Storytelling in order to narrate and understand social suffering. The heuristic power of the life story

Abstract

The life stories collected in qualitative research of subaltern people such as migrants and women of la Araucanía have been added over the years. From their transcription and editing, which involves listening and writing, we think and feel that in our hands there is a unique material of events that need to be known. So, reflecting on the importance of making known memories that come from lives that need and deserve to be told (Ricoeur,1985), we consider the importance of the heuristic force of life stories for critical qualitative research. The told breaks with everyday time to urge us to seek the best ways to appropriate a messy and diffuse speech that becomes comprehensible in a time other than the obligation of chronological order. I intend to show the importance for social research of the life story method when people recount their existence. First I will refer to what is understood by life story, then I will dwell on some authors with whom we have worked and finally I will refer to the centrality of the understanding coming from the word of the person who tells what he/she has lived.