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This study aims to describe and evaluate various visual and creative tools for supporting the in-depth biographical interview aimed at analyzing educational communities and their stakeholders.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper suggests reflecting on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The main contribution of this paper is to unpack the uses and applications of four visual tools that support the interview technique. First, photo-elucidation is presented as a sensory strategy to stimulate the narrative during the dialogical exchange of the interview. Next, the timeline is described as a visual concretization of the traditional biogram widely used in educational research. Next, the authors unravel the uses of the organizational chart in educational research, which, due to its nature and utility, provides a glimpse of the organizational functioning of an institution and is particularly suitable for research in institutional frameworks. Finally, the tool known as the flight of the geese is presented. This tool is recommended for use in educational leadership and teamwork studies due to its simplicity and high representativeness of the hierarchy of roles and functions.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions, and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper invites us to reflect on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram, and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of life story for the teaching of sociology to Social Work students. It contains the results of a teaching experiment in higher education which aims to foster sociological imagination among students.

The study employs a mixed methodology. The quantitative data came from a survey handed out to the students with closed and open questions. The qualitative information came from the contents of class exercises in which the students had to connect the theoretical contents of the course of sociology with the biographical narratives of different research subjects.

The results reflect student satisfaction or appreciation regarding the use of the life story as a teaching resource, as well as a successful acquisition of sociological skills and knowledge, such as critical thinking, micro-macro connection and the interplay between structure and agency.

Life story and narrative methods should be employed in post-secondary education as teaching instruments.

The study contributes to expand the reflection on narrative techniques as a pedagogical tool. The paper provides several examples of class exercises with biographical narratives that have demonstrated to be successful for teaching sociology in higher education.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the social and affective aspects of communication in school-age children with HFA and school-age children with WS using a micro-analytic approach. Social communication is important for success at home, school, work and in the community. Lacking the ability to effectively process and convey information can lead to deficits in social communication. Individuals with high functioning autism (HFA) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) often have significant impairments in social communication that impact their relationships with others. Currently, little is known about how school-age children use and integrate verbal and non-verbal behaviors in the context of a social interaction.

A micro-analytic coding scheme was devised to reveal which channels children use to convey information. Language, eye gaze behaviors and facial expressions of the child were coded during this dyadic social interaction. These behaviors were coded throughout the entire interview, as well as when the child was the speaker and when the child was the listener.

Language results continue to pose problems for the HFA and WS groups compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. For non-verbal communicative behaviors, a qualitative difference in the use of eye gaze was found between the HFA and WS groups. For facial expression, the WS and TD groups produced more facial expressions than the HFA group.

No differences were observed in the HFA group when playing different roles in a conversation, suggesting they are not as sensitive to the social rules of a conversation as their peers. Insights from this study add knowledge toward understanding social-communicative development in school-age children.

In this study, two non-verbal behaviors will be assessed in multiple contexts: the entire biographical interview, when the child is the speaker and when the child is the listener. These social and expressive measures give an indication of how expressive school-age children are and provide information on their attention, affective state and communication skills when conversing with an adult. Insights from this study will add knowledge toward understanding social-communicative development in school-age children.

Video game dependency (VGD) is a behavioural addiction on the rise with considerably higher prevalence among males, and the rates and patterns of comorbidity with other disorders seem to be comparable to that of substance‐related addictions. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the role of gaming behaviour and gaming motives in the biographical context for female addicts with this new type of dual diagnosis.

The authors conducted semi‐structured biographical interviews as part of an interdisciplinary German research project on VGD conducted by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN). Qualitative research process followed modified grounded theory.

For VGD women, frequent accounts of depression preceding VGD and of traumatic childhood experiences of loss and/or abuse were found. In two exemplary case studies, online gaming can be described at least in part as an unsuccessful coping attempt. For example, the MMORPGs seem to allow them to experience reliable “reward for their efforts” while experiencing feelings of worthlessness due to academic failure, to experience “social contact” in spite of a fear of closeness.

Gender specific strategies in prevention and treatment of VGD need to be considered, though further research is needed to verify the findings on a larger scale.

The research on gender and VGD dual diagnosis provides qualitative pioneer work in an area where no published research results are available.

The purpose of this paper is to extensively report the implications of the global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population. The experiences of childless men are mostly absent from gerontological, psychological, reproduction, and sociological, research. These disciplines have mainly focussed on family formation and practices, whilst the fertility intentions, history, and experience of men have been overlooked. Not fulfilling the dominant social status of parenthood provides a significant challenge to both individual and cultural identity. Distress levels in both infertile men and women have been recorded as high as those with grave medical conditions.

