DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE Volume 42, Issue 5, September 2011, Pages- 1131–1152, Catherine Locke and...

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Qualitative Life Course Methodologies: Critical

Reflections from Development Studies

Catherine Locke and Peter Lloyd-Sherlock

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on two experiences of applying qualitative life course re-search in development studies. The first methodology centred on the elicited narratives of older people in Buenos Aires exploring their lifetime rela-

tions with their children and their current well-being. The second employed semi-structured interviews with young adults in Zambia to investigate their trajectories towards economic empowerment. In both methodologies, theroles of linked lives and of wider social, economic and political changeswere central. The article contributes to critical reflection on methodologicalchoices and trade-offs, by focusing on dilemmas that arise from a desire toaddress policy makers and more quantitatively-orientated researchers. It ex-

plores three themes: the challenges of making sense of disparate narratives of linked lives; the possibilities for engaging with individual subjectivities; and different strategies for situating individual experiences in dynamic social,economic and political contexts.

INTRODUCTION

Qualitative life course research has a strong potential to add value to ex-isting methodologies in development studies (Davis, 2006b) and its use isgrowing.1 However, as in other established fields of research, qualitative lifecourse methodologies remain rather marginal in development studies and

tend to lack credibility with more quantitatively-orientated researchers and public policy makers. The methodological pluralism of qualitative life courseresearch stands in opposition to the drive to establish unifying standards for ‘evidence-based’ qualitative research that can inform public policy (Denzin,

The authors are grateful to Janet Seeley, Mariah Farah-Quijano and the anonymous reviewers

for their insightful comments.1. Applications in development studies have notably included the study of livelihood tra-

jectories, experiences of well-being over lifetime, experiences of ageing, the impact of

childhood poverty on later life, and lifetime migration experiences (such as Davis, 2006a;

Gardner, 2002; Harriss and Osella, 2008; Hobcraft, 2007; Rizzo, 2009; Seeley, 2008;

Whitehead et al., 2007). See also the website of the TRANS-NET Project (2008–2011) co-

ordinated by University of Tampere, Finland, and managed by Professor Pirkko Pitkanen,

www.uta.fi/laitokset/kasvlait/projektit/transnet (accessed 6 July 2009).

Development and Change 42(5): 1131–1152. C 2011 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA



1132 Catherine Locke and Peter Lloyd-Sherlock

2009; Polkinghorne, 2009).2 Within development studies, as in wider socialscience, the nature and claims of qualitative evidence are not well under-stood outside circles of qualitative researchers. Even within these circles

in development studies, there has been little methodological reflection onqualitative life course research or substantial debate about the implicationsof the field’s pragmatic policy orientation for methodological choices. Thisarticle seeks to make a small contribution in this direction by reflecting ontwo experiences of using life course methodologies in development studies.3

We argue that the life course methodologies used in development studiesare to varying degrees more thematically focused and directed than in other fields of research where they have been more traditionally deployed. Devel-opment research methodologies relating to the life course tend to give value

to the subjective life account as revealing of wider institutional changes.This contrasts with other fields which take a greater interest in the narra-tive account itself. Our experience suggests that more thematically focused approaches to life course appear more credible and useful to the broader audiences of development policy research, even though they constrain lifehistory accounts and their representation in ways that diminish their capacityto fully explore the way in which individuals interpret changing experiences.We argue that deeper methodological reflection on life course methodologyin development is vital for enhancing the rigour of the research itself. It

may also contribute towards enhancing the credibility and utility of morenarrative accounts to non-qualitative audiences and policy makers.

LIFE COURSE METHODOLOGIES IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

The life course paradigm (Elder, 1995) places a high value on inter-disciplinarity. Life course analysis, with its emphasis on self-defined tran-sitions, trajectories and turning points, offers important advantages for qualitative life history research in the varied cultural settings of develop-ing countries where existing expectations and experiences of life stages areoften changing rapidly. The emphasis on subjective lives in changing con-texts provides a methodology that is well orientated to pursue developmentstudies’ central concern with how lived subjectivities of lifetime experiencesof poverty, exclusion and vulnerability are linked to wider social factors(Davis, 2006b: 9). The potential for a strong analysis of inter-dependencythrough a focus on ‘linked lives’ (Elder, 1974; Mason, 2004) resonates wellwith the more relational notions of well-being in developing countries and

2. This is epitomized within development policy by the rise of agency-funded ‘systematic

reviews’ (such as by the UK’s Department for International Development and AusAid).3. We should caution that neither author is a ‘methodological specialist’ in qualitative life

course research: Catherine’s disciplinary background is in sociology, anthropology and

politics with a focus on gender; Peter’s focus is on social policy with special interest in the

health sector, social protection and ageing.



Critical Reflections on Qualitative Life Course Methodologies 1133

helps to counter the tendency towards methodological individualism implicitin mainstream neoliberal economics (Levy and the Pavie Team, 2005: 6).In contrast to static measures of well-being, life course analysis facilitates a

dynamic view that is particularly valuable given development studies’ focuson how processes of change affect human experience over time.

Whilst quantitative approaches have generated insights about stages of the life course in relation to sociological characteristics or specific circum-stances, these tend to linear standardization which interprets unexpected outcomes as outliers (Cooke, 2008). In this sense, they have little to sayabout the path-dependency of individual trajectories or the role of agencyin their creation and interpretation. To understand how far different eventsresonate throughout a lifetime, and whether transitions are accomplished

successfully or not, it is necessary to appreciate the timing and sequencingof individuals’ life events and transitions (and those of the people they areclose to), as well as how these individuals choose to fashion their lives,respond to events, and interpret their experiences. As Paerregaard notes ‘amajor challenge for development studies. . . in the late twentieth century isthe shift of focus from the structural conditions that restrict [the] poor’sroom for manoeuvre and pin them to poverty, to the strategic practices thatthe less privileged engage in to exploit the economic, social and politicaloptions available to them at the local, regional, national and global level’

(1998).The growing complexity of change in an era of rapid globalizationmeans that it is of particular importance for policy makers to engage withqualitative life course methodologies that can deconstruct the life course byanalysing, rather than collapsing, difference (Cooke, 2008).

