1. Introduction: biographical research -- 2. Uses of biographical research -- Disciplines and contexts -- Education -- Oral history -- Health and ageing -- Feminist research -- Narratives of the body and sexuality -- Autobiography and biography -- 3. The life history -- Individual lives and social structures -- Life history data and method -- Deviance, career, becoming -- Case studies -- Types of interpretation -- 4. Autobiography and biography -- Genre -- Letters, diaries, memoirs and other personal artefacts -- Fiction and non-fiction -- 5. Auto/biography and sociology -- Individual experiences and auto/biographical writing -- Feminism and auto/biography -- Intertextuality - written and oral texts -- Hermeneutics, phenomenology and narrative texts -- Time perspectives - Mead, Schutz and Ricoeur -- The researcher as an auto/biographer -- The researcher and the researched subject -- Individual lives and social lives -- 6. Oral history -- Origins -- Development and purpose -- Ethics -- Evidence, truth and the researcher -- Political standpoint -- 7. The narrative analysis of lives -- Time and narrative -- Myth and narrative -- Other models of life study -- 8. Memory and autobiography -- Types of memory -- The social transmission of memories -- Family and group memories -- Public and private memories -- Methodological issues: recollection and selectivity -- 9. Ethnography and biographical research -- Research roles -- Methodological issues -- Ethnography and key informants -- Reflexivity and the researcher's life experience of ethnography -- Ethnographic texts -- Oral traditions and biography -- 10. Conclusion -- Disciplines -- The biographical turn -- Identity -- Time -- Memory -- Researcher's self -- Methodology -- New technology