GAINING PERSPECTIVE ON CHOICE AND FATE: Revisiting critical moments

The idea of epiphanies, turning points and critical biographical moments is a central analytic category of life history research in general, and of youth studies in particular. In this paper we explore how we have engaged with ideas of ‘fatefulness’ (Giddens 1991) and biographical ‘choice’ in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood, tracing the employment of theoretical and analytical devices through time to assess their usefulness in this context. We attempted to operationalise Giddens’ idea of the fateful moment in relation to biographical data asking how the analysis of a formal narrative device (critical moments, turning points) might play a part in mapping and theorising the configuration of structural conditions, individual responses, timing and chance. We reviewed earlier analyses, and the changes of interpretation brought about by the accumulation of biographical data through time, recognising the provisional nature of interpretation in longitudinal research and analysis. The process of revisiting and revising our deliberations over the meaning and significance of the critical moments within biographical narratives confirms the interpretative value of focussing on these narrative forms, yet suggests that late modern theoretical frameworks with their emphasis on reflexivity may have a limited contribution to make to understanding the configuration of biography and history. We suggest that this makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to biographical and narrative approaches to the study of young people's lives, transitions to adulthood and trajectories.

As a discipline, youth studies has been centrally concerned with transitions: from education to work; leaving the parental home; starting a family. But ultimately the concern is with transitions from youth to adulthood. There is debate about the usefulness of the focus on transitions, when youth transitions at least have become so fragmented, elongated, interrupted and reversible (MacDonald et al.2001; Furlong 2006; Wyn and Woodman 2006, 2007; Roberts 2007), and calls for a more holistic approach to young people and their lives, of which the study discussed here in an exemplar (Coles 1995, 2000; MacDonald et al. 2005; Henderson et al.2007). As the institutional shape of youth transitions becomes less familiar, there is a need to find new ways of mapping and conceptualising biographical patterns that attend both to the ways that young people describe and experience their lives, but also to the structural conditions that constrain individual responses.

The emergence of a biographical approach to understanding young people's transitions to adulthood has been associated with a growing awareness of the changing character of young adulthood over a generation and shifts in government policy towards increasingly integrated and individualised forms of government in the European context (Henderson et al. 2007). The expansion of higher education, disappearance of youth labour markets, and delay of parenthood and homemaking mean that most young people are living lives that can be very different from their parents and grandparents. A longitudinal approach is clearly valuable in this, since it enables us to trace individual trajectories in their multilevel relational and broader social and historical contexts over time in some depth (Jones and Wallace 1992; du Bois-Reymond 1998).

Although much of the rhetoric of neo-liberal governments and late modern social theory suggests that the structuring patterns of the past (class, gender, race) are giving way to increasingly individualised biographical patterns shaped by choice, in practice life chances continue to be shaped profoundly by familiar inequalities – albeit in new ways. Yet forms of government increasingly put the individual on the spot; it is the individual who has to make the right choices about work, health, employment and intimate life, with the project of self emerging as the medium through which opportunity and resources are mediated (Rose 1991). In the UK a chorus of critical voices have accompanied this shift, all suggesting that the incitement to self government systematically privileges the forms of cultural and social capital typical of the middle classes and that this obscures the relationship between self narration and the construction of the self, and the ability to secure material, social and affective resources (Skeggs 2004; Hey 2005; Reay 2005).

It is in this context that life story research becomes highly politicised. How we understand and interpret the ways that people talk about themselves has consequences for where we locate the burden of social justice. The idea of epiphanies, turning points and critical biographical moments is a central analytic category of life history research in general, and of youth studies in particular. The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) has suggested an elaboration of this idea, the concept of the ‘fateful moment’, a moment in which the individual reflects and makes choices that will have serious consequences for her/his future life trajectory. In this paper we explore the way that we have engaged with ideas of ‘fatefulness’ and biographical ‘choice’ in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood, tracing the employment of theoretical and analytical devices through time to assess their usefulness in this regard. This has a broader theoretical and methodological contribution to make to biographical and narrative approaches to the study of young people's lives, transitions to adulthood and trajectories.