Life history research in development studies mainly employs semi-structured interviews that aim to ‘capture the concrete details of lives incontext’ (Cairns and Cairns, 2002: 292) without allowing data collection to

be overwhelmed by standardized procedures in way that might destroy the‘intimacy’ of narrative accounts (Davis, 2006b). As such, Paerregaard ar-

gues that development research takes a ‘life-focused approach’ to qualitativelife history that ‘allows us to regard the life story as a trace of some externalreality that is more than the story itself’ (1998). In this sense, ‘life-focused’approaches can be understood as broadly ‘critical realist’ and therefore oc-cupy a rather different epistemological terrain than the more ‘story-focused’approaches commonly employed in other fields where life history researchis more established.4 Within the humanities, psychology and the social sci-ences more generally, qualitative life history research has moved decisivelytowards a ‘constructivist’ approach in which the narrator ‘creates reality’

by the ‘story’ he or she tells, and where the analytical interest revolvesaround exploring what that particular narration reveals about the narrator’s

4. Whilst the narrative itself creates ‘reality’ for story-focused approaches, for life-focused

approaches although the life history is always constructed from the narrator’s perspective

it is also shaped in relation to an external material reality.




acquired dispositions and internal motivating forces (Paerregaard, 1998 withreference to Linde, 1993). As a result, the practice of qualitative life coursemethodologies in development studies can be described as somewhat ‘het-

erodox’ or divergent from the mainstream or ‘orthodoxy’ of qualitative lifehistory methodologies found in other fields.5 There has so far been littlereflection on these ‘heterodox’ methodologies or their implications for ei-ther their methodological integrity or capacity to influence policy (but seeBaulch and Scott, 2006; Dewilde, 2003; DRC Migration, Globalisation and Poverty and the Innocenti Research Centre, 2007; Hobcraft, 2007).

This is unfortunate since the claims of the quality, credibility and util-ity of qualitative life course methodology, as with qualitative and ethno-graphic approaches more generally, are not well understood and pose certain

challenges. Epistemological claims as to what represents ‘good’ qualitativeresearch are pluralistic, in contrast to the well-established and universal stan-dards of quality applied to the ‘hard facts’ of quantitative research (Coles and Knowles, 2001; Lincoln, 2010). The claims of qualitative methodologies torigour rely to varying degrees on reflexivity, all too often confirming thereservations of non-qualitative researchers about its ‘biased’ and ‘unscien-tific’ nature. Worse, reflexivity is often regarded as being overly-indulgentin a field of policy that values action.6 Aside from feeding into the generalmarginalization of qualitative research in development, these tensions have

also perversely led to the down-grading of methodological reflection aboutqualitative research for development: whilst ignoring the ‘elephant in theroom’ (Denzin, 2009) may make our research superficially more palatableto a wider audience, it does nothing to strengthen its quality or to addressthe more fundamental barriers to extending its credibility.

This article attempts to contribute to redressing this imbalance by reflect-ing on the experience of using two different methodologies for qualitativelife course analysis (see Table 1): firstly, the elicited narratives of twenty-two older people in Buenos Aires with respect to their lifetime relations

with their children and their current well-being; secondly, sixty in-depthsemi-structured interviews of young adults in Zambia focusing on their lifetrajectories from birth, through youth to early adulthood with an emphasison education and employment. In both cases there was a strong emphasis onlinked lives by exploring the role of family, friends and other individuals aswell as on the influence of shifting social, political and economic contexts onindividual experiences. In both cases only the primary research subject was

5. As we shall demonstrate, this heterodoxy extends beyond difference from ‘mainstream’

understandings of what constitutes ‘good’ life history research to include multiple strategiesfor claiming validity. There is, as a result, a very wide range of methodological practice

within life history research in development, despite the overall small size of the field.6. As one of our anonymous reviewers noted, the reception of qualitative research has not

been improved by the way some researchers have ‘sold’ their findings as useful on the basis

that they expose ongoing misunderstandings on the part of development policy makers

about the poor and their problems.




Table 1. Two Methodologies for Qualitative Life Course Analysis

Argentine Ageing Research Zambian Youth Research

Research Focus Older people’s lifetime relations withtheir children and their influence on

current well-being (Lloyd-Sherlock

and Locke, 2008)

Young adults’ life trajectories with anemphasis on educational and

employment choices, opportunities

and experiences (Locke, Verschoor and Dudwick, 2008)

Aim Exploratory Diagnostic

Key Question How do lifetime relations with children

influence older people’s well-being?

What factors enhance the agency of

young people in their quest for economic empowerment?

Epistemological

Stance

Life-focused but comparatively

interpretive

Life-focused but comparatively

structured

Methodology • Elicited narrative, fairly‘free-flowing’ by a principal

investigator

• Semi-structured interview combiningopen and closed questions by two

field researchers

• 22 older men and women from a

single socially excluded

neighbourhood of Buenos Aires in

2006

• 60 young men and women

purposively selected from three

purposively selected sites in Zambia

in 2007

Practical

Implications

• Less legible to non-qualitative

researchers

• More legible to non-qualitative

researchers

• Small n and convenience sample • Medium n and theoretical sample• Interpretive method makes weak

claims to representivity

• More structured analysis and

stronger claims to representivity• Less of the data presented but with

integrity more intact

• ‘All’ of the cases presented but with

integrity less intact

• Older people more able to tell their

story in their own way

• Compromised on extent to which

youth tell their own story

interviewed, so these methodologies offer partial accounts as the children,grandchildren, parents and friends who feature have no independent voice.

From the perspective of life course research, both these experiences, to

varying degrees, are somewhat ‘heterodox’: in each case the researcher di-rected the account, shaped it and ‘interfered’ with the unmediated story theseinformants might have told about their lives (Wengraf, 2001). Furthermore,the different analyses that the researchers used involved selecting, editingand re-presenting the stories that informants offered, and thus might be

perceived as destroying the essential integrity that is the key thing that indi-vidual subjective accounts have to offer (Watson and Watson-Franke, 1985).Despite these similarities, there are also clear contrasts in the methodolo-gies. Whilst both are broadly ‘critical realist’, in that they are ‘life-focused’

and see life history as a means to understand (even if provisionally) somereality, they nevertheless sit at significantly different positions on the spec-trum of critical realism. The Argentine research elicited highly narrativeaccounts with the minimum of interference by the researcher and used theseas the basis for strongly interpretive analysis that was led by the data. TheZambian research collected more structured accounts whose production was




powerfully shaped by researchers and used these for a more categorical and comparative analysis that involved deductive as well as inductive reasoning.

