Narrative Identity (051521)

Narrative and the Cultural Psychology of Identity - Phillip L. Hammack

A tripartite model of identity that integrates cognitive, social, and cultural levels of analysis in a multimethod of framework.

Personal, Master, and Alternative Narratives: An Integrative Framework for Understanding Identity Development in Context - McLean and Syed

The concept of master narratives provides a framework for understanding the nature of this intersection between self and society. Master narratives are culturally shared stories that tell us about a given culture, and provide guidance for how to be a 'good' member of a culture; they are a part of the structure in society. As individuals construct a personal narrative they negotiate with and internalize these master narratives - they are the material they have to work with to understand how to live a good life.

Defining Identity Development

McAdams' (2013) model: identity is defined as a subjective, constructed, and evolving story of how one came to be the person one currently is. This story integrates the past, present, and future providing the individual with a sense of personal continuity (Pasupathi, Brubaker, & Mansour, 2007)

Normative Ideas of Life and Autobiographical Reasoning in Life Narratives - Annette Bohn

Autobiographical reasoning : the ability to create coherence between remembered autobiographical events, and thus, to turn them into a meaningful life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000)

Further, I will argue that the ability of autobiographical reasoning is closely related to the development of normative ideas about life as measured by the cultural life script  (Berntsen & Rubin, 2002, 2004; Rubin & Berntsen, 2003), and that the cultural life script should be considered the overarching organizational principle of autobiographical memories across the lifespan.

Researchers on autobiographical memory have generally emphasized the cultural component playing a role in the formation of both autobiographical memory (see Nelson & Fivush, 2004 for an overview) and life narratives. For example, Reese and Fivush (2008) proposed that the development of autobiographical memory from the beginning is affected by the social and cultural context surrounding the child. Life narratives are thought to be formed by individuals in close interaction with their social and cultural environments (e.g., Harbermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha, 2001; McAdams, 2001). McAdams defines life stories as "psychosocial constructions, co-authored by the person himself or herself and the cultural context within which that person's life is embedded and given meaning" (McAdams, 2001, p.100). Thus, life narratives are made up of autobiographical memories that are selected and combined by the individual through the process of autobiographical reasoning to form a coherent personal narrative in the framework of a given cultural context. From this definition of life narratives, two questions are relevant: How do children learn to tell a life story that is personal and at the same time adheres to a culturally defined framework? And how can this cultural framework be measure empirically?

Life story coherence

To discuss the influence of cultural norms on the ability to engage in autobiographical reasoning and thus, to tell a coherent life story, the concept of life story coherence needs to be described. Following Habermas and Bluck (2000), a coherent life story is based on four different kinds of coherence. Agreeing with the definition of life narratives as personal narratives within a given cultural framework, Habermas and Bluck describe three types of linguistic or narrative coherence, and one type of cultural coherence called the cultural concept of biography. The three types of narrative coherence are temporal, thematic, and causal coherence. In a coherent life narrative, the temporal sequence of events needs to be respected, i.e., it would be incoherent to mention a job promotion before mentioning getting a job. Thematic coherence refers to the ability to create overarching themes in a narrative and to establish thematic similarities between various life events. Through causal coherence, one adds reason and meaning to a life narrative. Casual coherence is necessary to explain how one has become the person that one is. Cultural coherence is specific to the life story and is "used to form a basic, skeletal life narrative consisting of an ordered sequence of culturally defined, major life events (Harbermas & Bluck, 2000, p. 750) The cultural concept of biography is the background and backbone on which the individual life narrative is built. A life narrative should explain - if necessary - deviations from the culturally agreed upon expected life course. Habermas (2006, 2007) has since broadened the definition of the cultural concept of biography to not only include the temporal order in which major life events should occur, but also criteria such as the appropriate beginning and ending of life stories, the handling of less-well-remembered events, and the goal of telling one's life story.

The cultural life script

The cultural life script combines the concept of story scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977) with the idea of an age segmentation of the lifespan and culturally sanctioned age norms for salient life events (for an overview, see Berntsen & Rubin, 2002, 2004; Neugarten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965). However, cultural life scripts are different in two important ways from story scripts and research on age norms. First, life scripts are not learned by experiencing an event (as one learns the script for eating at a restaurant by eating repeatedly at a restaurant, according to Schank and Abelson, 1977). Rather, life scripts are semantic knowledge learned within one's culture.

Semantic knowledge: general information that one has acquired; that is, knowledge that is not tied to any specific object, event, domain, or application. It includes word knowledge (as in a dictionary) and general factual information about the world (as in an encyclopedia) and oneself. Also called generic knowledge.

