical analysis of what can be described as ‘the human consequences of globalization’. The local is in different ways and to varying degrees linked to larger global systems. Based on life histories, Bourdieu reveals how different forms of social suffering have social causes. The ways individuals act, relates to their own class habits (Bourdieu, 1984).

It might also be due to the possibility that the lives of unemployed parents do not fit into their expectations and how they imagine living a ‘normal’ life. Linked to the latter, people tend to lean on narrative standards to make sense of their lives, also referred to as ‘master narratives’ (Frank, 2010; McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance, 2017). These standards are culturally embedded and often represent ideals. In the life history interviews, we constantly saw that parents tried to navigate themselves towards such ideals. Along the way, they realized that their lives were more disjointed and that things had a tendency to become messy.

Researcher: But I don’t know, is it something else you think that…

For the respondents, life was not perceived as flawless from beginning to end because they ran into several obstacles and new beginnings all the time. Not every life is straightforward, and the search for coherency does not necessarily fit the life history of respondents’ experiences of complex needs and problems. Consequently, some stories are more difficult to tell for the simple reason that they do not fit into the life history format. As Järvinen (2005) argues, narrative approaches are not to be seen as reflections of individual experience as they express already existing cultural scripts.

We found that people with different class backgrounds engaged in different presentations of their life histories. Presenting one’s own life history is therefore not an equal exercise. Goffman (1959: 13) argues that there is always some form of presentation of the self and ‘when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation’. By presenting themselves in particular ways, people are to some extent able to control the impressions received by others. Following this, we found that the respondents presented their life histories based on topics about which they were comfortable discussing and those they wished to leave out of the story. They varied in terms of what they shared and how they approached telling their life histories. Consequently, class sensitivity should be regarded as an important aspect in the life history interviewing process. Talking about one’s own life can be perceived as a well-interpreted exercise and an important normative dimension of the life of people in the middle class and people with higher class affiliation.

Normative understandings of the ideal life course

Understanding respondents’ challenges of presenting their own life histories and approaching respondents narratively in research require knowledge of one’s own position and privileges, as well as the normative dimensions of respondents’ actual life histories and their constructions of them. Such complexity involves multiple characteristics and aspects. As Kojan and Christiansen (2016) argue, normativity permeates child welfare practice and research. They argue for the existence of norm cultures, which are different sets of written and unwritten values and rules, expectations and practices, for example with regard to the life course. Norm cultures also have different intersectional dimensions such as class, ethnicity, age and gender, hence adding further complexity.

There is no standardized story that is common to all. Still, Becker (1997) argues that the life course is structured by normative expectations about each phase, and meaning is assigned to specific life events and the roles that accompany them. When expectations about the life course are not met, people tend to experience disruption. As mentioned above, parents with lower class affiliation explicitly expressed trouble in presenting their life histories coherently. In this process, they related to normative understandings of the life course, for example, in feeling that they had not accomplished anything in life or done the ‘right’ things leading them onto the ‘right’ path.

Normative understandings of the ideal life course are societal and culturally embedded, and often perceived as ideals with which we compare ourselves. Following this, Becker (1997) discusses wrestling with normalcy and found that people consciously wrestle with cultural norms that contradict their life situations. This is particularly true when the life situation does not fit cultural ideas about what constitutes normalcy. Because of the disruptive character of the respondents’ life, which requires them to take a step back and start all over again, they do not follow what they perceive as the ‘normal’ life course. Rather, they might lean on normative standards so that their life appears less chaotic. While stories are social and cultural products, not all stories are equal in their influence. Some stories are constructed as more powerful than others depending on the context in which they operate. When circulating within a culture, for example, through media, policy documents and everyday conversations, particular stories achieve a higher status. They become ‘master narratives’ (Frank, 2010; McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance, 2017). Invisibility is central to their power as they become taken for granted as truths.

Recognizing life histories ‘off track’

Awareness of normative complexity in the research setting as well as in professional encounters with marginalized individuals and groups are crucial for capturing their life histories. This strengthens the ability to make their ‘voices’ visible, and it might improve the quality of the research. To understand why some life histories differ from the life history format within the narrative tradition, we must take into account respondents’ complex life situation.

Rittel and Webber (1973: 160) argue that most problems related to public policy are ‘wicked’ in terms of being inherently resistant to clear definitions and agreed-upon solutions. Moreover, they identified 10 primary characteristics of such problems:

There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem

We found that some of the parents’ life histories did not coincide with the life history format, as they were presented in a disjointed manner. Some parents made different attempts to get their life histories back on track by trying to create coherency and add meaning by connecting the past with the present as well as potential futures (Breumlund and Hansen, 2016). These life history interviews were much more structured by the researcher and characterized by more questions and fewer rich answers.

To understand and manage disjointed interviews, we must consider the context in which the life histories are embedded. Brannen (2013) argues that lives told or untold require contextualization by considering the wider context, which tends to be overlooked or given insufficient attention in qualitative research. Some of the parents in this study experienced more underlying and persistent problems. They had experienced complex problems for quite some time, problems who in many cases relate to social inequality. As mentioned above, our analysis paid special attention to the problems rooted in social inequality, which is part of the ‘wicked problems’ of many families in contact with child welfare services in Norway (Fauske et al., 2018). Parents with a lower class affiliation constitute a significant part of the clientele within child welfare services and, based on class background, we can ask whether the life history interview really fits all.

Is there space for life histories that do not fit into the middle-class box?

How can we make the life history interview work in child welfare research, in particular in interview settings where respondents’ life histories might be considered ‘off track’ and chaotic? The answer is not very clear. We have emphasized the necessity of gaining knowledge about the complex and ‘wicked’ life situation of marginalized individuals and groups. Additionally, our understandings of the ideal life course need to be reflected upon throughout the research process. This is important in all research within social sciences, particularly in interview settings where respondents are expected to bring their own life histories to the table. Not all people are familiar with this way of reflecting upon their own lives; hence, we can question whether applying the life history interview encourages a particular type of middle-class reflexivity.

The life history interview as a middle-class practice can be illustrated by an example concerning the data one expects to gain from the life history interviews. Qualitative research aims to produce ‘rich’ data. Searching for richness is ideal when using narrative approaches in qualitative research, including expectations of complementary answers and continuous flow in the interview (Riessman, 2008). The chaotic storytelling of some respondents in our analysis challenged this qualitative ideal of richness. We found that different class backgrounds amongst the respondents might influence how they construct their life histories and, just as important, who was being listened to and heard. For some data to be considered rich, are other data then regarded as poor? What is done with the poor interviews? Are they referenced in the presentation of the findings or left out? If so, we may risk silencing the respondents who are not familiar with the traditional narrative way of thinking and telling stories, because the most underprivileged respondents in terms of class background are far more likely not to be included or to become marginalized in the presentation of research results. How can disjointed interviews be safeguarded from being silenced?

Data will often appear disjointed even if the researchers are aware of normative complexity underlying the relationship between researcher and respondent. This is important and valuable to take into account throughout the research process, especially when analysing the data. Qualitative researchers might strive for ‘rich’ interviews, which often entail coherent plots were respondents take charge in the interview setting. In child welfare research, we must problematize the pursuit of ‘rich’ interviews. We must think differently around narrative approaches amongst marginalized individuals and groups, because their lives do not necessarily match the middle-class normativity.

Rethinking the life history format

There are both opportunities and challenges when applying the life history interview in research with respondents who experience multiple needs and complex problems. On the one hand, life history interviews can be useful to gain insight into the everyday life of marginalized individuals and groups, as well as their social problems and potential for and processes of change (Breumlund and Hansen, 2016). Life history interviews can also be useful in gaining important and nuanced knowledge of how people understand their lives. The life history interview offers insight into how individuals perceive themselves today, who they once were and who they would like to become in the future. Ideally, life history interviews are regarded as a research method, which strengthens the researcher’s understanding of the respondent’s embodied knowledge of the life course. Therefore, it allows the researcher to understand people’s identities as well as how such identities are formed and change over time (Phoenix, 2016).

On the other hand, our analysis shows that the respondents’ class affiliation is significant for the degree to which they introduce topics themselves and run the storytelling in the interview setting. Understood from a class perspective, the researcher and the respondent engage in interviews with their own class-based assumptions, and our findings suggest that some respondents’ life experiences are overlooked to a greater extent than others or simply not revealed. Because the life history interview demands a particular way of reflecting about life, the researcher might be insufficiently aware of the respondents’ familiarity with the life history format. This does not mean that the lack of richness in several of the interviews is about narratives not being present. Of course, they are present as for all people; however, they are presented in ways that differ from the traditional perception of narratives.

As shown in the analysis, some researchers structured the interview in a chronological manner, expecting respondents to follow; however, when respondents’ life histories did not match the chronology, life history format, they did not conform to these expectations. We found differences between interviews highly structured by the researcher (Figures 1 and 2) and interviews were the respondent took the lead (Figure 3). This was evident despite that the researchers had been given prior training in life history methodology. There are complex reasons why the interviews turned out differently, and class affiliation alone cannot explain our findings. Some respondents took charge in the interviews despite their lower class backgrounds. Therefore, it is important to recognize other potential factors than class differences, such as individual characteristics of both the researcher and the respondent, as well as the practical and physical circumstances that may have influenced the interviews. This adds multiple dimensions to the complexity of the life history interview. Do researchers pay sufficiently awareness to issues of normative complexity when conducting such interviews?

We encourage thinking outside the box or rather, expanding the box. Perhaps we should rethink the life history format on the premises of marginalized individuals and groups, experiencing complexity throughout the life course. As shown in our analysis and discussed above, this format basically fits with middle-class respondents’ understandings of the life course. The research interview was once viewed as a straightforward method of data collection, whereby respondents were contacted and interviews scheduled, then determining the location and setting ground rules before the interviews began (Gubrium and Holstein, 2012). The researcher would manage the interview setting and ask questions, while the respondents were expected to answer them.

Narrative approaches have challenged the nature of interviewing; however, how does it actually work? Are we able to create narrative environments and move away from the standardized interview? Chase (2005) argues that we need more research on techniques for inviting and producing stories, as well as expanding the ways in which we critically think about interviews. Based on the findings from our analysis, there is still much to consider before we are sufficiently prepared to engage in the topic.