Renewed use of the Ageven form in qualitative analysis of biographies

Abstract

This article starts by briefly recalling the essential features of the biographical approach, the associated paradigm of the life course, and the origins of the Ageven form, a tool developed in the 1980s as part of the retrospective studies and demographic analysis of biographies. Next, we present a new version of this tool for its use in qualitative analysis, involving the individual, family, and contextual levels of observation, and including the identification of sequences in the life stories, based on the biographical turning points. In this way, the Ageven form can be converted into a tool for simultaneously representing and analyzing a wide range of qualitative biographical data. It is illustrated with the example of adolescent maternity in Mexico.