The article discusses such aspects of life history use as: What is a life history? What kinds of problems and what kinds of people are best suited for the use of the life history? What motivates people to write life histories? Does the collection procedure affect the contents? Does life history material speak for itself? How does one analyze life history material? Some guiding principles for the analysis of such material is suggested.
... I think the narrative of experience by the individual,. whether guided or unguided, is basic in the study of motivation.
W. I. Thomas (23:133)
Is not everyone who has lived a life and left a record of that life, worthy of biography-the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness... Biography thus is only at the beginning of its career.
Virginia Woolf (31:191)
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