The Unfulfilled Promise of Life Histories

Most investigators of life histories have omitted detailed descriptions of their relationships with the narrators. Such data are indispensable for complete life histories, and they are not amenable to traditional social science analyses. The analysis of life histories requires reversal of the Law of Parsimony, an expansion rather than a contraction of complexity to explain the phenomena adequately, since the investigator's role in the creation of a life history is not an interference with but rather an integral part of the data.