| 4. |
- Järdmo, Caroline, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Creating something new from past experiences - The meaning of change in repeated narratives
- 2023
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Ingår i: European Society in Adult Development (ESRAD) hybrid Conference, Greenwich, United Kingdom, May 12-14..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background and Aim: The stories people tell about their present, past and future selves are highly important for identity development (McAdams, 1985; Kroger & Marcia, 2011), not least in adulthood. To maintain one’s identity as a subjective coherent sense of self, continuous over time, the identity also needs to be reworked and developed throughout life in response to new experiences (Erikson, 1968; McAdams, 2013). Therefore, identity defining narratives should entail both stability and change (Adler, 2019). The aim of this study is to examine the meaning of change in repeated narratives about occupational experiences. Method: Fifty-nine individuals were interviewed at age 25, 29 and 33. In these interviews 544 narratives and 142 sets of repeated narratives were identified, of these 39 sets of repeated narratives had changed between interviews. A thematic narrative analysis was conducted focusing on the meaning of change in repeated narratives. Result: The analysis of the meaning of change in the repeated narratives resulted in five themes: Gaining insights about one’s identity, Transforming views of past challenges, Increasing agency, Increasing motivation for occupational commitments, and Accentuating competence and importance. In the context of occupational experiences, the results from the narrative themes illuminate how narrators repeatedly engage with the same narrative to elaborate their narrative identity. Discussion and Implications: This study presents a novel method for capturing identity development, which show that changes in repeated narratives can entail important information about identity growth as well as the way narrators create new stories of their previous experiences in order to continue to make sense of their lives.
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| 5. |
- Järdmo, Caroline, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Stability and Change in Repeated Narratives About Occupational Identity
- 2021
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Ingår i: International Society for Research on Identity (ISRI) online conference, Tufts University, Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, June 3-4..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Narrative identity is the meaningful evolving story of the self that individuals construct and internalize in order to make sense of their lives (McAdams & McLean, 2013). The story connects the autobiographical past and the imagined future through reconstruction of memories, and serves to explain how the person came to be, and where his or her life may be going (McAdams, 2011). The identity needs to be reworked and developed throughout life in response to new experiences (Erikson, 1968; McAdams, 2013). Thus, aspects of both stability, such as continuity, and change, such as growth, are important for narrative identity. Recent research on narrative identity has started to focus more on examining repeated narration, that is, similar content that an individual repeat across different occasions, in order to more fully understand the complexity of stability and change in narratives (e.g. Adler, 2019; Dunlop, 2019; Fivush, Habermas, & Reese, 2019; McAdams, 2019; McLean, Köber & Haralssson, 2019; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2019; Singer, 2019). The aim of this study was to examine how repeated narratives change between interview sessions conducted at three time points, four years apart, and what function the changes in repeated narratives have for individuals’ identity. A community sample of 59 young Swedish adults were interviewed at age 25, 29 and 33. The interviews focused on occupational identity (one domain of the Identity Status Interview, Marcia et al., 1993). In order to identify narratives and to determine if the narrative was repeated, we developed a codebook. Reliability coding of number of narratives per interview occasion and number of repeated events across occasions indicated good reliability (ICC = .89 for number of narratives and .82 for number of repeated narratives). The 59 participants told a total of 544 narratives across the three interview occasions and there were 141 repeated sets of narratives, that is, narratives that were repeated across two or three interview occasions. For the analysis, we used an exploratory, data-driven, case-centered approach (Adler et al., 2017; Riessman, 2008) and examined each set of repeated narratives separately for each individual. The results showed three areas of change within the repeated identity narratives: change of amount of details, change of emotional tone and change of characters with two themes under each area. Findings suggested that there was a high degree of repeated narratives across the interview occasions and that individuals change their repeated narratives in various ways, indicating how the meaning and function of the narrative had changed and become more, or less, important for their identity at present.
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