We begin by explaining how, in the early stages of the study, we attempted to operationalise Giddens’ idea of the fateful moment in relation to this biographical data (Thomson et al.2002; Henderson et al.2007) asking how the analysis of a formal narrative device (critical moments, turning points or epiphanies) might play a part in mapping and theorising the configuration of structural conditions, individual responses, timing and chance. We then show, with the accumulation of interview accounts, how we moved towards analyses that were increasingly attuned to social processes that were not explicitly voiced in the young people's self-narratives. Data used include interviews, field notes, case profiles and studies, and sequential analyses. It is a story that unfolds over a 10-year period and shows how prospective research can confound analytic closure. We conclude by suggesting that the accumulation of narratives of self may provide a route to move beyond the life as told to gain insight into the life as lived as well as other possible unlived lives that fall away.

The Inventing Adulthoods study has followed a group of young people over more than 10 years from 1996 with up to six interviews with each participant.¹ They were drawn from five socio-economically contrasting sites in the UK: a leafy suburb, an inner city site, a disadvantaged estate in the north of England, an isolated rural area, and a city in Northern Ireland, where the areas involved also varied by sectarian identification. At the last full round of interviews the 64 young women and men remaining in the sample were aged 17–26, but we remain in contact and people both drop out of and drop back into the study. We used a range of methods including a questionnaire on youth values at the start, followed by focus groups, lifelines, and memory books (a form of diary), but the main method has been repeat biographical interviews at intervals varying with the status of our funding. This rich dataset is currently being archived, and analysis by the original team continues.²

One of the starting pointS for the research was Anthony Giddens’ idea of the ‘reflexive project of self’, ‘whereby self-identity is constituted by the reflexive ordering of self narratives’ (1991: 244). The researchers imagined a research design that would enable them to capture individuals’ projects of self as they evolve and change over time, and to explore how the different contexts within which individuals grow up shape these changing accounts. In engaging with late modern theory the researchers were also aware of the many critical voices that had challenged the work of late modern theorists such as Giddens and Beck, including those who suggest that such theories simply lead us to focus on accounts of agency and to ignore more complex processes and practices through which privilege and inequality are forged and lives are lived (Adkins 2002; Skeggs 2004; Heaphy 2007). We employed the reflexive project of self as a vehicle through which to empirically document how individuals create identities for themselves and others. These empirical accounts provide a starting point for thinking about the kinds of claims that late modern theorists make about the relationship between social and personal change.

Gidden's (1991) concept of a fateful moment offered the promise of a bridge between the theoretical framework and our emerging longitudinal collection of biographical data about young people's transitions to adulthood. We explored ways of operationalising the concept. The key element in Giddens’ theoretical construct of the fateful moment is that it is recognised and acted upon, it requires that the individual considers the consequences of choices and action, and assesses the risk of those choices. Reflexivity and choice are key. In Giddens’ terms, fateful moments are:

Fateful moments can be within the control of a person, starting a business for example, but can also arise from events beyond the individual's control, and Giddens allows a role for ‘fortuna’, luck, chance and opportunity in shaping fateful circumstances. But it is taking control in the fateful moment and exercising agency that is crucial in the definition. The individual can respond by undertaking identity work, reviewing who they think they are, drawing on experts and others for advice, undertaking research and developing new skills, recognising the need for these responses given the consequentiality of the event. The focus is on the individual as a rational choice-making agent engaged in a ‘reflexive project of self’ (Giddens 1991: 244) where the individual is an agent constructing their self-identity through the choices they make, based on reflecting on their life and choices.

Operationalising this concept involved two stages. First it was necessary to identify narrative turning points in biographical accounts (what we have called critical moments), and second it was necessary to evaluate these moments in relation to Giddens’ criteria, asking whether they were ‘fateful’. We regarded a critical moment as an event described in an interview that the interviewee or the researcher, or both, understood as having important consequences for the young person's life and identity. We were looking for critical moments as they arose in the narrative, and also asked directly in each interview whether anything important and/or significant had happened since we had last seen the young person, in all areas of their lives. Sometimes researchers and participants agreed about critical moments and sometimes researchers identified them in the absence of corroboration from the young person. Occasionally young people offered as critical events and experiences that they had not previously mentioned, hidden until that moment from the researcher, but an important part of how the young person perceived the construction and development of their self and identity. And just as hindsight and a longer perspective have helped us as researchers to see different events as important in the process of the young person's life moving through time, so it enabled the young people themselves to reassess and reconsider what were and were not critical moments, as they reflected on their experiences.

