Biographical Management of Risk and Uncertainty: British Veterans Jens O. Zinn ([email protected]) University of Kent, Canterbury ESRC Priority Network.

Biographical Management of Risk and Uncertainty: British Veterans

Jens O. Zinn ([email protected])University of Kent, Canterbury

ESRC Priority Network Social Contexts and Responses to Risk (SCARR)

Risk Research and the Biographical Approach

Research Question• Why have some soldiers problems to manage combat experience and the

way back into civil life?

Risk research and biographical research• Quantitative studies on soldiers and veterans identify risk factors for

alcohol abuse, homelessness or PTSD such as school level attainment, family constellation, intensity of combat experience and others (Rona et al. 2008, Ismail et al. 2000).

• The biographical approach (e.g. Rosenthal 1993, 2004) explains risks and responses by the logic of patterns of biographical experiences assuming that the whole life is important to understand the management of risk and uncertainty at different stages of the life course (Zinn 2005).

Biographical research strategies (Zinn 2004)• Open forms of interviewing (focussed versus narrative)

• Explorative strategies of data analysis (holistic versus categorical)

Narrative Interviewing

Narrative interviewing (Schütze 1976, 1983): Open exploration of how experiences and expectations develop (trigger remembrances)

• Open narrative question regarding individual’s life story„Please tell me your family story and your personal life story; I am interested in your

whole life. Anything that occurs to you. You have as much time as you like. I won‘t ask you any questions for now. I will just make some notes on the things that I would like to ask you more about later; if we haven‘t got enough time today, perhaps in a second interview.“ (Rosenthal 2004, 51)

• Explorative questions in the second part of the interviewCould you tell me more about the time when you were ... (a child, in school, pregnant

etc.)? Could you tell me more about your time in the army? Could you tell me more about your parents, family, brothers etc.? Can you recall a situation when your father behaved in an authoritative way (..)? (compare: Rosenthal 2004, 52)

• Second interviewFurther exploration and open questions to address issues not yet elaborated on.

Biographical Analysis

Biographical analysis (e.g. Rosenthal 2004): Making sense of single narrations as part of the overall life story.

• The experienced and the narrated life: Life history (order of experience) versus reconstruction of the life story (order of presentation)

• Argumentation (present) versus narration (past)

• The introductory passage – main narration

• Central themes

• Not mentioned issues

• Sequential analysis: Developing competing hypotheses and testing them against the narrated life (advantage of interpretation groups).

Case Study (Albert)

Life history• Son of single mother

• Travelled Europe with his mother until age of 13

• Afterwards ward of the state, lived in a foster family

• Violent in school and in the foster family

• Problems with the police

• Low school leaving certificate

• Joined the Royal Marines with 16

• Was promoted several times to Corporal and Sergeant and finally Colour Sergeant (office job)

• Discharged from the Marines after 20 years service (was tested positive of drugs)

• ?

Case Study (Albert)

Life story

Family and Albert‘s childhood• “OK. Well thank you for asking me here. It’s a huge question (…) to tell you my

life story. OK. I’m AA years old and I was born into a single parent family. My father was [mixed-ethics, black] and my mother was white European, here from England. ((clears throat)) I never knew my father. I don’t even know his name so I was raised by my mother and my mother’s parents, my grandparents for a short while. (..) As I’m from a broken background I didn’t have a particularly stable life, younger life anyway; different schools, different places in the country. I’ve lived in foster homes and certain institutions of the state. I was a ward of the state for a number of years. And in between all of that I lived with my… my mother who travelled Europe in the… in the 60’s and the 70’s as a single mum... just as… just as a single woman she did it all by herself …”

• “… so it was a very exciting childhood you could say. There was nothing fixed in it. My horizons were very, very broad because I saw a lot of the world as a young man, different cultures etc.”

