Biographical methods used in psychological and educational research on
women in Poland
Edyta Zierkiewicz
Bogna Bartosz
Using biographical methods among researchers in Poland is still
not very popular, although one can find out that there is an
increasing interest in using qualitative approach.
Biographical methods and narrative interviews are willingly used
by some young researchers who conduct their research on
gender and especially on women. Processes of gathering and
organising material from research enable them to coming closer
and closer to the themes that are treated as unimportant, downto-earth, and transparent for science. These themes are
recognised as a "typically women's issues".
The authors want to look carefully at the kind of biographical
research conducted on problems like: mothering, ageing,
socialisation, and women's educational ways. There is not much
of this kind of research in Poland, so there is almost no scientific
tradition or common research knowledge available to
researchers who want to get to the problems denied by
mainstream psychology and education, which may be captured
only in such unique way like a personal story.
Narratives gathered in biographical research reveal complex
contexts (cultural, psychological, social, and educational) of
these problems through subjectively treated life stories. This kind
of approach enables us to uncover a uniqueness of women's
experiences analysed in biological, social, and psychological
aspects, and in moral or value aspects as well. These kinds of
research are mostly explorative and descriptive in their nature;
they try to provide insight into women’s realities in Poland at the
time of transformation.
One of the most important themes in biographical research is
female identity and the processes of constructing it at different
stages of lives together with specific problems on any of these
stages. New possibilities are given to researchers who can use
various types of biographical method (e.g. autobiographical
method by F. Schutze, "Metaphor of a book" by Mc Adams,
"Map of live" by J. Fowler). These types are pretty well known
among researchers in Poland but only few researchers use them
to explore women's lives. We want to look at those few studies
which start a sort of new tradition in Polish methodology.