We then drew together different examples of critical moments and considered how these moments might reflect socially structured patterns, identifying differing degrees of agency and self-awareness in the narratives. We sought to examine the relationship between these empirical critical moments and the theoretical construct of the fateful moment, asking if there was ‘a relationship between young people's agency, their imaginations and their ability to realize opportunities and control their destiny’ (Thomson et al.2002: 338). We were trying to understand whether the critical moments we identified were fateful in Giddens’ terms.

The kinds of situations/events/experiences that we and the young people in our study identified as critical moments both in the initial interview, and in further interviews over time, were extremely varied. They included:

• 1.

  family related situations: being kicked out of home, parents splitting up, parental unemployment;

• 2.

  illness and bereavement: a parent's death, suicide, death of a baby, diagnosis of chronic illness;

• 3.

  moving (house, school, town, country);

• 4.

  events associated with the education system: both formal (exams, changing schools) and informal (bullying, relationship with teachers);

• 5.

  ‘trouble’: creating young people as problematic (teenage pregnancy, drug taking, illegal activities);

• 6.

  leisure and consumption: learning to drive, clubbing;

• 7.

  rites of passage: ‘coming out’ as lesbian, gay; discovering (or rediscovering) religion; and

• 8.

  relationships: friendships, couple relationships, sexual experiences.

Many of these critical moments in young people's lives have been identified in the work of others, although not all use the term, and particularly in relation to the transitions of socially excluded young people in poor circumstances (Webster et al.2004).

In that first analysis, young people in all sites reported critical moments related to family, education and relationships, but others were identified with particular locations. On the socially disadvantaged estate, for example, critical moments related to chronic illness and death were more prevalent, and family related events were complex due to multiply reconstituted families. In the leafy suburb, participants were more likely to mention critical moments related to leisure, consumption and mobility: for example getting a car or passing the driving test. These patterns reflect the material conditions of life and resources available to the young people in these highly contrasted sites. Having established that certain kinds of critical moments were clustered in different places, we noted that there were differences in the extent to which the events were amenable to control, or that agency could be seen in the way they were experienced by the young people. We generated a continuum from experiences characterised by the possibility of ‘choice’ and agency on the part of the young person, to events outside the control of the individual, which we characterised as ‘fate’ (Figure 1). Activities associated with leisure and consumption, for example could be situations where choice and agency could be exercised; events such as illnesses and death are ones in which little control could be exerted, and we might observe fatalistic responses.

All of the events are socially structured, but depending on the position on the continuum, young people could be seen as having more or less control over them. We placed family events at the fate end of the continuum since young people are often at the mercy of family decisions made both currently and in the past, they are living the consequences of earlier family decisions.

Over time in the study it became increasingly clear that the lives of some young people were particularly vulnerable to events beyond their control, such as illness, violence and family disruptions (see also MacDonald et al.2005; MacDonald 2006; Parry 2006) while others were more likely to report critical moments that expressed a growing sense of autonomy. As their lives progressed and new experiences impinged on their consciousness, other elements emerged as salient, and young people discussed for example changes internal to the self. These might involve rethinking the self after a period of depression, the impact of a break-up of a friendship or intimate relationship, or regret after a one-night stand. It also became clear that some of the events captured within the term ‘critical moment’ have more serious consequences than others and similar events can have a different impact on different people. A bereavement, for example, can provide a turning point from which the young person takes control of their life, or can throw another young person into a downward spiral of depression and despair, reinforcing a sense of powerlessness and limiting and closing off possibilities (Ribbens McCarthy 2006, 2007; Henderson et al.2007: 95–6). Whether a moment is consequential can depend on the resources to which the young people have access, timing and coincidence. In practice it is the configuration and timing of these events that becomes significant, and the extent to which young people are able to respond with resources (which depends on material and structural aspects of their situation), and resourcefulness (dependent on the material, psychological and affective resources to which they have access (Adkins 2005)). There is also a process of accumulation at play over time so that it is possible to be drawn into spirals of decreasing and increasing agency.

