The biographical approach was influenced by the symbolic interactionism, the phenomenological sociology of knowledge (Alfred Schütz, Peter L. Berger, and Thomas Luckmann), and ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel).
[5] The biographical method as a research approach to understand larger groupings was used as sociological material by Florian Znaniecki and William Isaac Thomas in the 1920s.
The study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920) by Znaniecki and Thomas used an extensive collection of diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and other personal and archival documents as main source for a sociological investigation.
The reception of this work was initially late due to linguistic barriers, but it was then absorbed and disseminated in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
The biographical research approach formed an important foundation for the development of the Chicago School, which later influenced the symbolic interactionism and the work of sociologists such as Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and George Herbert Mead.
In 1978, Aaron Victor Cicourel published a case study on the life history of a boy named Mark, that received special attention in the discipline of social work.
With the increasing pluralization of life-worlds, modernization, and differentiation in Postmodern societies, the dissolution of traditional values and the conference of meaning, the biographical approach proved useful to study these social phenomena of the turn of the millennium.
The "normal biography" broke up and prompted the individual to manage his life course on his own and to find solutions amongst different and contradictory influencing factors and figurations.
The abductive conclusion that biographical cases are socially relevant and bear general patterns of behavior, action, and interpretation in them is common in sociological practice, although some think that it is not yet fully developed.
Different approaches to the development of typologies exist, as well as for the contrastive comparison between types in order to allow for theoretical generalizations (see Uta Gerhardt, 1984; Gabriele Rosenthal, 1993;[11] and Susann Kluge, 2000[14]).
[15] In the early studies of biographical research, great value was placed on the reconstruction of the actual life course of the individual using data from additional sources (such as institutional archives, diaries, interviews with relatives and friends, etc.)
Today – according to the phenomenological "bracketing" of the being of objects (as by the grounded theory principles) – it is increasingly assumed that the actual life course cannot be reconstructed: experiences are always interpreted by the subject and are mediated by perception, thus constituting the memory in regard to the framework of the overall biography as well as to the situation (for more, see Erving Goffmann notion of frame analysis) where the narrative is collected.