Drawing on a study about women secondary school teachers’ perceptions of the factors affecting their career decisions, I consider in this article some of the issues I faced as a researcher in using life history interviews, as well as the strengths afforded by this approach for research with a social justice agenda. I argue that researcher involvement and bias are inevitable aspects of life history research, and that these need to be managed to the benefit rather than the detriment of the study. I describe some of the strategies I used to code, organize and interpret the data. Life history offers a number of strengths: it offers scope for exploring subjective realities; it allows narrators to reflect as they speak, which for some can be a transformative experience; and it affords rich insights into the reasons behind the decisions people make that would not be possible via more structured approaches.
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