This book provides an alternative and novel way of carrying out biographical research (BR) from a critical-realist (CR) perspective. While most existing approaches to biographical research are grounded in hermeneutics, phenomenology, or social interactionism, this book introduces methodological detail for a CR-driven BR, supported by illustrative examples of coding, analysing, and explaining biographical material. It inscribes a CR-driven approach to BR within the meta-theoretical framework of depth realism, mechanism-based explanation, and retroductive reasoning, while developing the idea that conducting BR under the CR perspective requires theorizing social time and temporality. This book would be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the social sciences who are conducting, or wish to conduct, biographical research.

Michalis Christodoulou is Associate Professor in the Department of Primary Education at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His research focuses on qualitative data analysis, methodology of research designs (mostly qualitative and mixed method) and social theory. He teaches social research methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has served as a methodologist on several interdisciplinary research teams involved in funded projects in Greece and internationally.