Narrative identity Flashcards
(35 cards)
Some psychologists view trait approaches as incomplete explanations of personality. They use which theory to support this claim?
McAdams (1996) three level theory of personality.
Eysenck’s PEN Model
Gray’s RST Model
Costa & McCrae’s (1992) Five Factor Model
: these trait models are trying to understand the core features/ building blocks of personality, but these only give us a mean level score of how characteristic they are compared to others.
What is an alternative view?
The Narrative Identity
(social construction of personality, how we change and evolve our personality over time)
What is a Narrative Identity?
A level of personality that captures how individuals define themselves through the SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION of a coherent and purposeful LIFE STORY.
3rd and the broadest level of personality outlined by McAdams (1996).
More of a social approach to personality (personality changes, more of a focus on identity/ understanding who they were, are, and want to be)
What is the role of narrative identity theorists?
They ask people to describe significant experiences from their lives, then try and deduce what their identity is, meaning they attach through how they tell their story leading to how they interpret the world.
What would McAdams, (1996) say about Trait Theories such as
Costa & McCrae’s (1992) Five Factor Model?
“But as an integrative framework for studying persons, the Big Five may not be comprehensive enough, for it makes the whole of personality to be synonymous with traits.”
Trait theories were only created to capture people’s general stability. This is based on the social consumption of personality and build on this narrative identity throughout life (developmental aspect due to learning/ observing).
Mcadams argues that people construct their identity based on how they react with the world (ie- job interview question of why you want this job would be a more specific response as they shape their answer)
The Life Story Interview:
The life story interview is a labour-intensive method. (2-3Hours)
Researchers sometimes collect written narratives of key life scenes using similar instructions to the interviews. What is this called?
Written (Abbreviated) Life Story:
-Write down Core scenes
-Importance on why/ how participant sees it as salient/ interpretation
-Narratives do not assess the truth of event(s), just individual differences in the interpretation of event(s) that are important.
-There is often not a constraint on the retrospective time frame for narrative recall, rather a focus on subjectively meaningful scenes.
-this event will often shape their identity and how they see themselves
Which 3 assumptions is McAdams’ theory based on?
Selfhood is not given, it is made.
The self develops over time.
People seek temporal coherence in their self.
What are the 3 levels of McAdams’s Integrative Theory of Personality as he draws on evidence from trait theories and social-cognitive theories in personality to propose…
Level 1 – Traits (e.g., FFM).
Level 2 – Personal Concerns.
Level 3 – Narrative Identity.
McAdams’ Narrative Identity suggests that:
Traits are how adults explain their ………….
Traits are grounded in a ……….. or ………. context
Individuality.
Cultural or sociohistorical context.
Environment can also influence the meaning we attach for the world.
Level 1 of McAdams’s Integrative Theory of Personality is?
FFM: “OCEAN”.
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neurotic
Dispositional signatures of personality.
Decontextualised – (fairly) stable across lifespan and situations.
But not much insight into uniqueness
Level 2 of McAdams’s Integrative Theory of Personality is?
Personal Concerns
He identifies motivational values/ self-development as being
Explains the individual differences between people highlighting their motivation, self-development, and strategies or skills.
These are all contextualised within a specific time, place and/or role.
McAdams created the Integrative Theory of Personality even though there are trait/ motivational theories was because?
Those theories still do not represent the unified identity of a person over time (they are contextualised time and place)
So the Level 3 Narrative Identity ties together all the changes in one lifespan, how they interpret the changes to form who they are today
McAdams & McLean (2013):
The life story that is constructed from which type of memory?
An autobiographical memory:
An evolving, integrative account, which provides temporal coherence and meaning.
Answer to ‘Who Am I now from the past to who they want to be in the future’ question.
Basically tells us more insight to how they got to be who they are, the struggles they went through (more specific)
Evidence is drawn from other areas in psychology (e.g., Erikson’s model, 1968) showed usage of level 2 of McAdams’s Integrative Theory of Personality
His model asks participants about the different life phases they go through as you age and societal changes.
eg. adolescence (role identity vs role confusion)
Name a criticism towards trait theorists:
They explain how people respond to stresses and coping styles but it does not tell us what subjective experience means to the person:
whether they have learned from it
reflected on it
has it affected their identity or not
Measuring narrative identity:
Name a method used to collect data on narrative identity:
The Life Story Interview (2-3Hours)
It positions the participant as a storyteller:
In-depth qualitative interview
Person divides their life story into distinct chapters.