We reflect on how far such methodologies are able to deliver insights

that are rigorous, valuable and convincing. We focus selectively on threethemes, whilst acknowledging that there remain a very large number of other methodological concerns that are also significant. Firstly, we look at the challenges of making sense of widely disparate narratives of linked lives. Secondly, we explore possibilities for engaging more fully with thesubjectivity of the narrative accounts of linked lives. Thirdly, we reflect onhow individual experiences can be more effectively rooted in wider social,economic and political contexts. We conclude that ongoing reflection onthe life-focused approaches to life course methodologies in development

studies has significant potential to enhance their quality and the influencethat they wield with policy makers and other researchers. We argue thatthis is valuable because life course methodology can contribute added valueto other methodologies in theorizing how and why poverty or other formsof disadvantage may be escaped, transmitted or acquired. In making thiscontribution palatable to policy makers and non-qualitative researchers, itis important to strike an explicit balance between entirely unstructured meth-ods and more focused strategies in a way that is appropriate to the aims of the research and its intended audience.

CHALLENGES OF ANALYSING MULTIPLE NARRATIVES OF LINKEDLIVES

A key potential contribution of life course analysis for development researchis its capacity to explore how individual lives are inter-related with the eventsand transitions experienced by close relatives and associates. However, thedifficulty of tracking linked lives is complicated by the ‘inconvenient’ ten-

dency of relatives to get ‘lost’, to be forgotten, to be ‘not spoken of ’, todie, to be adopted, to suddenly appear or re-appear in the respondents’ lives(Kreager and Schroeder-Butterfill, 2006). In each case, our approach to track-ing linked lives was respondent-centric: we focused on what our respondentshad to say about those who were important in their lives at various times,their relationships with them, and what it meant for them. Thus, individ-ual linked lives come in and out of focus throughout our interpretationsof particular life courses and the dynamism or stability in the bundle of meaningfully linked lives represents a core part of the data to be analysed.

This respondent-centric strategy represented a workable compromise thatcould be accommodated within the traditions of life history research and the

pragmatic requirements of development studies.However, development research audiences place a comparatively higher

priority on being able to generalize about the way in which multiple narra-tives can be used to generate insights about wider social change than they doon the stories themselves. The variations and complexity in life trajectories




and the lives to which they were linked pose serious challenges for doing this.The two projects resolved these challenges in contrasting ways, reflectingtheir particular objectives and the relative strengths of their methodologies.

This involved resolving tensions between different strategies for buildingrigour, utility and credibility.

The study of older people was explorative in intent and elicited rela-tively free-flowing narratives that provided a rich understanding of howthey viewed their lives and their lifetime relations with children and others.As an exploratory study of a single neighbourhood, our sample was cho-sen opportunistically through a resident gatekeeper. We did not attempt asynthesis of narratives, but instead focused on analysing commonalities and differences in how informants referred to particular relationships, turning

points or changes in circumstances. In presenting our analysis we chose toforeground contrasting pairs of narratives to give a detailed treatment of thethemes and then to follow this with a generalized but brief account of howthat theme appeared in the wider group. This approach preserved much of the integrity of individual life histories whilst enabling us to explore thevariety of experiences of linked lives.7 For example, the event of the lossof a child was identified by some as a turning point in their lives, but for others it was not. To illustrate this we contrasted the experience of Carlos(79 years) and Daniela (68 years):

Carlos was devastated by his only son’s death, particularly bitter because it occurred when

his wife’s child bearing was complete. Although he still feels his loss keenly, his grief has

been tempered by the discovery that the son had left a child with whom Carlos has since

established an ongoing relationship. In contrast, the loss of one of her sons was not so

shattering for Daniela. The key turning point in her life was her conversion at the age of

49 years to evangelical Christianity in the wake of a different sort of crisis: her youngest

son, Ruben, being abandoned by his wife and children. The inner strength she drew from her

religion enabled her to cope with the subsequent death of her son, Luis, after a long history

of illness and alcohol abuse. For Carlos the chief pains and pleasures of his life were his

relations with his children and despite grief for his son, he has close relationships with his two

daughters and his understanding of his relationship with his grandchildren is at times parental.For Daniela, religion supplemented and to some extent substituted, social relationships with

children for those formed through the church giving her substantial resilience in the face of

a child’s death. (Pr ecised from Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008)

The disadvantages of this strategy were that in some senses these fore-grounded accounts could be seen to ‘stand for’ the wider data set, eventhough no claims were made as to their representativeness. Some of thenarratives were under-utilized in the presentation, raising questions about

the justification for selection of the fore-grounded analyses. This approach is potentially biased since even the fore-grounded accounts have been selected because they highlight common themes. Outlier experiences are unlikely to

7. Yarrow (2008) applies a similar approach to present life histories of NGO workers in Ghana,

providing a single detailed case before moving on to more general, thematic analysis.




be selected as case studies or to feature in the more generalized account, yetthese more ‘problematic’ narratives can have fundamental implications for the validity of researchers’ assumptions and interpretations (Cary, 2009).

