Usually, biographical researchers take a pragmatic stance in research
practice instead of a firm allegiance to ‘realism’ or ‘constructionism’. There
has to be a basis in the material world including the embedded institutions,core structures, and evident bodily realities in which individual existence is
situated. Life stories commonly refer to ‘real’ events and experiences – and
often the tellers may be the only witnesses to such happenings but, commonly,
their accounts can be checked against other written, visual or oral
accounts. Nevertheless, how these events are perceived and selected (even
chronologically reordered or changed over time) and placed within understandings
of the individual life – by metaphor, myth and so on – are necessary
aspects of analysis. A constructionist view can be used to help to
analyse how the tellers shape the telling of their experiences of particular
events – how the ‘reality’ (for them) is formed through the account. At base,
the common pragmatic view would be that stories or accounts by individuals
are central but that they are collected and used in different ways for
different methodological and theoretical purposes thus resisting being
trapped by realist or constructionist imperatives. For Atkinson and Coffey,
the importance of reflexivity and the dependence on conventions of writing
and reading in textual practices must be recognized, but they argue strongly
that rejections of simple positivist and realist assumptions should not
necessarily lead to the ‘nihilism’ of a textual approach. Writing conventions
need to be applied and explored while conveying the diverse lives of others
(Atkinson and Coffey 1995: 55). Again, generally, in biographical research
a pragmatic orientation is often taken, relying on the similarities in
approaches and procedures – the emphasis is on purpose, to gain insights
into individual lives as, perhaps, reflecting wider cultural meanings of the
society rather than dwelling on differences in methodological and theoretical
assumptions (Miller 2000: 18)