Life stories as a technique to address the structural dimension of the social world

Abstract

In this article, we consider use of life
stories as a tecnique to learn about structural
conditions,
social class positions
and objective working
mechanisms of specific
areas of human activity.
In the first part, we
present contributions
by Daniel Bertaux on
the characteristics of
life stories and on the
technique of graphing
family educational and
work trajectories in
family trees. Then,
based on an example
of empirical research
on class trajectories in
Buenos Aires, we highlight
possibilities that
the application of these
techniques exhibited
and some additional attributes to those that
had been pointed out by Bertaux.