In its defence, the approach taken in the ageing study was premised on the belief that, within life history work:

To understand some of the complexities, complications and confusion within the life of just

one member of a community is to gain insights into the collective. In saying this we are not

invoking an essentialist claim that to understand (however partially) one is to understand

all . Rather, we are suggesting that every in-depth exploration of an individual life-in-context

brings us much closer to understanding the complexities of lives in communities. (Cole and

Knowles, 2001: 11)

Whilst this technique of focusing on a selective number of cases for reportingdata is established academic practice within certain circles where the valueof qualitative research is well accepted,8 it has serious implications for developing the credibility of this methodology for a wider audience becauseonly a relatively small proportion of the data is available for academicscrutiny by others (the detail of the remaining eighteen narratives on thattheme being in effect concealed).9 The strategy adopted in the second studydoes go some way to addressing that audience’s concerns but at certaincosts, including the extent to which it solicited and preserved stories that

individuals wanted to tell about their lives.The youth life histories research was commissioned to provide diagnostic

insights for policy makers. Whilst the focus on the economic empowermentof youth was a given, the framing idea was sufficiently broad to accom-modate a life course analysis. The diagnostic imperative militated towardsa much larger sample size, a purposive sample of more and less success-ful youth from three contrasting sites, a semi-structured interview formatand a much greater degree of synthesis of narratives. These methodologicalchoices both hindered and enabled the synthesis: sixty in-depth interviews

were labour intensive to analyse even with the help of software but the purposive sampling and the semi-structured nature of the life histories provided structure that facilitated the synthesis.

As Davis argues, a ‘larger-than-usual’ number of cases offers a ‘manymoment, many-variable combination’ for life history work that can, through‘categorical analysis’, generate a stronger analysis of the social mechanisms

8. The orthodoxy of presenting a few cases to ‘stand for’ the many is illustrated by Shenk

et al. (2002) who rely on two cases, Rizzo (2009) who examines the life of a single

Tanzanian entrepreneur to ‘allow for a detailed understanding of the structural constraintsand individual agency that shaped strategies of rural capital accumulation’ (ibid.: 222)

and Auyero (2003) who compares the narratives of two Argentine women from differing

backgrounds to explore wider processes of social and political change.9. The increasing use of qualitative data deposits, such as the Economic and Social Data

Service (ESDS), may increasingly enable the scrutiny of entire qualitative datasets from

which selective testimonies have been drawn.




behind life course dynamics and ‘enhance its impact on social policy’ (2009a:5, 33). We constructed different categories of the young people’s progresstowards economic success: ‘going places’, ‘solid start’, ‘may have potential’,

‘little potential’, ‘unable to find a job’ and ‘economically excluded’ (Locke etal., 2008: 8).10 This categorization was based upon a combination of emic and etic criteria to respond sensitively to the experiences of informants, whilstaddressing the need to inform policy makers through the study. They werenot intended, however, to ‘model’ life course nor to infer linear progressiontowards economic success: a single event could enable someone to leap over or slide down several rungs at a time. Importantly, the categories facilitated a disaggregated analysis of the large dataset by allowing us to make senseof individual trajectories in relation to original circumstances, way markers

along the route, and current progress. For example, they were useful inexploring why losing a parent was critical in determining the path of someyoung people but made relatively little impact for others.

In these circumstances, the availability of alternative sponsors to ‘pick up’ children, ‘take’

them to school and importantly also provide a loving and supportive environment appear to

be critical to shaping childhood experiences. The young Zambians who faced such difficult

events but who found adoptive homes that conferred advantages (financial security, educa-

tional continuity, loving support) were insulated against severe repercussions for their life

path while others who were not so fortunate faced extreme difficulties (financial hardship,

educational disruption or truncation, neglect, discrimination and abuse).. . .

even parentaldeath was not necessarily disastrous for children or young people: rather the impact depends

largely on the emotional and financial security that their remaining family networks can offer.

(Locke et al., 2008: 38–39)

A problem with this approach is that using a structure to facilitate syn-thesis may crowd out the stories that informants might otherwise have told.Our interest in exploring factors enabling economic empowerment in somesenses ‘muted’ (Ardener, 1975) the experiences of those less successful or unsuccessful youth who could not ‘talk our talk’. This limited our capacityto explore the ways that unsuccessful youth thought about their own lives,even though traces of these frameworks were visible in their open-ended answers. This was apparent in the frequent mention by youths that they were‘just sitting’ or ‘just waiting’ or were ‘squeezing themselves in’. Becomingeconomically productive or self-sustaining is a key aspect of the transitionto adulthood in Zambia. ‘Just sitting’ involves a moral judgement of beinguseless and is distinct from ‘just waiting’ (for opportunities to come along)

because this is purposeful. Those urban youth unable to build independentincomes remained living with older relatives where their presence was of-ten resented and insecure: ‘squeezing themselves in’ betrays their everydayexperience of shame at still being burdens. As Calves et al. (2009: 122) show,

10. Davis (2009a) categorizes the pattern of whole trajectories, such as ‘saw-toothed trajec-

tories’, whilst we categorize ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ states and explore the variations in

pathways between these.




these ‘fuzzy transitory states’ in which these youth find themselves do notconform to expected pathways, but are increasingly central to developing a

better understanding of urban youth in Africa.

We balanced our synthesized analysis by careful exploration of the rangeof experiences ‘within group’, by highlighting nuances, discussing ambigui-ties and quoting individuals verbatim. This contributed to a further problem:although the sample size and the way it constructed claims to analytical‘rigour’ made this study more convincing to a wider multi-disciplinaryaudience, its sheer scale created barriers to its accessibility. A professionallyedited summary (PREM Poverty Reduction Group, 2008) of the full 200

page research report for a wider audience inevitably obscured the fullcomplexity of the data and its interpretation in ways that compromised the

richness of the voices of the young people involved. In this way, the ethical principles guiding life course research, both ‘to make it count’ and to treatrespondents and their accounts ‘with respect’, had direct implications for the ‘artful’ work of representing lives (Cole and Knowles, 2001) in our research projects and their outputs.

POSSIBILITIES FOR TAKING A MORE RIGOROUS APPROACH TOSUBJECTIVITY

Qualitative life course analysis has great potential both to examine perceived intentionality of individual action (agency) and to evaluate individual experi-ence (subjective meaning) in the context of linked lives and changing times.These insights are particularly helpful for theorizing our understanding of development trajectories in which chronic poverty or other forms of disad-vantage may be escaped, transmitted or acquired.11 Despite their differentmethodological emphases, both projects focused on how individual respon-dents made sense of their lives. They were firmly embedded within whatPaerregaard calls a broadly ‘subjectivist’ approach to life history (1998) in

which ‘if we do not know the subjective meaning of lives we are comparingand evaluating then we cannot construct an adequate descriptive frame-work’ (Watson and Watson-Franke, 1985: 28). However, the subjective lifehistories were not in either case simply ‘taken at face value’. As Wen-graf says, narrative methodologies reject the notion that ‘a person’s explicitself-theory [is] sufficient for our purposes’ (2008: 37).12 Whilst Wengraf’sconcern is expressed in terms drawn from psychology, developmentstudies, too, values subjectivity and simultaneously seeks to question it (cf.