Our first published discussion of the relationship between critical moments and fatefulness was based on the first round of biographical interviews (Thomson et al.2002). We concluded that the descriptive category of the critical moment provided us with a way of organising data so that it was possible to see how social and economic environments frame individual narratives, and the personal and cultural resources on which young people are able to draw. It is an analytic device that privileges individual identity and subjectivity, without reducing the analysis to individual psychology. We saw the concept of the ‘fateful moment’ and theoretical framework of the ‘reflexive project of self’ as generative and useful in this context. But even in the first round of interviews, the qualitative nature of our material exposed the limitations of such an abstracted, individualised explanatory model. While it was useful to aggregate data on critical moments and to map it in relation to theoretical notions of choice and fate, there was no straightforward way of evaluating whether critical moments were fateful in individual terms.

As the study continued we gained a longitudinal perspective through further rounds of interviews. On one hand this enabled us to gain a better sense of the consequences of an event, but it also revealed the provisionality of the kind of identity work captured within any single interview. As self narratives were revised in the light of new experiences and demands, accounts of events that had fulfilled the criteria for a fateful moment were not so clearly fateful with the passing of time. As interviews grew into longitudinal case studies it became possible to interrogate both the value and the limitations of Giddens’ analytical framework for understanding the relationship between individual biography and wider social processes.

A second published article interrogated the relationship between longitudinal studies and the reflexive self (Plumridge and Thomson 2003), and in this paper we develop this analysis further through two longitudinal case studies of Robin and Lorna. In the first we explore how our analytic focus on ‘fatefulness’ including the criteria of risk analysis, help seeking and planning distracted us from alternative readings of the data. The second case study demonstrates how the accumulation of biographical accounts helps us to see the consequences of events, but also complicates the picture by revealing the significance of antecedents and the wider biographical context of family culture and other lives that are linked to the life that is narrated. Both examples also demonstrate the difficulty of forging stable interpretations of qualitative longitudinal data.

Robin was a white boy living in an isolated rural village, presenting an urban identity through his taste in music, dress and ‘streetwise’ qualities, having lived previously in a town. His older brother had dropped out of school and was involved in petty crime and drug taking. In Robin's second (biographical) interview he described a situation where he had come close to expulsion from secondary school since we last met him, having been ‘busted for smoking the old puff’ with two friends on school premises. The drama included a visit from the headmaster and the police, as a result of which Robin reported ‘I didn't sleep a wink that night’. He described the whole event as ‘the worst time of my life’.

In his account of events and of his and his parents’ reaction to them Robin's case seemed to fulfil Giddens’ criteria for ‘fatefulness’. He provided a reflexive account of his experience, ‘I look back now and think how pathetic I was. I knew I was going down a bad track, but I didn't care’, and vowed that ‘I'd never put myself in that position again’. He could be seen as undertaking risk assessment, seeking out expert advice (from family, including his brother, who had himself had drug and police related experiences) and engaging in identity work. He drew on family and community resources to avoid expulsion from school, in contrast to his fellow smokers who were excluded. In our original interpretation, Robin had used the crisis as an opportunity for reworking his identity from that of a ‘bad boy’ to a middle-class young man with conventional educational and other prospects.

In this instance Giddens’ notion of fatefulness was useful in making sense of Robin's account, bringing attention to the centrality of self-identity in the unfolding of a biography, and providing a method for exploring a process of identity revision. But in privileging individual choice, this theoretical approach to understanding the significance of life events obscures relationships, investments and the wider power structures that might constrain choice in practice. Crucial for Robin in this instance, for example, was his access to the social and cultural capital of his parents, which they instantly, fiercely and successfully deployed in his defence. This parental intervention, and the fact that other young people in the study, and Robin's fellow smokers, clearly do not have access to these kinds of resources (Holland 2006), supports the suggestion made by Skeggs (2002) that a particular form of cultural capital is crucial for the kind of reflexivity to which Giddens appears to give universal status. In broader perspective, the longitudinal approach reveals underlying processes influencing responses and narratives at any particular point in time. Although not narrated as such, the break down of Robin's family and establishing of two families of father and stepmother, and mother and stepfather could be seen as a more consequential life event for both Robin and his elder brother, helping to explain their investment in rebellion, ‘bad boy’ images, and difference.