Person describes key scenes, characters and plots, and significance of the event(s) in each chapter.
Agreement and consistency in the interpretation of the narrative data is important:
Defined coding schemes.
Training with example narratives.
Multiple coders, often blind to study hypotheses.
Inter-rater reliability statistics are used to examine the consistency and agreement across coders in which method of measurement?
When coding the Life Story Interview to measure the Narrative Identity
-Narrative identity researchers code qualitative data for the purpose of statistical analyses.
Measuring narrative identity:
To capture (stable) individual differences in narrative style, when coding the Life Story Interview, researchers will average a construct (e.g., redemption) across all life scenes.
Which approach is this known as?
De-contextualised approach
-averaging across different life domains
(Dunlop argues you average only the constructs you think are meaningful)
Coding the Life Story Interview:
Each life story is unique, but researchers can code for common dimensions and examine how these narrative dimensions relate to variables of interest (ie, can still generalised findings by searching for themes and what they predict).
Name the core themes (narrative patterns) found across respondents:
Agency- how in control they feel of their lives
Communion- quality of relationships with others
Redemption- how we make sense of challenging events
Contamination- good events that turn bad
Meaning making- subjective interpretation of events happening and how we connect them to ourselves in a positive or negative way
Which term is used to describe averaging constructs across specific life domains (e.g., love or work).
It is the processes involved in identity formation may vary in different life domains and only collects narratives from relevant life domains for the context under study
(e.g., academic and romantic narratives for college adjustment)?
Contextualised Narrative Identity
-only RELEVANT and MEANINGFUL ATTACHMENT
Redemption in Narrative Identity 1
McAdams et al. (2001):
2 samples in different life stages:
74 mid-life adults - completed Life Story Interview (LSI)
125 UG students – written LSI for 10 life scenes.
Researchers coded for redemption (how we make sense of challenging events) and contamination life scenes (good events that turn bad).
Participants also answered questionnaires on their current level of well-being.
What were the results?
McAdams et al. (2001) Results: Averaging across
Midlife=
individuals who reported more Redemption
reported more satisfaction and lower depression
Individuals who reported higher contamination
reported less satisfaction and higher depression
UG students=
individuals who reported more Redemption
reported higher psychological wellbeing (being satisfied)
A03: correlational research, confusion in the direction of causality
Asking P to recall their narrative and then do a well-being questionnaire
maybe more well-adjusted people are more able to tell good narrative stories, and assumes cause + effect!X
Narrative Identity is the 3rd level of personality that should predict important life outcomes.
It is dynamic and responsive.
Researchers have often focused on health and well-being outcomes.
However, Narrative identity does not have robust evidence predicting ones physical health, only mental wellbeing
Alder et al. (2015)
Narrative identity has situation contingencies specific to salient events in someones life (ie, health-related outcomes)
Narrative identity should predict differences in well-being-related outcomes by describing unity and purpose.
The Structure of Narrative Identity:
McLean et al. (2020) then conducted an empirical investigation into the underlying domains and structural organisation of narrative identity constructs.
What narrative big 3 dimensions did he find to be linked during coding of themes in the Life Story Interviews?
ABR- reflection of events and the attachment of significant events to their memory
S- can people tell a coherent narrative start/middle/end/context
-E+M- how we interpret different events/ how we emotionally behave
Narrative Identity & Mental Health:
This is viewed as more salient for people who are going through particular types of events (health challenges)
Alder et al. (2015) looked at whether is there a foundation over time for a set group of people and used a longitudinal study design.
They asked: is narrative identity style of health challenges associated with well-being over time?
89 late-mid-life participants were sampled from a study that included the Life Story Interview.
Participants were selected if they had narrated a “personal health challenge”
Mental and physical health were assessed 5 times (once a year for 4 years post-baseline).
What were the 4 life scenes that were selected?
high point,
low point,
personal health challenge,
and turning point.