Case Study (Albert)

Why Albert joined the forces• “So that was that. hh. At the age of hh. 13 all that stopped and I lived with a foster

family from 13 till… to the age of 16. I had to get out of that situation because things were getting bad. I was going from school to school and I was getting in trouble with the… with the police and there were no other black people in school or no other black people in the community so things were difficult in that stage. …”

• “… There was a lot of fighting at school. You either let yourself be bullied or you stand up and fight so (.)“

• “I had learned from my mother to fight so that’s what I did. At 16 I wanted to get out of that situation so I joined the services and …”

• “… the best of the services seemed to be the Marines at the time so that’s why I joined the Royal Marines.”

• “I had a next door neighbour who lived next to where I lived in this foster home, an old chap who had served in the Second World War … , he was torpedoed twice and a real hero .hh and …”

• “… he was the littlest man on the estate and .hh very kind and gentle but nobody ever messed with him. Nobody ever messed with his house or .hh or burgled him or did anything to his garden. Everybody respected him and I wanted that (.) and that was part of why I joined the services. .hh”

• “I did 10 months basic training. There started with 70-odd of us, finished with 7 of us, I was one of those 7. I took to it like a fish to water.”

Case Study (Albert)

Circumstance of leaving the forces• “The circumstances by which I left weren’t as… as well as they should have been.

Things hadn’t been going well for a number of years in the corps (.) due to some of the experiences that I’d had .hh and this built and built and built. But while I was busy in the corps that was fine, that was OK. It was only when I got to the end of my time when I was sitting in an office job, … not doing what I’m good .hh at that I had more time to think and that (.) that led to some problems.

• And so I left the corps with a medical discharge. I’ve got injuries. I was shot a couple of times when I was away and I’ve got .hh some vertebrae shattered in my back from an explosion and parachuting .hh and I get a 40% disability fee but I was also tested for (.) what they call… a test… a drug test and I positive for because… it doesn’t matter why but I tested positive for it .hh so therefore I lost my rank, my status, my money, my career, my house, my identity. I lost everything. So this is where I was.”

• “… I realised that I had to .hh find a way to… to come to terms with what experiences that I’d had (.) and at that stage I had no education, I didn’t know how I was going to do it or what I was going to do, I just knew that something wasn’t right. (.) …”

• “… So I went to night school so I could get on an Access course .. so that I could get access to higher education. …”

Case Study (Albert)

Re-evaluation of his job as soldier• “I didn’t seem to fit the world that I was in. Somebody would shout or pick on a girl

at a bus stop and I would step in and stop them. Somebody would be doing something wrong and I would speak up against it. .hh To take a risk for your future is the natural thing. Why wouldn’t you take the risk? What’s the point of being here? What’s the point of being alive (.) if you’re not going to take a risk? You can’t gain nothing if you’re not going to take a risk. And this just seemed to be completely alien to where I was and where I was in so (.) I had to re-evaluate a few things. (.) The mantras by which I’d led my life, (.) the absolute certainties… that’s what they were, absolute certainties, the flexible rules to be applied to different situations but in reality the certainties had to be turned upside down. These certainties I believe in to such an extent that I would give my life or take another life for it. That’s how much on the explicit level I believed in these certainties and of course they were shattered.”

• “The first person I shot was a girl. (..) I can remember firing 5 rounds, kneeling down and squeezing off 5 rounds at the drivers seat … and opening the door and pulling this person out and realising it was a girl .hh and not being .hh upset because it was a girl or anything like that but being angry that my 5 rounds hadn’t killed her. She was still alive. I can remember distinctly being really, really angry (.) that she wasn’t dead and what a bad soldier I was. But I look back on that now and I find that incredulous, I really do. You know? That’s just… (..) But that’s what I remember. It’s things like that that I’m very ashamed of.”

Conclusion

• Albert’s life became a fight for recognition and appreciation. The military became his new family and was the social frame where he got recognition. He integrated his attitude for fighting and the professional norms for being a good Royal Marine in an all-embracing worldview. As a good soldier he faced his own mortality and managed it by living in the present. After being medically discharged he got his future back and made experiences in civil life which questioned and fundamentally eroded his professional attitude. Left alone with these problems he struggled to find a place in society.

• The better soldiers might have more problems to find back into ‚civil street‘.

• Common research lacks understanding how and why some good soldiers are at risk to fail managing their experiences and their way back into civil life.