We can see here a quite disconcerting aspect of longitudinal study – the impossibility of analytical closure, new rounds of data can provide new perspectives and render earlier interpretations redundant. All interpretations are provisional of course, but this aspect of interpretation is more easily contained in a one-off, snapshot study (Ramazanoglu with Holland 2002; Thomson and Holland 2003). In longitudinal research it is an integral part of the analysis/analyses, and the researcher is engaged in and part of a reflexive process of reconsidering and reinterpreting the meaning of the data and analysis.

In the case of Robin, what had appeared in our initial interpretation to fulfil the criteria for a fateful moment in the first interview, required review and reconsideration. Although his agentic response to being discovered smoking cannabis did save him from expulsion from school in the short term, it did not represent an enduring identity in broader longitudinal perspective. By the second interview Robin had reverted to his dope smoking ‘bad boy’ identity, and in fact drug and alcohol use continued to be part of his pattern of behaviour throughout the period we were meeting with him, it was this that appeared later to be an enduring aspect of his identity in this phase of his life. He was, however, like some other young men in the study, able to use and develop skills and contacts to help him pursue a career in the music and entertainment business as a DJ and alternative entrepreneur, not the conventional middle-class trajectory foreshadowed in the first interview as the result of the critical moment that Robin and the researchers identified. Our interpretation with the benefit of hindsight indicated that Robin's critical moment at the age of 16 may have fulfilled the criteria of being ‘fateful’ in Giddens’ terms but seems not to have been a turning point in his ‘life as lived’. Rather it forms part of what became a pattern of confession, self-inspection and experimentation in his ‘life as told’ – exemplified most clearly in his fourth interview at the age of 19.

After a series of failed courses and casual jobs Robin took a steady job to facilitate his DJing at night to help him realise his dream:

Giddens’ model of the fateful moment does not provide an explanation of why particular identities are possible and endure, whilst others are not. To explain the trajectories of the young people in our study we have needed to explore the wider framework within which certain identities are liveable (Butler 2004), including the structures of opportunity within which they operate, and limitations on their options and choice (Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Nilsen and Brannen 2002; Thomson et al.2004). Youth transitions to adulthood in general are subject to constraints of class, gender and ethnicity, but within this framework of socio-structural factors and the impact of the macro social environment there is space for individual agency. Proactivity, independence and autonomy can be facilitated or restricted by social, cultural and institutional factors (Thomson et al.2002; Catan 2004). The four-factor model of the life course suggested by Giele and Elder (1998) includes time and place, linked lives, agency, timing and resourcefulness, all important when taking the longitudinal perspective. The ‘critical moments’ that are a central part in young people's narratives of self are just part of the story, and we have shifted our focus over time from the critical moments to the young people's responses, the resilience and resourcefulness they show in the face of such moments, and the ways that such moments themselves are revisited, worked and reworked in the ongoing biographical narrative (McLeod and Thomson 2009).

In the next example we show the value of longitudinal data for exposing the biographical significance of that which is not explicitly stated or narrated but which nevertheless emerges over time. It is an example of how the meta-analytic narrative, the longitudinal, diachronic linking and reworking of analyses, is also contingent and iterative, with new stories being told from the same material from the position benefit of a shifting present. It also illustrates some of the ways in which hindsight and a retrospective analytic perspective takes over from the prospective orientation as a data set matures.

Lorna was 16 years old when we met and in this first interview identified an experience as a biographically critical moment: the consequences of which were considerable and far reaching, but from which she tried to construct a positive outcome. The critical moment was presented as being outside her control: at a party she was assaulted by a boy from her school. She told her parents, and her father informed the police. She was subsequently excluded and ostracised by a group of friends at her predominantly white middle-class school in the leafy commuter belt area, who were at the party and denied that there had been an attack. Lorna explained ‘at this point everyone turned against me cause I had done a bad thing, I had gone to the police’. Her excommunication from the popular ‘in crowd’ was so extreme that it forced her to change her way of being in the school. One of the erstwhile friends gave her some advice, suggesting that she took advantage of the fact that ‘no-one can be seen with you’ to throw herself into her schoolwork to ‘show them’, so she decided to buckle down and study. She did better than expected in her examinations, but ‘became really bitter towards the end’ about the behaviour of the group, and decided that she could not tolerate being at the school under those circumstances. After the exams she forged a path independent from her peers, going to a sixth form college in a nearby town, rather than to the school's sixth form. This was a risky educational route since her school would have provided a more direct route to educational success, not necessarily assured by the sixth-form college.