11. Whilst there has been extensive critique of development’s tendency to individualize and universalize experience, the problematic way in which it fetishizes the present has not been

as widely explored. This last shortcoming is embedded in the pragmatism of a field of

studies concerned with public action ‘now’ and is reflected in the general predominance of

cross-sectional rather than longitudinal research designs.12. ‘Self-theory’ involves self-description but invokes a deeper sense that these self-

descriptions are embedded in the way that individuals make sense of who they are and

what they can achieve.




Paerregaard, 1998). Engaging more rigorously with subjectivity through lifecourse methodology should involve adopting somewhat different stancestowards the ‘factual’ nature of subjective accounts, however telling they are

with respect to self-evaluation and their treatment of intentionality.In the Argentine research we did not attempt to reconstruct factual ac-

counts. Instead, we explored the ways in which the life histories ‘involved informants “storifying” their lives’, so that they made sense for the re-searcher (Reissman, 1994: 114). This methodological strategy enabled us toreveal ‘how older people use understandings of family relationships to makesense of their unfolding relations with children and their current well-being’(Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008: 1182). Respondents constructed partic-ular children as successful, as struggling or as problematic and these social

constructions functioned to explain and in some cases justify older people’sviews of their lifetime or current relations with those children.13 For example:

Eulogia talks about her daughters in very different ways. She is rather disparaging about four

of them, comparing her own life of hard work and struggle to these daughters’ easy lives.

She claims that these daughters are over-reliant on welfare handouts and are incompetent

at managing their husband’s money. Eulogia’s youngest daughter is unmarried and she

portrays her as sensitive, unworldly and good-hearted. For Eulogia, key issues were whether

her children shared her religious faith, whether she felt their ethic of struggle and hard work

compared favourably with her own, and the extent to which she felt they could rely on each

other at difficult times. Whilst there is a tradition of youngest daughters staying at home tocare for ageing parents, Eulogia was keen to emphasize her youngest daughter’s vulnerability

and dependence on her. (Pr ecised from Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008)

These narratives drew discursively on gendered social norms about parent–child relations, but also showed the scope for agency and the renego-tiation of parent–child relations in old age. The stories are valuable for whatthey tell us about older people’s current state of mind and the extent to whichthey feel that they had a ‘life well lived’ (Rowe and Kahn, 1998) rather thanas a factual record of what actually happened across chronological time. Thearticulation of self-justification or self-blame within the narratives, whichmay indeed ‘distort’ facts, provides rich insight into motivations, desires,regrets and moral evaluations of older people trying to make sense of their lives. Nevertheless, this ‘unapologetic’ subjectivity in which lives, and theevents in them, are open to multiple interpretations is usually viewed bynon-qualitative researchers as ‘less authoritative’ (Hatch and Wisniewski,1995: 123).

In the research on Zambian youth, we did attempt to ‘unravel’ the material‘facts’ and key events in their (much shorter) lives to enable comparisons of individual accounts and to ask why certain circumstances, such as comingfrom a poor rural family or a rich middle class one, were problematic or

13. Similarly, Stokoe and Edwards note the importance of attention in narrative analysis to

‘what conversational actions are accomplished by their telling’ (2007: 70) whilst Coleman

(1991) stresses the psychological significance of reminiscence in old age.




advantageous for some and not for others. Our data combined respondents’self-assessments of this issue (their contemporary retrospective accounts of these relations) with more structured (but nevertheless retrospective and sub-

jective) data on material and chronological events and achievements.14 Inthis case we intuitively employed a method of analysis that is in some key re-spects parallel to Wengraf’s (2008) ‘twin-track analysis’. One track focuseson the subjective memory of the life, ‘the told story’, the other attempts a‘future blind analysis’ (ibid.). This latter method involves reconstructing achronological event series for individual life histories and using a panel of volunteers to examine discrete ‘chunks’ of individual lives (in the order inwhich they actually occurred) in ignorance of the respondent’s subsequentlife course. The researcher can then use the analysis that is ignorant of future

consequences to throw light upon ‘the told story’.We did not adopt this strategy, but did look comparatively at where chil-

dren who had achieved certain levels of success had come from (by lookingbackwards in time through their retrospective accounts), as well as using thedata to reconstruct their trajectories as they unfolded over ‘real’ time (bylooking forwards through the lives of children who started in similar ‘places’and seeing where they ended up). This comparative analysis is qualitative,focusing on the different trajectories of young people and their accounts of how and why events unfolded as they did. In this way the ‘biographical

inevitability illusion’ (ibid.) and self-justificatory problems associated withself-accounts can be challenged to some degree.

The insights that arose from this process were significant in trying tomake sense of the economic mobility of young people. The trajectoriesof many youths were often marked by a number of false starts and ‘uncompleted transitions’ (Calves et al., 2009: 125), such as startingeducation late, or starting a small business that fails, or dropping out of avocational qualification, and ‘chance’ events. Whilst self-perceived chanceevents ‘[were]. . . a “tool” with which many people come to understand

their lives’ (Shanahan and Porfeli, 2007: 117), these often represented pay-offs from social and kinship networks in which young people invested opportunistically but from which returns were highly uncertain. Indeed,the quality of family and social networks was a significant determinant of whether youth were able to move forwards. This analysis demonstrated howfar the potential benefits of younger people’s ‘agency’ could be undermined

by those to whom their lives were closely linked. For example:

The initially good economic position of her ‘relatively advantaged’ early childhood did not

last for Rose (‘economically excluded’). Rose’s bad relationship with her abusive father worsened when she became pregnant at the age of 13. Under violent pressure from her father

to get an abortion she did not want, she married out of desperation. Despite having three

14. Like Blumenfeld-Jones, we resisted the conventional divide whereby the factual is displaced

by ‘perspective’ and sought to recognize that our data were both ‘factual (that is reasonably

accurate) and a function of perspective (meaningful)’ (2009: 426).




