Biographical Research with Social Welfare Clients. Experience from the Field Research with Teenage Parents from Lodz “Poverty Pockets”

Abstract

From its very beginning, the biographical method has been applied to studies on the marginal, excluded, beyond-mainstream individuals and groups. The biographical processes of people experiencing economical and social deprivation may be related to people and institutions providing professional support. Biographies of individuals experiencing various hardships in their life may, on the one hand, serve as tools used by professional helpers to empower their clients, but, on the other, may become the subjects of destructive influence of social service institutions and their representatives. In the research on poverty, poverty perpetuation, and poverty transmission, carried in Lodz for many years, the biographies of poor people, clients of social welfare and other helping institutions have been collected. The article attempts to reflect on the influence of the narrator’s experiences as a social service client and on his/her underprivileged social position on different dimensions of the process of sociological research with the use of biographical interview. The empirical ground of the text is a field study with participation of the teenage parents from Lodz “poverty pockets.”