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In the last 15-20 years, the social sciences have witnessed a strong upsurge of interest in narrative and stories as they apply to human lives and social relationships. Narrative methods have proliferated in many fields, and psychological theorists such as Jerome Bruner and Theodore Sarbin have emphasized the storied nature of human lives and human conduct. Beginning with his 1985 book, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story, Dan P. McAdams has developed a life-story model of adult identity. According to the model, people living in modern societies begin to organize their lives in narrative terms in late adolescence and young adulthood. People create internalized and evolving life stories that serve to reconstruct the past and anticipate the future in ways that provide their lives with some degree of unity and purpose. McAdams has argued that what Erik Erikson called "ego identity" is largely a personal narrative that situates a person in a particular psychosocial niche in the modern world. Like other literary constructions, life stories may be analyzed in terms of plots, settings, scenes, characters, and themes.
The Foley Center sponsors research into the structure, function, and development of life stories across the adult life course. Life-narrative data are typically obtained through Life Story Interviews or through open-ended written procedures that take the individual through a Guided Autobiography. Life-narrative data may be analyzed in many ways. Objective content analysis procedures have been developed to code such narrative categories as agency and communion themes, redemption and contamination sequences, emotional tone, and narrative coherence. Most of the individual research projects conducted under the Foley Center auspices employ some variation on narrative methods, or explicitly draw upon narrative concepts in interpreting findings.
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Generativity is an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of youth and future generations through involvement in parenting, teaching, mentoring, and other creative contributions that aim to leave a positive legacy of the self for the future. In Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, "generativity versus stagnation" marks the seventh of eight stages, the stage typically associated with midlife. Generativity is a complex psychosocial construct that can be expressed through social demand, inner desires, conscious concerns, beliefs, commitments, behaviors, and the overall way in which an adult makes narrative sense of his or her life. Theory and research on generativity are described in detail in a book edited by Dan McAdams and Ed de St. Aubin, Generativity and Adult Development: How and Why We Care for the Next Generation (APA Press, 1998).
Researchers at the Foley Center have designed a number of measures for assessing individual differences in generativity among adults. Included among these are thematic coding schemes for assessing generative imagery in descriptions of life goals and accounts of past experiences and self-report questionnaires measuring generative concerns and behaviors. Initially funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation to Dan McAdams and Phillip Bowman (University of Illinois, Chicago), studies have examined the relations between generativity and (1) subjective mental health, (2) religious and political involvements, and (3) patterns of parenting among both Euro-American and African-American adults. Researchers have been especially interested in exploring the life stories of both Black and White American adults who score especially high on generativity measures. The findings of these studies converge on a prototypical life narrative form to which the life stories of highly generative adults often conform. Termed a commitment story, this narrative brings together six themes: (1) a sense of being advantaged in early life, (2) witnessing the suffering of others, (3) moral steadfastness and continuity, (4) the power of redemption to reinforce progress in life, (5) conflicts between agency (power) and communion (love), and (6) articulating prosocial goals for the future.
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A central idea in the commitment stories constructed by highly generative adults is redemption. In a redemptive sequence, an affectively negative or bad life-narrative scene is followed by an affectively positive or good outcome. The good ultimately redeems or salvages the bad that precedes it. Redemption is a central idea in all of the world’s major religions, and it has assumed especially interesting and characteristic forms and qualities in American cultural history. Many American adults today see their lives in redemptive terms, or seek to narrate their lives in ways to suggest that some form of redemption will ultimately prevail.
Researchers at the Foley Center have examined the prevalence and correlates of redemption sequences in people’s life narrative accounts, and they have compared those findings to what they have learned about the opposite narrative form – that is, contamination sequences, wherein extremely good life narrative scenes suddenly, and sometimes dramatically, turn bad. Whereas redemption sequences in life narrative have been associated with generativity among adults and with self-report psychological well-being among both adults and students, contamination sequences have been linked to reports of depression, low self-esteem, and a sense that one’s life is incoherent. Dan McAdams' new book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford University Press, 2006), describes psychological research on redemptive life narratives and explores the meaning of redemption in American history and culture. The theme of redemption is also a central idea in the criminology research conducted by former Foley associate Shadd Maruna, and described in his recent book, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives (APA Press, 2001).
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People often use redemption or contamination imagery to depict significant life transitions or turning-point scenes in their life stories. The concept of a turning point is both literary and psychological, and it has enjoyed strong currency in Western cultural life for hundreds of years. Social scientists have recently employed qualitative and narrative methods for examining the turning points that people describe in their lives. Some of the best research on narrative approaches to turning points comes together in a book edited by Dan McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson (Hebrew University and The Fielding Institute), and Amia Lieblich (Hebrew University), Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition (APA Press, 2001). This book is the first in a Foley-sponsored book series on "The Narrative Study of Lives."
Led by the former Foley postdoctoral fellow, Jack Bauer, researchers at the Foley Center are exploring turning points and life transitions as they reveal themselves in stories of (1) religious development (e.g., conversion narratives) and (2) career changes. Building on his earlier research on adults’ construction of bereavement narratives, Bauer has launched an intensive qualitative examination of how adults narrate significant ideological and career turns in their lives.
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People’s life stories may be viewed as one aspect of the large constellation of internalized constructs that comprise human personality. Dan McAdams has argued that personality itself may be viewed as a loose confederation of three constructs at three different levels of functioning: (1) dispositional traits (such as extraversion, neuroticism), (2) characteristic adaptations (such as motives, goals, values, schemas, and the like), and (3) integrative life stories. In simple terms, traits sketch a dispositional outline for human individuality, adaptations fill in the details, and life narratives provide an overall sense of life meaning and purpose. A full explication of this idea may be found in the fourth edition of McAdams’ personality textbook, The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology (4th Ed., John Wiley, 2006).
A major research thrust at the Foley Center involves documenting relations among constructs at these three different levels of personality. Former Foley postdoc, Ian McGregor (currently at York University), has examined the extent to which traits, goals, and stories are consistent or inconsistent in a person’s life. Jack Bauer examines the meaning and manifestations of growth goals – personal strivings stemming from intrinsically motivating needs and aimed to enhance self-actualization. Growth goals appear to be positively linked to both psychological well-being and ego development, and they also play important roles in redemptive life narratives. In 2000, McAdams, Bauer, and their associates at the Foley Center launched a longitudinal study of traits, goals, and stories among college freshmen and seniors. They have examined patterns of continuity and change in the three levels of personality over a three-year period in young adulthood.
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Research on personal narratives has typically focused on stories about episodes that are emotional and seen as having some influence on the evolving sense of self. For some people the experience of having been in psychotherapy is one such experience. (For example, Lieblich (2004) found that people frequently spontaneously mention having gone to psychotherapy when recounting their life story and point to it as a key site of their personality development.) But psychotherapy stories are not just interesting examples of significant scenes from one’s life; they have been theorized to play a central role in maintaining the gains from therapy. Indeed, it has been suggested that the ability to construct a viable story to tell about one’s experience in psychotherapy is vital to the individual’s continued functioning once treatment has ended (Frank, 1961; Spence, 1982).
An initial investigation, conducted by Jonathan Adler and Dan McAdams, sought to develop qualitative descriptions of stories about psychotherapy told by individuals with varying degrees of subjective well-being and ego development (complex meaning-making processes), two independent dimensions of optimal functioning (Adler & McAdams, in press; Adler, Wagner, & McAdams, under review). Subsequent quantitative work is underway in an effort to empirically replicate the themes identified in this qualitative investigation. In addition, Jonathan Adler is currently conducting a major longitudinal study which focuses on the development of psychotherapy stories over the course of treatment and will empirically assess the relationship between narrative changes and shifts in psychiatric symptoms.
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Dan P. McAdams and Regina L. Logan, Foley Center Postdoc and Research Associate, are launching a new study examining how people of faith understand their own lives and their political involvement in society. The study goes beyond opinion surveys and polls to explore the psychology of faith and politics in an effort to understand how American adults make sense of their lives as committed Christians and informed citizens. The study examines the relations between American adults’ (1) religious faith and spirituality, (2) political preferences and behavior, and (3) narrative understanding of their own lives. In recent years, psychologists and sociologists have conducted many studies of religious beliefs and practices among Americans, focusing on issues like church attendance, spiritual practices, and the effects of religion on health. Political psychologists have employed surveys and interviews to examine the relations between voting and political behavior on the one hand and personality traits, values, beliefs, and goals on the other. Dan McAdams and other narrative psychologists have explored the ways in which people, beginning in young adulthood, construct self-defining stories to make sense of their own lives and consolidate a feeling of identity and purpose. This new study aims to bring together these three traditions of research – the social science of religion, political psychology, and the narrative study of lives. Through questionnaires and interview, Personal Faith, Politics, and the Life Story will examine the complex interrelations of faith, politics, and narrative identity in a diverse sample of adults who are both politically active and who identify with Christian religious institutions.
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Last Updated: 2007-01-29 15:47:25
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