children with her husband and against his wishes, she worked to earn money to take herself

back to school and managed to complete her secondary education against the odds. However

her marriage collapsed and Rose took her children to stay with her mother. Rose wanted to

do a three-year course in journalism. When her illiterate father heard she was doing well he

decided to sponsor her, but only paid for one month, bringing back the shameful pregnancy

as a motive for stopping his support. Rose, now 23 years old, lives entirely alone, supported

only by the grudging charity of her brother and her cousin. (Pr ecised from Locke et al., 2008)

However, our interest in their progression through education and into work framed the narratives, emphasizing the completion of certain stages of ed-ucation more than other possible markers. Similarly, young people’s con-structions of relations with parents, siblings, other relatives and friends werearticulated in terms of the role they played in their specific choices and path-

ways through education and into work rather than in other ways that mighthave been more meaningful to them. Our methodology constrained the wayyoung Zambians ‘performed’ their identities by soliciting certain sorts of narratives that were intelligible in relation to ‘doing’ economic empower-ment (Pheonix and Sparks, 2009: 220). Clearly, the different ways in whichthe two methodologies avoided taking ‘self-theory’ at face value involved different trade-offs in their strategies for reconciling subjective accountswith methodological rigour.

LOCATING INDIVIDUALS AND LINKED LIVES IN THE WIDER CONTEXT

The influence of social and historical factors on networks of shared relation-ships is a crucial dynamic for the exploration of ‘linked lives’ (Elder, 2002:202). To understand how disadvantage can be linked both within and acrossthe generations, it is necessary to consider contextual factors in individualaccounts. Interpretations of these accounts must be situated within a robustanalysis of ‘the changing times’ (ibid.: 210), as well as changing places they

inhabit. This is critical for constructing interpretations for policy makers and academics who are interested in using social institutional analysis to identifylocal, national and global factors that are significant for the ‘many’.15

The Argentine research was particularly effective at revealing the dynamicconnections between situated individual lives, local milieu and the wider de-velopmental setting. This study was conducted in a single district of BuenosAires, characterized by high levels of social exclusion. The neighbour-hood’s history was closely connected with the wider national experience of

15. Despite the potential for ‘unexpected stories’ (Cary, 2009) to change prevailing assump-

tions, tolerance for ‘idiosyncratic stories’ is decidedly limited as their interest is primarily

in what can be learnt from individual lives about the process of development. Nevertheless,

there is broader appreciation amongst some researchers for studies that use small num-

bers of life histories as personalized windows on wider processes of social, economic and

cultural change (such as Auyero, 2003; Rizzo, 2009).




industrial development and rural–urban migration (1950s and 1970s)followed by economic instability and rising urban unemployment. To someextent, this also reflected a global shift in development orthodoxy away from

state-led industrialization towards laissez-faire economic policy. Almost allthe informants in this study were migrants, had less formal education thantheir children or grandchildren, and yet had experienced greater economicsecurity through their lifetimes. Recent programmes of social investment inthe neighbourhood, including extensive cash transfer schemes, had failed toimprove security or reduce long-term unemployment, creating conditionsamenable to the spread of both drug-trafficking and evangelical Christian

practice.Informants in the Argentine study were clearly aware of how these differ-

ent layers of dynamic context had framed their lives. For instance:

Carlos. . . was born in one of the poorest provinces of Argentina, Tucuman, where the

economy was dominated by sugar-cane monoculture. He had worked in the cane fields from

the age of 14 years, but when many of the sugar mills closed in the mid-1960s, he decided to

migrate the 700 miles to Buenos Aires. Carlos struggled to find stable work and had to move

house several times. His family relationships were problematic and he remained depressed

about his only son’s death. He lamented the worsening local economic and social conditions,

but remained acutely aware of his deeply impoverished life back in Tucuman. He explained:

‘I’m glad I came here because of all the poverty in Tucuman. It breaks your heart to see how

the people live there’. (Locke and Lloyd-Sherlock, 2008: 1192)

The complex combination of respondents’ own geographical mobility and ongoing changes in the place of settlement has been described elsewherein terms of ‘life-space mobility’ (Dureau et al., 2009: 139). A key partof this was how migration into the neighbourhood, usually from distant

parts of Argentina or neighbouring countries, had affected relationshipswith children, particularly those initially left behind, and how these effectshad endured through their respective lives. The accounts of migration and

parenting challenged the gendered stereotype that children mattered moreto older women than older men. Some older women had not kept in contactwith all their children, while some older men had made considerable effortsto maintain these relationships. Nor were the outcomes of these relationshipson the informants’ well-being always predictable.

Whilst the informants’ narratives made discursive use of social norms about gendered parent–

child relations, these norms do not capture the complexity of actual relationships and the

possibilities for renegotiating the meaning of these relationships over time. Older men were

somewhat more likely to have lost contact with children earlier in their lives. In most cases

this was perceived as involuntary, either as a result of separation or migration, rather thanas a result of selfish or irresponsible behaviour, and the informants expressed deep regrets.

Several female informants also felt, however, that they had suffered from loss of contact with

a child as a result of disintegrating relationships and migrations. . . and some expressed strong

regrets about this. Furthermore, loss of contact or distant relations with children early in life

did not preclude re-establishing or improving relations with children and grandchildren in




later life, or sadly, the converse — relations with children could also become more distant or

problematic in later life for both men and women. (Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008: 1197)

Movements of children in and beyond the neighbourhood also proved important in understanding linked lives. A key finding was that ‘success-ful’ children tended to live outside the neighbourhood and maintained onlyremote contacts with parents. The far greater numbers of ‘struggling’ or ‘problem’ children remained within (never escaped) the neighbourhood,sometimes still living with the respondent. For our sample, children rep-resented a substantial source of vulnerability rather than security for older

people and this was linked to the contexts in which they lived and howlatterly the neighbourhood had changed around them:

The number of struggling or ‘problem’ children was much greater than the number regarded

as successful. In many cases, this had substantial impacts on the informants’ lives. The

concern that a child or grandchild might ‘go off the rails’, or that a problem child would

behave ‘destructively’ (harming either themselves or the informant) was a prevalent source

of unhappiness and vulnerability among the older people in the neighbourhood. Living in a

socially excluded neighbourhood contributed to these problematic relationships, and receiv-

ing scant support from children reduces an older person’s opportunities to live elsewhere.