Lorna was proud and defiant, however, explaining ‘I beat everyone else in this school […] everyone saw me getting on with my life and that made me feel important, that made me feel like I don't need any of you lot’. Unlike the majority of her peers who had progressed from school sixth form to university, by her third interview Lorna was working as an office temp, having completed a vocational qualification at college. She was highly conscious of how her trajectory differed from many of her peers and expressed anxiety about the relative merits of the higher education versus the work based route to professional work status.

In our original analysis we struggled to fit Lorna's critical moment into Giddens’ model of fatefulness as marked by agency. On one hand the attack was clearly outside Lorna's control, a matter of chance, although the decision to inform her father who involved the police and from which flowed the serious consequences of the event was more within her control. Although Lorna did not need to tell her father, we considered that she had not fully recognised the risks involved. What did seem clear at this point was that Lorna's fate turned on the rift with her school friends, and that this had been consequential for her subsequent educational path. However, with the benefit of the longitudinal analysis we began to understand the significance of other powerful underlying biographical forces.

Over time we came to know more about Lorna and her relationship with her family, and particularly her parents. Apart from a period of modelling in her early adulthood, Lorna's mother had not worked outside the home, although in later interviews it emerged that at that time she worked as a volunteer in a charity shop. There was no experience of higher education or university in Lorna's family and they did not particularly value that route to success, even though they did provide an emotionally supportive and materially affluent background. With their support, Lorna was the first amongst her group at school to learn to drive, and was provided with a car by her father, with whom she reported a complicated relationship. Lorna's father was a successful self-made businessman with little formal education. She spoke of admiring his achievements and was encouraged by him to show independence, and indeed become independent, which had a strong influence on the way she pursued her own career. Over the years of the study Lorna moved between a number of jobs that were closely linked with her long-term relationship with a man of whom her parents disapproved. At our last meeting she reported having broken up with the boyfriend and found another, more acceptable to her parents. She had acquired a responsible job in a car showroom. Lorna explained that she enjoyed the work, and wanted to pursue it, possibly in a larger organisation. She linked her career trajectory with her father's interest in cars as a collector, and a dealer in second hand cars in his retirement.

In our original analysis of Lorna's critical moment we were aware of the significance of her father's intervention. Yet in retrospect we can see this event in new light. Where we originally interpreted Lorna's confiding in her father as showing a lack of awareness of the risks involved, might we now read this decision in retrospect as a sign of the degree to which he was important in her life and influenced her values. She wanted to get his response to the event. And although rejected by her friends, might her departure from school for the sixth-form college reflect her parents, views of education, and particularly those of her father. He had done very well with little education, and would clearly support any route that Lorna chose to take. Lorna's solidarity with her parents could be one source of her ambivalent feelings of belonging and of valuing of employment over education. Lorna herself had a changing view over time on the degree of control that people could exert over their lives. In early interviews she was fatalistic, seeing life as mapped out before her, and offering little control, although through time she did become more of a planner. In the final interview she had moved to a position where she considered that ‘you make your own luck’.

Kierkegaard's (1992[1846]) insight that lives are lived forwards, yet understood backwards lies at the heart of narrative (Lawler 2007), ethnographic (Geertz 1995) and dynamic approaches to qualitative social research (McLeod and Thomson 2009). In this paper we have traced our own journey towards this understanding, sketching the parts played by theoretical agendas, research design and critical reflection. We have shown why we were interested in findings analytic techniques with the potential for mapping biographical narratives, suggesting that formal rhetorical devices can provide a mechanism for comparison and a means through which to connect the social and the biographical. We have also shown limits of applying a theoretical model such as Giddens’ fateful moment to empirical material, a limitation amplified with the accumulation of multiple accounts over time. Our experience has cautioned us against moving too quickly between evidence of the life as told and interpretations of the life as lived. The critical moment that is found in a single biographical narrative represents a provisional identity claim, which can tell us a great deal about the individual and their circumstances. Yet if one-off life stories are our only form of data, we are limited in what we can see. With the accumulation of accounts we capture contradiction, dissonance and repetition. Silences are more discernable, and consequences and antecedents begin to be revealed. Longitudinal approaches can liberate us from the limits of single interview data, providing another route into the life as lived. Ironically, it may be that the ‘events’ that we identified as critical moments with Lorna and Robin in their first interviews in the Inventing Adulthoods study may in fact be understood retrospectively as capturing the key biographical themes of their lives. Yet it has required the passage of time for these themes to unfold, and with more time and data the picture inevitably becomes richer.

