Bringing social biography to life course studies: Agency and reflexivity in education-to-work transitions in young adults’ biographies

The paper is based on my longitudinal qualitative study, which takes a “social biography approach” to exploring and interpreting biographical sequences in a person’s life course from early childhood to young adulthood. Against the background of a recent debate that argues for bringing “life” back to life course research through the implementation of qualitative data, the paper explores how life course studies could gain from taking a social biography approach to youth transitions. I focus on analysing education-to-work transitions within the biographies of a young woman and a young man from working-class families. The analysis shows that their education-to-work transitions were not based on linear trajectories, but their decision-making agency was path-dependent on their previous agency in different biographical contexts, and also linked to the lives of significant others. I argue that there is a heuristic benefit to including reflexivity within a study of the life course through the actors’ interpretation of the impact of country-specific “opportunity structures” on their education and employment. Analysis of the two biographies has also revealed that the emotions and satisfaction revealed in the actors’ reflections also had an impact on their agency in relation to education and work. After discussing the compatibility of the social biography approach with life course studies, I conclude that life course studies benefit from including a biographisation to the contextualisation of transition process.