Second, measures of cultural life scripts are attempted to be free of researcher bias because participants are not asked to rate lists of events pre-chosen by the researcher on salience and age norms, in contrast to what has been done most frequently in research on age norms. Instead, life scripts are measured by asking participants to imagine a newborn child of their own gender in their own culture and to list the most important life events that they think will happen in the newborn's life, as well as to estimate at what age the newborn will experience these events. Therefore, the outcome of the life script task is an empirical measure of the type of life events that different populations in different cultures consider important in life. This makes the life script task an ideal way to measure both the notion of cultural life scripts as well as the related notion of the cultural concept of biography because the instructions for the life script task make this measure at the same time (relatively) bias-free and culture-sensitive.

A cultural life script consists of a series of culturally important transitional events that are expected to take place in a specific order in specific time slots in a prototypical life course within a given culture. The life script is conceptually different from the life story. Life stories are made up of autobiographical memories as they are remembered, reconstructed, and combined by an individual. Cultural life scripts consist of semantic knowledge that is learned detached from personal experience, i.e., young people are able to nominate such events as "getting married" or "retirement" as life script events, even though they have not experienced these events themselves. Life scripts refer to the culturally shared representations of an idealized life. A life script can be described as a series of predominantly positive important transitional events that are expected to happen in a certain order (e.g., "getting married" before "having children"), whereas the order of life story events is dictated by the life a person has lived (e.g., a single teenage mother who gets married later in life). In addition, in a person's life, certain life script events might be "missing"; for example, a person might have remained single. Still, people would be expected to report reasons for the missing life script events "getting married" in their life story because "missing" an event is a deviation from the life script. Each event is allocated a specific time slot in the life course, referring to the age at which the event is normatively expected to take place (e.g., "getting married" around age twenty-seven), while in an individual life, the timing of such life events can be "off", and therefore might need to be accounted for in the personal life story (e.g., "we got married when we were twenty-one because we just knew we would always stay together").

The cultural life script being semantic knowledge has implications not only for the organization of our past life story, but also for the expectations concerning our future life story. With the acquisition of the cultural life script, children not only acquire a template for the organization of their life story as lived until now, but they also acquire a template for what to expect for their future lives within their culture. Empirical findings support this strong future dimension of the cultural life script. Berntsen and Jacobsen (2008) found that when imagining future events, the number of events mapping onto the cultural life script increased with the distance of years the events were imagined to be from the present - participants seemed to rely on their life script knowledge when imagining events farther into the future. In another study, we found that when participants were asked to recall past or to imagine future important events, the majority (71 percent) of all events recalled or imagined were life script events. (...)

Methodologically, the concept of the cultural life script makes it possible to measure the cultural life script makes it possible to measure the cultural concept of biography separately from the life story. The advantage of this method is that it makes it possible to disentangle the development of "ordinary" narrative coherence (temporal, causal, and thematic) from the development of life story coherence, which by definition includes cultural coherence whereas other narratives do not (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).

Theoretical Implications

The cultural life script s semantic knowledge about an entire life span within a culture that is acquired across childhood and adolescence. Thus, the knowledge of the life script includes a strong future dimension. This differentiates the cultural life script from other models on the organization of autographical memory, like the life story schema that is formed "as a residue of repeated speaking, thinking, and reasoning about the events of one's past through which events are related to one another and to the self" (Habermas & Bluck, 2000, p. 127).

In the life story schema, the cultural concept of biography is seen as one type of life story coherence on the same level as the three types of linguistic coherence. However, as the results presented in this chapter suggest, the acquisition of the cultural life script is an important prerequisite for the ability of autobiographical reasoning because it facilitates the connection between the self and the culture beyond the individual life story.

Further, children and adolescents are able to tell temporally, causally, and thematically coherent stories of single events independent of their life script abilities. Therefore, it seems, the cultural life script is the frame that holds life stories together: Cultural life scripts teach children which events are expected to be in their life story, and when to expect certain events in life. It seems that the life script provides the "plot" of one's life story. Having a plot makes it much easier to tell a coherent life story, where one thing leads to another, and events are neatly tied together through the process of autobiographical reasoning. Therefore, the cultural life script should be considered the overarching organizational principle of autobiographical memories across the lifespan.

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Culture encompasses human elements beyond biology: for example, our norms and values, the stories we tell, learned or acquired behaviors, religious beliefs, art and fashion, and so on. Culture is what differentiates one group or society from the next.

Different societies have different cultures; however it is important not to confuse the idea of culture with society. A culture represents the beliefs and practices of a group, while society represents the people who share those beliefs and practices. Neither society nor culture could exist without the other.

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What Do We Know When We Know a Person? - Dan P. McAdams

Modern and postmodern democratic societies do not explicitly tell adults who they should be. At the same time, however, these societies insist that an adult should be someone who both fits in and is unique (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985). The self should be defined so that it is both separate and connected, individuated and integrated at the same time. These kinds of selves do not exist in prepackaged, readily assimilated form. They are not passed down from one generation to the next, as they were perhaps in simpler times. Rather, selves must be made or discovered as people become what they are to become in time. The selves that we make before we reach late adolescence and adulthood are, among other things, "lists" of characteristics to be found in Levels I and II of personality.