In literary criticism, sociology and psychology, a biographical method of research is used, which allows you to study a work of art, features of social development, as well as the psychological development of a person through a description of the biography of a writer, an individual member of society, or a specific person.
In psychology, this method is presented in three versions. The first is a description and analysis of a person in retrospection, based on existing documents and other sources. The second option is a long study, the collection of biographical data throughout life for their subsequent analysis. The third method is through causometry, i.e. establishing links between various life events indicated and evaluated by a person according to the degree of their significance.
Traditional biographical method
As a rule, various documentary sources are used to describe and study a person’s life path: letters, diaries, memoirs of his contemporaries and his own, everything that has been preserved in time. But such data, as a rule, are incomplete, individual periods of life simply turn into “black holes” of the biography, and learning anything about them becomes impossible. Another problem in the study of post factum is the unreliability of certain facts, the subjectivity of their assessment, the inconsistency in the description of the same events by different people.
For a researcher-psychologist, it is important not only to obtain reliable information about the biography, the external life of a person, the description of which he is engaged in, but, first of all, his internal emotional, emotional experiences associated with certain events, their significant assessment. Unfortunately, documentary facts reflect the psychological state of a person only partially, and sometimes do not give such information at all.
The longitudinal biographical method in psychology
Another way to study a person’s biography is based on long-term observations of his life path. This is a psychological experiment, sometimes lasting a lifetime. Similar studies are carried out by a direction in science called “ontogenetic psychology”, which is widely developed in America and Europe.
Longitudinal observations in the perspective of personality development are certainly more complete and provide an opportunity for the selection of various objects and objects for analysis. In addition, they make it possible to use real measurements of various psychological parameters, rather than relying on documentary evidence. But the duration in time makes them blurry, and does not give a complete picture of the development of personality. Another drawback of such studies is the comparison of ongoing long-term observations with the personality of the experimenter, which gives a very subjective assessment of life events.
Kausometric biographical method
This method was founded by A.A. Kronik, who tried to simulate a person’s life path with the help of special techniques that trace the causal relationship of life events. The essence of the method lies in the fact that a person identifies the most significant events for him, which gives a certain positive or negative assessment, depending on their impact on life. By connecting these values with personality traits, its character and temperament, as well as significant values, you can evaluate your past life and build the right perspectives in the future. Methods of causometric analysis are aimed at this, which use different means to obtain experimental material: interviews, projective techniques, modeling of game situations.
The data obtained are subjective, but this biographical method, in contrast to the traditional ones, is more therapeutic and useful, as it allows a person to evaluate his own life path, to structure it, which makes it possible for a deeper analysis and evaluation.