Albrecht, J., Holz-Rau, C. and Scheiner, J. (2017) ‘Life-course data reconstruction using complementary information taken from linked lives’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 104, pp. 308–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2017.03.016.

Albrecht, Holz-Rau and Scheiner address a central weakness of retrospective research: parts of early life are inaccessible to the person whose biography is being reconstructed. Their solution is to treat linked lives as an evidential resource, using parents’ and grandparents’ accounts to reconstruct residential biographies and then testing those reconstructions against respondents’ own reports. The method reframes memory as distributed rather than sovereign. A childhood trajectory can be partially recovered because family members shared residences, decisions and temporal episodes even when the child did not consciously register them. The study also shows that reconstruction quality varies by relationship and variable, so supplementary testimony cannot simply be treated as factual replacement. Its wider contribution is methodological and epistemic: longitudinal biography becomes a multi-source reconstruction problem, linking mobility research to relational sociology, intergenerational transmission and evidential triangulation across partially overlapping lives.