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Sammanfattning

In nursing science and nursing practice, life experiences elicited from individual people's biographies can help us to understand the beliefs, valuations and practices related to health and health care at different times. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the use of biographical research in nursing science. Two studies are introduced as examples of cases where the method can be used. The choice of informants, the collection of data, the analysis of data, the presentation of results and issues related to ethical principles and reliability in biographical research are illustrated. Study 1 was a study of the manifestation and development of self-care from a life history point of view. This point of view was chosen because previous research on this and related phenomena had shown that the development of health care is associated with the individual experiences of people living in a certain societal context. Study 2 was a description and analysis of the education of practical nurses in the 1960s and the changing content of practical nursing from the 1960s to the 1990s in elder care. The multiple dimensions of change in nursing within the societal context were assumed to be best captured by biographical research. The studies described below indicate that biographical research yields a lot of experiential knowledge, which helps us to understand the views of both clients and practitioners of nursing.

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