Biographical Methods Used in Psychological and Educational Research On

Biographical methods used in psychological and educational research on women in Poland

Edyta Zierkiewicz Bogna Bartosz

Using biographical methods among researchers in Poland is still not very popular, although one can find out that there is an increasing interest in using qualitative approach. Biographical methods and narrative interviews are willingly used by some young researchers who conduct their research on gender and especially on women. Processes of gathering and organising material from research enable them to coming closer and closer to the themes that are treated as unimportant, down- to-earth, and transparent for science. These themes are recognised as a "typically women's issues".

The authors want to look carefully at the kind of biographical research conducted on problems like: mothering, ageing, socialisation, and women's educational ways. There is not much of this kind of research in Poland, so there is almost no scientific tradition or common research knowledge available to researchers who want to get to the problems denied by mainstream psychology and education, which may be captured only in such unique way like a personal story.

Narratives gathered in biographical research reveal complex contexts (cultural, psychological, social, and educational) of these problems through subjectively treated life stories. This kind of approach enables us to uncover a uniqueness of women's experiences analysed in biological, social, and psychological aspects, and in moral or value aspects as well. These kinds of research are mostly explorative and descriptive in their nature; they try to provide insight into women’s realities in Poland at the time of transformation.

One of the most important themes in biographical research is female identity and the processes of constructing it at different stages of lives together with specific problems on any of these stages. New possibilities are given to researchers who can use various types of biographical method (e.g. autobiographical method by F. Schutze, "Metaphor of a book" by Mc Adams, "Map of live" by J. Fowler). These types are pretty well known among researchers in Poland but only few researchers use them to explore women's lives. We want to look at those few studies which start a sort of new tradition in Polish methodology.