(Pr ecised from Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008)

In this way, our engagement with context not only revealed how broader social and institutional factors play out in individual lives, but cruciallyallowed us to question key assumptions underpinning ageing and devel-opment policy. Much policy thinking in this arena erroneously assumesthat children are a source of support for older people (UNFPA, 2002) and that whilst women are often able to capitalize on a lifetime of investmentin children, those without surviving children and older men are especiallyvulnerable (Beales, 2000; UNDP, 2005). This logic underpins thinking in

policy around social pensions cash-transfer programmes (Lloyd-Sherlock,2008) and informs much quantitative work (Palloni, 2001) where proximityto and co-residence with children can be uncritically regarded as a positive.

Whilst our findings were highly credible to qualitative researchers, theywere open to suspicion outside these circles: the journal publishing the

paper from this study requested we reduce our commentary on methodology because they regarded it as so well recognized as not to need justification, but a proposal for further research based on this methodology was criticized by quantitative gerontologists who saw little merit in qualitative life historiesand viewed the proposed sample size (of sixty) as ‘too small’.

The Zambian youth work probed how individuals negotiated their livesin the context of turbulent economic and political changes at the na-tional level. Secondary evidence documented how economic decline be-gan with a fall in world copper prices in the mid-1970s and contin-ued after 1991 with economic restructuring. Alongside public disinvest-ment in education and social security, there was a dramatic reduction




of public sector employment (from 70 per cent of the labour force inthe 1980s to under 5 per cent in the late 1990s). Economic liberal-ization policies failed to stimulate growth, to stem the ‘brain drain’ to

neighbouring countries or to reverse declines in social and economicindicators. The growing impact of the HIV/AIDs epidemic (in 2005 adult[15–49 years] prevalence was 14 per cent), and an increasingly youthful pop-ulation, meant that Zambia’s already strained social institutions and familynetworks were overloaded. Severe un(der)employment, and frustrated ex-

pectations created a disenfranchised and disaffected youth. To probe dif-ferent experiences in this context, our sample investigated the experienceof rural youth (in Eastern region) and urban youth in Copperbelt and inLusaka. Rural youth were most disadvantaged in terms of access to educa-

tion, employment and productive resources, but our findings showed thatthey were more likely to be doing ‘something’ in subsistence agriculture.Although Copperbelt boasts mining and manufacturing industries, young

people reported to us that competition for even gruelling manual work wasextreme. In contrast, in urban Lusaka the cost of living was said to behigher, creating tensions over living arrangements for youth, and althoughthere were more opportunities for getting by with informal employment or street-hawking these were low-return and stigmatizing. Our findings suggestthat there were almost no opportunities for non-manual work in rural areas,

and in both Copperbelt and Lusaka opportunities for non-manual work werevery limited even for those with higher education.

As a result, young Zambians inhabited a very different world from their parents for whom formal education and formal employment had offered aroute to security. Respondents’ educational levels were on average lower than their fathers’ (see also Chinguta, 2001). Many personal youth trajecto-ries were directly affected by the mid-1990s education sector reform whichoccurred at the same time as a hard-hitting adjustment programme. As aresult, the state’s education subsidy ceased at the same moment many par-

ents’ ability to pay for their children’s education was severely compromised.For those youth whose parents ‘retired’ to rural areas, either as a result of age or prematurely in the face of redundancy, geographic disadvantages inopportunities substantially compounded their lack of options. Young peoplemade a realistic assessment of this context and their options for economicempowerment in ways that reflected their desires for self-respect and self-improvement.

The ten young Zambians who ‘may have potential’ felt that ultimately self-employment

was preferable to employment, notably because of the freedom the self-employed have totake action, and to avoid exposure to bad treatment, financial or otherwise. Iris, who has

her own salon, and Lucy, employed in the informal sector as a tailor, both said that when

you are employed you have to ‘hand over the money that you make to your employer’.

Overall informal employment was the least preferable form of employment as ‘working

for an individual’ was seen as objectionable, combined with long hours and poor pay, thus

making it hard to simultaneously pay or study for further qualifications or to save the start-

up capital needed to set up on their own. Whilst employment in the formal sector offered




better financial security, few considered it a realistic opportunity particularly given their

dissatisfaction with their own educational achievements and lack of the right social contacts.

(Pr ecised from Locke et al., 2008)

Whilst their aspirations for the future reflected bitter experiences in the past, the informants had developed long-range strategies to incrementallycarve out improvements in their economic circumstances in what they per-ceived to be a very hostile environment. Their combined perspectives and

personal experiences offer important insights into the distribution of opportunities for economic advancement in Zambia. People ‘like them’, withmissed educational backgrounds and with nobody to ‘carry them’ forwardsto a job or business, needed to work hard over the long term, while mak-

ing small ongoing investments of various sorts to improve their situationsagainst the odds of better-connected, better-financed and blatantly exploita-tive competition.

Many in this group often have long range strategies involving incremental improvements

in their working situations. For example, Jones is hoping for a driver’s job which he thinks

will enable him to learn some skills in mechanics and offer him a good foundation for future

progress: ‘I will be looking for other things, so when I have that chance I can have my own

thing’. As Simon notes, ‘it is not just a matter of an opportunity coming your way, but it is

also about how you utilize that opportunity as well’. However, many in this group see success

as something distant people have. Iris sees successful people as those who come from rich

families, and Everlasting puts it this way: ‘Ah like people who have money, it is very rare

to find them helping people who have nothing and are in need, even when you have good

business plans and you go to them and say, “oh, I want this”, it will take years for that person

to help you’. (Pr ecised from Locke et al., 2008)

Whilst global linkages were visibly at work in the shrinking economy and neoliberal policy responses, they also played into young people’s attemptsto get ahead in unexpected ways. For Zulu investing part of his salary intoaccredited distance learning delivered from the UK was an effective means of

circumventing problems of access and quality in local higher education; for several like Malaika, educational sponsorship from relatives or well-wishersin other countries made it possible to continue with training or education;and for Tepson illegal cross-border trade in petrol and currency constituted a way of accessing higher (and riskier) returns that he hoped to invest intraining to be a customs official in the future.

