Project “LifeStories”
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schmalenbach
Project “LifeStories”
Listening, Understanding, Appreciating
Biographies of People with Disabilities
At the Institute of Special Education and Social Therapy, Bernhard Schmalenbach and Sören Roters-Möller have been conducting the research project “LifeStories” in cooperation with Hohenfried e.V. since 1 June 2011.
The focus of the project is on the biographies of people with disabilities who have found a home at Hohenfried. As part of qualitative interviews conducted on site, they will have the opportunity to tell their life stories, their memories, and their biographical experiences. The interviews will be documented and qualitatively analyzed with the aim of identifying subjective structures of meaning, biographical constructions, and subjective evaluations – also and especially with regard to the areas of conflict between individual action strategies and institutional control.
To date, there is still relatively little well-founded research on how people with disabilities narrate their own biographies and how they subjectively assess their opportunities and limitations in shaping their lives. The project aims to fill this gap and is guided by the following key research questions:
- What do we learn when people with disabilities talk about their lives?
- How do people with disabilities see and evaluate themselves and their life stories?
- How do they speak about themselves, about what is important to them, about experiences of failure and loss, about the barriers that have stood in their way, about what makes them happy?
- What meaning do they give to their lives? How do they experience spirituality?
- Which periods and phases of life do they perceive?
- How do they evaluate and process objective contemporary historical circumstances?
- How do they evaluate and process the paradigm shift(s), the change in guiding principles and concepts?
A further dimension of the project will be the exploration and testing of suitable conditions, procedures, methods, and approaches that enable successful biographical self-narration. To this end, the project is guided by the following questions:
- Do cognitive or linguistic limitations per se prevent an inner ‘access’ to one’s own biography?
- Under what conditions can people with disabilities talk about their biography?
- How must biographical conversations be structured and, where appropriate, supplemented by other forms of communication?
- Which methods / forms of support are helpful in taking one’s own life into one’s own hands again?
Students have the opportunity to participate in data collection and in the analysis of the transcribed interviews, as well as to connect their own research projects to the project.
Contact:
Project “LifeStories”
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schmalenbach
Institute of Special Education and Social Therapy
