prompts a subject to expand on various sections of the stories and asks the interviewee to theorize about his or her life. These theories may relate to career models, processes in the life course, models of the social world, relational models of biography, and natural history models of the life course. Then, narrative segments and categories within the interview-story are isolated by the researcher, and larger patterns and meanings are determined. Finally, the individual's biography is reconstructed, and the researcher identifies factors that have shaped the life. This leads to the writing of an analytic abstraction of the case that highlights(a) the processes in the individual's life, (b) the different theories that relate to these life experiences, and(c) the unique and general features of the life. In the life history of Vonnie Lee(Angrosino, 1994), the reader finds many of these forms of analysis in the chronology of the bus trip, the specific stories such as the logo on the bus, and the theorizing(at least by the author) about the meaning of the bus trip as a metaphor for Vonnie Lee's experiences in life as an individual with mental retardation