The conceptual tool of the fateful moment proved to be a double-edged sword for our own work. On one hand it provided a link to the wider theoretical construct of the ‘reflexive project of self’ and to generative debates about the neoliberal subject in the remaking of privilege and inequality. But it also closed the conceptual space between the story told and the life as lived, encouraging us to accept professions of agency at face value. Our attempts at operationalising the fateful moment stalled in the face of complex and contradictory data and we struggled to fit unfolding case studies within its exacting yet descriptive criteria. From where we write today, as custodians of a rich data set of longitudinal biographical accounts, we are intrigued by the possibility of rethinking the critical moments we find in narratives as clues and rehearsals, sometimes realised and sometimes not, which are suggestive of a plethora of ‘unlived lives’ which may have fallen away yet which still haunt the imagination and may yet find expression (Portelli 1990; Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1997). Working with a mature longitudinal data set has led us towards the rich methodological and theoretical resource of oral/life history and biographical sociology. This is a retrospective analytic project, distinct from, yet complementary to the prospective project that we began with at the outset of the study.

Notions of choice and fate infuse our data and we cannot escape the challenge of understanding how and why they contribute to contemporary narratives of selfhood. Yet we need not accept such expressions at face value, despite recognising that there is a relationship between the stories we tell and the lives we experience (Bruner 1987). Throughout the Inventing Adulthood study we have engaged in a critical and productive conversation with late modern theory. We were excited by the fit between our longitudinal research design and a conceptual framework that privileged narratives. In this paper we have provided an account of the ways we have moved between theory and empirical data. Our initial impulse to operationalise the theoretical tool of the fateful moment was productive in the early stages of our study and helped us map our data in such a way that revealed the significance of social and economic resources in shaping the narrative expression of choice and fate. The operationalisation of fateful moments was less successful in relation to case study material. The process of revisiting and revising our deliberations over the meaning and significance of the critical moments within biographical narratives confirms the interpretative value of focussing on these narrative forms, yet suggests that late modern theoretical frameworks with their emphasis on reflexivity may have a limited contribution to make to understanding the configuration of biography and history.

Janet Holland is Professor of Social Research and Co-Director of the Families and Social Capital Research Group at London South Bank University. She also co-directs Timescapes: Changing Relationships and Identities through the Life Course, a multi-university, large-scale qualitative longitudinal study. Research interests cover youth, education, gender, intimacy, sexuality and family life, and methodology. She has published widely in these areas, examples are: (authored with Sheila Henderson, Sheena McGrellis, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson) Inventing Adulthoods: A Biographical Approach to Youth Transitions, 2007, Sage; (edited with Jeffrey Weeks and Matthew Waites), Sexualities and Society, 2003, Polity Press; (authored with Caroline Ramazanoglu) Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices, 2002, Sage; and (authored with Tuula Gordon and Elina Lahelma) Making Spaces: Citizenship and Difference in Schools, 2000, Macmillan.

Rachel Thomson is Professor of Social Research in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the Open University. Her research interests include young people, intimacy, gender and social change and qualitative research methods. She is currently engaged in qualitative study of the transition to motherhood that is intergenerational and longitudinal, and funded by the ESRC as part of the Identities and Social Action programme. The study will also form part of the ESRC funded Timescapes initiative. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘Sexuality and young people: Policies, practices and identities’ Sexualities: Personal lives and social policy, Carabine, J. (ed.), The Policy Press (2004); ‘An adult thing’? Young people's perspectives on the heterosexual age of consent’, Sexualities 7(2): 135–52 (2004); and Researching Social Change: Qualitative Approaches to Personal, Social and Historical Change (with Julie McLeod) published by Sage in 2009.