As long as we have a notion of a self-identity, most people have a moment in their life when they have been forced to recognise, as a result of events, that ‘I am not the same as I was, as I used to be’ (Strauss, 1959, p 95). This is the basic definition of the sociological concept of ‘turning points’ provided by Anselm Strauss in his 1959 book,Mirrors and masks: The search for identity. Since then it has been an important sociological concept for investigating identities over a lifetime in the context of an ever-changing structural, cultural and interpersonal...

The concerns of sociologists when engaging in biography research are different from both the caring professions and oral history. Although there are clear parallels between, in particular, oral history and sociological biography research concerning methodological issues related to how to conduct and interpret biographical interviews (Charlton et al, 2007; Perks and Thomson, 2009), there are also important theoretical and conceptual differences. The latter originate from the knowledge interest of sociologists that partly coincide with but are nevertheless slightly different from historians. This can be illustrated by the works of Alessandro Portelli (1981, 1991, 2003). What mostly interests Portelli is how...

In this chapter I examine how the turning point concept is defined in academic literature and its use in the life course field. While the main tendency in social sciences is to ignore the concept of the turning point, some researchers are keen to study the concept in greater detail and to try to give it a theoretical status.

My interest in this concept took shape in my research on voluntary professional change and by my participation in a broad debate on this concept initiated at the 2003 conference, ‘Bifurcations and Events’,¹ highlighting a number of major changes in postmodern...

Single parenthood over the past few decades has been a focus of family scholar research that has shown its characteristics as a family form, its risks and opportunities, as well as its coping mechanisms. Within this body of research, the situation of immigrant single parents is less documented, although specific conditions particularise this experience, as it will be demonstrated in this chapter. We intend to discuss whether or not immigration can initiate a turning point in the lives of parents experiencing a conjugal separation after settling in the receiving society. Examples are drawn from a research¹ based on biographic interviews...

There is no single way of understanding migration, but the one I know of is to think of it as a journey with a certain goal. In times of global migration, there are countless people on the move every day. They intentionally set forth to make new achievements and take new chances in life. Thus, it often surprises me that there is hardly any empirical research that emphasises the empowering aspects of migration experience, and only a few researchers who conceptualise migration as an exciting, hopeful, future-oriented biographical project (see Morokvasic, 1991, 1993; Apitzsch, 2000, 2003; Lutz, 2000). Instead, migration...

Critical life events such as the loss of a job, the end of a relationship or a divorce or, as discussed in this chapter, the passing of a parent, are often accompanied by depression, melancholy, disorientation and loss of perspective on life. It is the concept of critical life events in particular that is a predictor of psychological anomalies. As a general rule, a critical life event condenses the experience and takes the affected person into a stadium of ‘relative imbalance’ (Filipp, 1981, p 24; Inglehart, 1991), therefore requiring the person to reorganise his or her behaviour and experience making...

This chapter discusses the usefulness of the concept of ‘turning points’ in the effort to understand, first, the biographical narratives of young men who initiated and sustained a trajectory of violence, and second, the narratives of biographical reconversion related by young men who developed a trajectory of violence, and who managed to redefine and transform their lifestyles as well as their identities and life projects.

In the first part of this chapter I discuss, departing from the narratives of the youths I have interviewed, that the initiation in violent life trajectories can be described as a clamour for respect that...

This chapter examines the specific phases and turning points of the life course that can influence the decision of young people to choose singleness as a way of life or become single by virtue of structural conditions. The research focused on a group of young, urban singles from Budapest. Singles are understood as those young adults at an age (25–40) typically devoted to family, living alone in their own household and having neither a durable partnership nor children. The population I studied was that of urban singles in their thirties from the upper social strata, having (at least) a...

In this chapter I present my own investigator’s story, my version of the stories gifted to me as part of a research study into lesbian experiences of social exclusion and mental well-being, and my interpretation of narrative analysis and the use of turning points in narrative. It is a story that, through the process of development, has been presented to different audiences in different formats, received and interpreted differently by each new audience and consequently reinterpreted. The aim here is two-fold: to demonstrate how turning points provide a useful focus of analysis in research that seeks to explore the interaction...

This chapter explores the acceptability of the idea of a biographical turn in order to explain women’s conversion to Orthodoxy in contemporary Russia, which has taken place in a situation of widespread mass conversion and religious renaissance in the post-Soviet period.

In order to trace representations of religious conversion as a biographical turning point (or process) I analysed Orthodox biographical narratives and religious scriptures. This chapter aims to identify typical representational schemes or ways of speaking about religious conversion as biographical experiences that exist at both individual and institutional levels, that is, at the level of biographical narrative and church...

What are turning points, and how are they to be described and analysed? How might a stronger focus on turning points help us to advance sociological biography research? This is what this book is about. It combines theoretical work with a number of concrete, empirical analyses of turning points, starting from different theoretical and methodological traditions within the contemporary academic landscape, but nevertheless with the overall conviction that the concept of turning points is a good start, both to make a theoretical contribution and to provide methodological advice (heuristics) on how to go about interpreting biographical narratives.

Traditionally, sociologists who...