The article deals with the peculiarities of the biographic method in the context of qualitative sociology. With an increasing interest in subjective aspects of social phenomena, the biographic method has developed as a certain opposition to structuralism and universalism of Marxism and become an independent widely applied research perspective. Two related research directions, “life history” and “family history”, are presented and illustrated by examples of applying, the biographic method in Lithuania. The author presents her experience in applying this method. Problematic methodological aspects, such as relevant number and selection of respondents, objectivity–subjectivity dimension, intersection of academic discourse and literate narrative, are discussed on the basis of D. Bertaux and M. Kohli. The author concludes that the biographic method is the golden mean between the two methodological distinctions of the qualitative and quantitative research conceptions while studying structured experiences of everyday life of individuals. Studies of personal “life history” enable researchers to focus both on the narrative of the life history itself and on constructions of individual identity, changes of identities and motivations. Individual life history can provide the basis for a study on the ways of survival in a certain social historical situation, individual life crises and significant events. The whole of biographic stories can be an object of analysis of a collective experience in a certain social situation
