Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning, purpose, and temporal coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Moreover, narrative identity has been found to be associated with a range of psychological and social phenomena, such as personality, mental health, and well-being (e.g., Adler et al., 2015; McAdams & Guo, 2015). However, cross-cultural variation in narrative identity has not been systematically examined. For the purposes of the current inquiry, written narratives of two difficult life events (low point and life challenge) and self-report measures on psychological well-being (i.e. life satisfaction, psychological well-being) and mental health (i.e. depressive symptoms) were collected from 438 adults in the United States, Denmark, Israel, and Japan. Study 1 offered a direct, mixed methods comparison of narrative identity in Denmark, Israel, Japan, and the United States, by examining the frequency of core narrative identity themes (redemption, contamination, agency, communion, meaning-making) and their relationship to well-being across the four countries. Study 2, meanwhile provided a qualitative analysis of narrative identity in individual countries (i.e. Denmark, Israel, and Japan), generating a new set of narrative themes emerging from each cultural context. Study 1 found both similarities and differences in narrative identity across the four countries, while also offering a replication of previous research. Participants, from all four countries, showed a positive association between levels of redemption, agency, and communion and psychological well-being—which is a broadly supported finding in the narrative identity literature in the United States (Adler et al., 2015). Differences by nationality included lower levels of redemption and meaning-making in Japan and higher levels of meaning-making in Denmark, while differences in the relationship between narrative identity (i.e. redemption, agency, communion) and well-being were minimal across the four countries. Moreover, the four countries showed differences in the kinds of difficult life events (i.e. “Interpersonal”, “Mental Health”, “Financial”, etc.) that were narrated. Decades of research on narrative identity in the United States began first with an iterative, inductive qualitative exploration of dominant themes emerging in American narratives. While the field has built a significant body of research based on these themes, it has been (so far) largely unclear how these themes might apply to life stories outside of the United States. Study 2 expanded on this body of work—as well as the quantitative findings in Study 1—by performing an iterative, inductive qualitative exploration of narrative identity in three new countries (i.e. Denmark, Japan, and Israel), in order to better understand how culture influences the construction of the life story. Three new themes emerged from the Danish set of narratives: communal growth (individual growth through the lens of others), balanced affect (a discussion of both positive and negative outcomes), and normality (an emphasis on the universality of lived experience). In Japan, meanwhile, three distinct themes emerged: acceptance (in lieu of meaning-making, a desire to instead accept circumstances), attribution of blame (the need to assign blame to either the self or to the world), and open-ended (less story resolution, in favor of an open-ended story). Lastly, one new theme emerged from the Israeli narratives: collective meaning (experiencing a sense of collective responsibility). In conclusion, the results from both studies better illuminate the impact of cultural context on the narration of the life story, by revealing both differences and similarities across cultures. Certain aspects of narrative identity appear to be potentially more universal (i.e. the importance of redemption, agency, and communion for psychological well-being). However, important cultural distinctions emerged in how individuals narrated the events of their lives. Even while using the five narrative themes derived from and well-established amongst American samples, quantitative differences emerged between the four countries. A qualitative approach, however, illuminated a much richer set of culturally distinct themes, which appear to be supported by broader cultural norms in Japan, Israel, and Denmark—highlighting the critical role of qualitative, inductive approaches in research design. Taken together, this research supports the idea that narrative identity cannot be fully captured without an understanding of culture, but needs to instead be studied in tandem with the cultural context in which stories reside.

Creator

• Turner, Ariana Ferrara

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tzkz-k472

Subject

• Psychology

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_905196
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16114

Keyword

• narrative identity
• cultural psychology

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright