Betty's Story

Abstract

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).

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bakhtin

(1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Castro

(1990). American feminism: A contemporary history. New York: New York University Press.

Coontz

(1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York: Basic Books.

Denzin

(1989). Interpretive biography. London: Sage.

Eco

(1990). The limits of interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Emihovich

(1995). Distancing passions: Narratives in social science. In Hatch

Wisniewski

(Eds.), Life history and narrative (pp. 37–48). London: Falmer.

Flinders

Mills

(Eds.). (1993). Theory and concepts in qualitative research: Perspectives from the field. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hammersley

(1992). What's wrong with ethnography? Methodological explorations. New York: Routledge.

McLaren

(1986). Schooling as a ritual performance: Towards a political economy of educational symbols and gestures. London: Routledge.

10.

Portelli

(1984). The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. Albany: State University of New York Press.

11.

Smith

(1994). Biographical method. In Denzin

Lincoln

(Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 286–305). London: Sage.

12.

Spivak

(1994). Can the subaltern speak? In Williams

Chrisman

(Eds.), Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader. New York: Colombia University Press.

13.

Swindells

(1989). In Personal Narratives Group (Eds.), Interpreting women's lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives (pp. 24–38). Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

14.

Taylor

Bogdan

(1984). Introduction to qualitative research methods: The search for meanings. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

15.

Whyte

(1991). Interviewing in field research. In Burgess

(Ed.), Field research: A sourcebook and field manual (pp. 111–122). New York: Routledge.