These narratives challenged a number of prevalent assumptions aboutyouth transitions to economic empowerment. The young Zambians viewed economic empowerment not in narrow terms of ‘having a job’, but more

broadly in terms of having the security of resources to be able to fulfilfamily obligations and look after one’s immediate and extended family. Thecomplex relationships between educational attainment, work experience,work aspiration and income illustrated the difficulties of ‘reading off’ ayoung person’s prospects from their education or of understanding their well-being from their labour market position. Together with the purposivesampling that was stratified across the labour market, their perceptions of the




wider context of their life trajectories enabled an analysis of how Zambianyouth ascribed their successes and failures to personal factors or changingsocial structural conditions.

The study confirmed a wide range of policy-relevant conclusions, such asthe need to improve access to further education and employment opportuni-ties. However, the study went much further than comparable methodologiesin the way it highlighted how the severity of the impact of adverse (butcommon) events depended on when they were experienced and whether young people’s social networks were able to compensate for them. This wascounterbalanced by evidence of the resilience of other young people to thevery same events where networks or other resources or ‘happenstance’ pro-vided social protection. In this way the study demonstrated the critical role

that can be played by a wider range of mitigating public interventions. In con-trast to widespread anxiety about ‘moral decay’ amongst an idle/unemployed youth, the life histories also revealed astonishing perseverance in the face of adversity. The ambiguity of family relationships was emphasized by the factthat ‘many young people experienced the pressures from their families totake on financial responsibilities, together with the claims of dependents (liv-ing with them or apart) as a considerable burden, so that “somehow instead of going forwards, you are going backwards”’ (Locke et al., 2008:xi). Lifecourse analysis showed how the interdependence of young people’s lives was

the motivation for economic empowerment and, often simultaneously, asource of constraint as well as support for their achievements. In both theArgentine and the Zambian research, the agency that individuals exerted inutilizing the range of options available to them at different levels was evidentin both their ‘life-space mobility’ and their innovative strategies for gettingahead in spite of difficult conditions.

CONCLUSIONS

Life-focused approaches to life course analysis create particular challengesand opportunities for analysis and interpretation. Whilst more narrativemethodologies are widely accepted by qualitative researchers, their valid-ity is often disparaged by most quantitatively orientated researchers and ‘research users’. The more ‘mixed’ methodology of semi-structured life his-tories can speak more effectively to the non-initiated, but diverges from‘orthodox’ methodological requirements of doing subjective life historywork. Both the life-focused approaches discussed in this article had to re-

solve specific methodological challenges in (i) making sense of multiplenarratives of linked lives; (ii) engaging with subjectivity; and (iii) locatingindividual lives within the wider ‘times’. Both studies adopted a respondent-centric approach to tracking linked lives, pursued a strategy that went beyond taking accounts at face-value and took an approach to context that not onlynested individual lives within wider circumstances but also examined how




individual agency utilized wider circumstances or migration to expand their ‘option landscape’ (Paerregaard, 1998).

Notwithstanding such strategies, there still remains a trade-off between the

credibility of claims of life history research to rigour and utility in the eyes of non-qualitative researchers and policy makers and the extent to which theseapproaches can fulfil the orthodox requirements of life history research. Our article shows how the different epistemological terrain occupied by thesetwo pieces of research was played out in the respective designs, interpretivestrategies and representation of findings in each case. This does not meanthat one is ‘better’ than the other (Cole and Knowles, 2001), but rather that there is a need to open up a more pluralistic and transparent debatewithin development research about what constitutes ‘good’ qualitative life

history.16

We regard both as creating the sort of ‘internal consistency’ required for ‘good’ life history research (ibid.: 125) and believe that this points tothe equal value of ‘mindful-ness’ in the use of heterodox as well as more‘orthodox’ applications of life course methodologies. As life history researchis increasingly being taken up within development studies for theoretical and

policy research, there is a growing need for scrutiny of the different avail-able methodologies. This is beginning to be tackled more broadly in qual-itative research thanks to the public archiving of data alongside statements

of methodological positioning.Antoine and Lelievre (2009) argue convincingly for the value of qualita-

tive life course methodologies to complement more quantitative approaches.We propose a further shift away from ‘methodological fundamentalism’(Levy and the Pavie Team, 2005: 23) within life course research for development: namely, a shift towards serious methodological debate over more heterodox approaches. This is important if orthodox approaches to lifehistory are not to prematurely curtail the possibility of improving quality,usefulness and legibility of ‘life-focused’ approaches for development

research. In different ways, these pieces of research explore subjectivereflections about individual action and experience over time in ways thatrevealed the significance of linked lives, as well as the importance of shifting contexts and circumstances. These ways of making sense of ageinglives and young lives offer unparalleled insights into the ‘life-worlds’ and ‘life-times’ of those concerned, allowing us to understand dynamics of social-institutional change and their ‘mutual relationship’ (Paerregaard,1998) with individual action and experience. In this sense, life-focused

16. For the Buenos Aires study, qualitative researchers interested in the authentic representationof subjective experiences found the small in-depth sample, presentation of a few detailed

cases, and the space created for older people to tell their own stories legible as markers

of quality. In contrast, for the Zambia study, policy makers interested in institutional

constraints and opportunities found the larger, purposively structured sample, the structured

and categorical analysis, and the consistent exploration of themes indicative of the high

quality.




approaches have the capacity to enhance our understanding of experiencesof poverty over time as well as the potential for making policy that cancontribute to alleviating it (ibid.). This is what makes qualitative life course

methodologies powerful tools for development studies.

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Dr Catherine Locke ([email protected]) is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Social Analysis at the School of International Development Studies

at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK. Her main researchinterests are reproductive lives, migration and life course.

Professor Peter Lloyd-Sherlock ([email protected]) holds aChair in Social Policy and International Development at the Universityof East Anglia (UEA), Norwich. His main research interests are social pro-tection, health and well-being of older people in developing countries. Healso has strong research interests in health policy and health sector reform.

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