| Sumario: | [EN] While the baby boom is well known, even beyond the scientific community, there is no consensus about its explanation. New avenues for research have recently emerged, using a qualitative or a quantitative approach. In this paper, we present a research design that articulates data, data collection and analyses. We use a sample of life calendars collected among Swiss residents aged 65 and over, which have been complemented with life histories for a sub-sample. Asking older adults to tell the story of their life necessarily implies information gaps (involuntary or voluntary), mistakes or approximations. We discuss the implications in terms of data quality, data validation and representativeness of the sample. The life course approach offers the framework needed to deal with the complexity of individual trajectories, to locate biographies in their evolving context, and to integrate objective and subjective material. Two statistical perspectives (exploratory and confirmatory) have been applied and combined with the individual assessment of their life trajectories.
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