How Do People Change their Lives? The Role of the Narrative Interview and the Biographical Trajectory for Social Work and Pastoral Care in the United States

Qualitative methods, and specifically narrative interviews, have received increasing attention in recent years in the United States and the English-speaking world in general. In this paper, the authors aim to illustrate the value of the role of biographical sociology and, more specifically, of the narrative interview developed by Fritz Schütze that is commonly used in German-speaking Europe for social work and pastoral care. They focus on interviewees’ biographical trajectories for a better understanding of the ways people afflicted by homelessness respond to living in a local, evangelical-based homeless shelter and the initial steps they take to improve their lives. In order to understand the role of biographical trajectory and how participants address it, the authors provide two case studies of individuals living in homeless shelters at the time of the interview. They then contend that this form of narrative interview has the capacity to help in understanding a person’s life history and biographical trajectory in-depth and could be used as a form of assessment that would contribute to social work and pastoral care in the United States.