Hopefully, this exercise will have provided a flavour of what is involve in the iterative process whereby you can extract relevant ideas from the available literature and use these to re-visit your data, refine your coding frame and develop new codes.  As well as allowing you to see data extracts in a new light such an exercise also allows you to engage with the arguments presented via theoretical frameworks and to see where these describe what is going on in your data and – even more importantly – where your own data may suggest that a qualification or amendment to the original propositions is required.  The papers summarized here demonstrated the relevance of the concept of ‘biographical disruption’ for understanding the experiences of individuals dealing with a range of chronic conditions.  However, they also question some of the ideas that underpin ‘biographical disruption’. 

In terms of the large literature on chronic illness, however, these papers are somewhat unusual.  In the years following the publication of Bury’s influential paper, the eagerness with which subsequent grateful researchers have seized upon the concept of ‘biographical disruption’ and the limits of their largely descriptive usage have, perhaps, over-emphasized the universality of this experience.  Several of the papers reviewed here point out that individual experiences may differ significantly – even to the extent that some people may not report the dramatic discontinuity and loss of identity and meaning commonly identified in other studies.  In addition, despite reporting some of features associated with ‘biographical disruption’ the impact of chronic illness and the ‘biographical work’ in which people engage need not always be negative: there may be some positive aspects.

The Exley and Letherby paper is of particular interest as it reflects on data generated by two independent studies on very different topics.  However, this serves to emphasize the salience of ‘emotion work’ as a strategy for dealing with and possibly minimizing the impact (of terminal cancer and sub-fertility, respectively) on relationships.  The data excerpts presented in this Exercise testify to the involvement of the couples in seeking to put such strategies into operation.  A few of the excerpts indicate that it is not only the couples who are engaging in such ‘emotion work’ – as friends and family ‘tip-toe’ around their feelings of vulnerability.  Indeed, one of the excerpts raises the possibility that couples may, at times, be forced by others to engage in ‘emotion work’. However, a couple of the excerpts suggest that the couples are also engaged in ‘emotion work’ with each other, as sub-fertility raises important and uncomfortable questions about the viability of their joint future.  This highlights another aspect of this dataset which challenges the inherently individual/biographical emphasis of Bury’s notion of ‘biographical disruption.  The couples interviewed for this study are wrestling not just with the implications of sub-fertility for their personal biographies, but with the implications for their biography as a couple.  Sub-fertility is a condition that frequently affects only one person in each couple and, thus – even if fertility treatment fails - childlessness is not a fate that need necessarily befall both – unless, that, is they remain together as a unit.

Williams’ paper poses some challenging questions, suggesting that ‘biographical disruption’ may be even more significant for the individuals involved than is their chronic condition.  He also points out ‘biographical disruption’ may be more pervasive than is suggested by its confinement to studying chronic illness.  His suggests that ‘biographical disruption’ may be a feature of responses to a wide range of ‘normal crises’ and, that, therefore, it may help to illuminate other transitions and situations that impact on identity and self-image.  Sub-fertility (which does not usually have a clinical cause) presents an interesting potential ‘case study’ of the relevance of ‘biographical disruption’ in the more general context of ‘coupledom’ and child-bearing.  This dataset, therefore, allows us to study the impact of ‘biographical disruption’ without having to contend with the onset and physical repercussions of chronic illness, which makes it more difficult to speculate meaningfully about the direction of causality.  The frequency and the poignancy with which the couples in this study invoked the tensions and challenges involved in the ‘biographical disruption’ associated with their experience of sub-fertility certainly indicate that sub-fertility is important as a social rather than clinical phenomenon - precisely because it disrupts their biography as individuals and as a couple.  It is not sub-fertility per se that is seen as the problem but, rather, the way in which it compromises futures, pasts and present relationships and identities.