The aim of this paper is to provide some insight into the affect involuntarily childless has on the lives of older men. This auto/biographical qualitative study used a pluralistic framework drawn from the biographical, feminist, gerontological, and life course approaches. Data were gathered from in-depth semi-structured biographical interviews with 14 self-defined involuntary men aged between 49 and 82 years from across the UK. A broad thematic analysis highlighted the complex intersections between involuntary childlessness and agency, biology, relationships, and socio-cultural structures.

Diverse elements affected the men’s involuntary childlessness: upbringing, economics, timing of events, interpersonal skills, sexual orientation, partner selection, relationship formation and dissolution, bereavement, and the assumption of fertility. The importance of relationship quality was highlighted for all the men: with and without partners. Quality of life was affected by health, relationships, and social networks. Awareness of “outsiderness” and a fear of being viewed a paedophile were widely reported.

This is a study based on a small self-selecting “fortuitous” sample. Consequently care should be taken in applying the findings to the wider population.

Health and social care policy, practice and research have tended to focus on family and women. The ageing childless are absent and excluded from policy, practice, and research. Recognition of those ageing without children or family is urgent given that it is predicted that there will be over two million childless people aged 65 and over by 2030 (approximately 25 per cent of the 65 and over population). The consequences for health and social care of individuals and organisations are catastrophic if this does not happen.

This chapter draws on biographical interviews to analyze identity-based interpretations of inequalities by disabled people in France, as these understandings are formed and transformed over the course of their lives. We combined the material from two different studies to create a corpus of 65 life stories from working-age people with contrasting impairments in terms of type, degree, and onset, as well as various profiles in terms of gender, race, and class. When talking about the inequalities they face, respondents commonly made use of identity labels (gender, class, race, disability), among those available in their micro and macro environments. They usually presented these categories as separate and cumulative, and only a few upper-class disabled women developed reflections in line with an intersectional model. This fragmentation of identity categories translated into the framing of each inequality encountered through a single lens. Respondents mentioned race, class, or gender mainly when evoking topics and contexts that the public debate highlights as problematic, while their references to disability covered a variety of disadvantages. Although the interview situation might have fueled this framing, we also showed that certain earlier socialization processes led people to believe that their disability was the source of the inequalities they encountered. Lastly, we identified three turning points that encourage shifts in the interpretation of inequalities; these are the availability of a new label to qualify one's experience, a competing identity-based interpretation for a mechanism, and access to a different, intersectional model of inequality.

Drawing on empirical research which incorporated biographical interviews with two older male perpetrators, this chapter develops theoretical conceptualisations of the histories, experiences and motives of these men. Four key areas are highlighted, which will be subject to closer scrutiny in relation to extant literature: (i) gender, particularly notions of masculinity, power and entitlement; (ii) attitudes relating to the use of violence both within intimate relationships and generally (iii) critical junctures in the life course which triggered attempts to desist; and (iv) an exploration of maturation and completion of treatment programmes in relation to their use of violence, future risks and efforts towards desistance.

The overarching question of this paper is, “What are the advantages of being an upwardly mobile academic?” The extant academic research on working-class academics has usually emphasized various kinds of “deficits” of working-class academics. In this paper, the author demonstrates that although class positions can constitute a formidable burden, they can translate into specific advantages in academia.

This study is based on the narrative, phenomenological approach, which has been applied in working-class studies and higher-education research. The empirical material comprises the collection of 25 narrative interviews conducted and analyzed according to the biographical narrative interpretive method (BNIM).

This paper looks at the experience of working-class academics from a holistic perspective, including both the downsides and upsides of being an “outsider within,” or “insider without.” It uncovers four assets of a working-class background – referred to as “navigational capital,” “revolutionary potential,” “wisdom” and a distinct “working-class pedagogy.”

The working-class pedagogy can be turned into support programs for working-class individuals. Their navigational capital can foster evolutionary changes and small improvements for the benefit of the entire academic community. Their revolutionary dispositions can trigger major reforms, and their unique experiences can be utilized as case studies in teaching.

This paper engages with the literature on the cultural mismatch and cleft habitus in the academic context. It analyzes the positive but rarely discussed aspects of being an upwardly mobile academic with a working-class background. By recognizing these unique assets, it engages with the literature on inclusive universities and can help make higher education more inclusive and sustainable.

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.