Los algoritmos convencionales de las operaciones con decimales

Like the authors of the SOSTRIS project, I was interested in exploring the gendered meaning of migration at an individual level,26 rather than mapping the broad patterns of women’s and men’s migration experiences. The degree of detail that characterises BNIM analysis, and the scrupulous representations of the lived texture of individual lives that defines BNIM case presentations, was of pivotal importance in my choice of the sociobiographic method for this thesis. As Firkin (2004:7) suggests, this kind of detail is easily lost, hidden or distorted in statistical or other aggregated research methods. Similarly, Rustin and Chamberlayne (2002:3) claim that ‘[t]he purpose of the sociobiographical approach is to avoid the over-generalisation and abstraction of many other social research methods’. Moreover, in order to comprehend the significance of broad social phenomena such as migration and gender, it is imperative firstly to have an appreciation of their meaning in the context of individual lives (Chamberlayne & Rustin, 1999:20). Kofman (2000:47) notes that biographical accounts are fulfilling exactly this function in gender and migration scholarship, capturing the diverse aspirations, strategies and experiences of both skilled and unskilled migrants.

The in-depth interviewing, meticulous transcription, and lengthy systematic analysis to which transcripts are subjected in BNIM result in the presentation of a relatively small number of detailed case studies (K. Jones, 2001:98; Wengraf & Chamberlayne, 2006:62). While these individual analyses cannot achieve statistical significance

24 The status of an individual includes factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, class and education.

25 As Buckner (2005:63) notes, BNIM ‘allows for interpretation of the data based on the performance of the interview as well as its overt content, giving an alternative perspective on the biographical material that they introduce'. See also Gunaratnam (2004:208).

26 Zinn (2005) notes that migrants’ perception of their experiences is a neglected part of migration scholarship.

(Wengraf, 2001:95-104; Chamberlayne & King, 2000a:217), they can, nonetheless, ‘be a fertile source of sociological ideas and insights’ (Chamberlayne & Rustin, 1999:21). As Rustin claims (1998b:70), case studies have always been an important source of discovery in sociology, from the ‘thick descriptions’ of Clifford Geertz to the ethnographies of Paul Willis. An understanding of the social world, he goes on to suggest, has been accomplished as much through the luminosity of single cases as it has been through the application of abstract general propositions or laws. He also argues that case studies are essential to human understanding because they are able to explore and represent the self-reflection, decision and action in human lives (Rustin, 1998b:70). In this thesis the three interviews which were analysed and presented as case studies provided the foundation from which broader sociological knowledge was generated.

BNIM’s mode of developing theory from data,27 of showing how a single life history sheds light on the social patterns and processes of other lives (Rustin, 1998b:69; Chamberlayne & King, 2000a:215), contrasts with the usual sociological practice of assigning meaning to individual lives by framing them within previously established sociological categories (Chamberlayne & Rustin, 1999:28). Rustin (1998a:113) describes the process this way,

…[o]ur interpretive method seeks to place our subjects’ narratives and their component fragments onto broader maps of typical social experience. One can see this as ‘plotting’ the itineraries traced out by our subjects’ narrated lives on to a larger, emergent map of the larger society and the typical life trajectories of which it is made up.

The development of theory in my thesis has progressed along these inductive lines. Using the individual case studies as a foundation, I drew broader theoretical conclusions about the meaning and process of gendered migration, and expressed these as a series of models, which I arrived at by developing an analytic vocabulary based around the

27 This method of theory development is analogous to the Grounded Theory approach of Glaser and Strauss (1967) (cited in Rustin & Chamberlayne, 2002:8).

concept of biographical disruption. In this way, as Rustin (1998b:69) proposes, I created original knowledge of social processes from the study of individual life stories.28

In addition to the particular suitability of BNIM interviewing and analysis to the representation of the lived texture of individual lives, one other closely related feature of the method influenced my decision to use a biographical approach. Through its focus on the particularity of individual experience (Gunaratnam, 2004), BNIM enables the researcher to avoid what is known as ‘categorical thinking’. As Knowles (1999:130) argues with reference to the category of ‘race’, ‘[c]onsideration of individual lives…brings endless variation to racial categories making it possible to take into account important differences between occupants of the same categories’.29 This feature of BNIM was important in my own work because it allowed me to avoid the homogenisation of women’s and men’s experiences and practices (Anthias, 2000:16), and thus move beyond the representation of migrant women as victims of double (M. Boyd, 1984:1093; M. Zhou & Nordquist, 1994:192) and even triple (Rivera et al., 2000:62; Wittebrood & Robertson, 1991:171) disadvantage. Also and importantly, the process of engaging with individual biographies allowed me to recognise the sometimes unique ways in which different categories interact with one another to affect an individual migrant’s overall biographical experience (Gunaratnam, 2004:208).