Adolescents' personal and vicarious life stories: Thematic coherence, interpretations, an connections

Date

2023-8

Author

Yenen, Zeynep Betül

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Little research to date has examined the relationships between personal and vicarious narratives, and to our knowledge, no study focused on the autobiographical reasoning dimension in this relationship. However, how we reason about our personal past might predict how we reason about others’ past. This assumption built the primary object of the current study. Considering that adolescence is crucial for narrative identity development, this study focused on adolescents’ personal and vicarious life story narratives. One hundred one adolescents aged between 14 and 17 had narrated the high, low, and turning point memory narratives belonging to themselves and a close friend (total of 599 narratives). The narratives were coded in terms of thematic coherence, elaboration of interpretations, and change/identity connections. The findings revealed that personal life story narratives of adolescents get better with increasing age in thematic coherence and interpretations. Furthermore, female adolescents had higher scores almost in all dimensions of their personal narratives. The relations of vicarious narratives with age and gender were not always found, but findings pointed to an increase with age and being female. Crucially, strong relationships between autobiographical reasoning in personal and vicarious life stories for thematic coherence and interpretations were found, with medium to large effect sizes. Thus, personal life story construction style appears to shape vicarious life story construction beyond age and gender.

Subject Keywords

Personal life stories, Vicarious life stories, Autobiographical reasoning, Adolescence, Narrative identity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104867

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis