Teach Me about Your Life: Narrative Approaches to Lives, Meaning, and Transitions

Abstract

People like to tell stories about themselves, narrative accounts that impose a framework of meaning on the varied experiences that make up their lives. Such stories teach others about how they live or lived once upon a time. Research and scholarship on narratives of human behavior have long been accepted in sociology, anthropology, and, of course, literary studies. These qualitative approaches have been slower to take hold in psychology, though change is afoot and there is some openness to the methods (to be both fair and accurate, some narrative research has always been present in psychology, such as Vaillant’s pioneering interviews with men from the Grant Study of Adult Development; see Vaillant, 1995a,b). Many psychologists now view the study of personal narrative as a fruitful way to explore the richness of individual lives and adult development that cannot be captured through traditional experimental or rating-scale methods; the scope and detail inherent in stories of life defy checklists, personality inventories, or other surveys and questionnaires, even the subtlety of manipulation checks. Narrative methods encompass autobiographical research, psychobiography, life histories, the content analysis of personal stories, case studies, ethnographies, and the like-all approaches that emphasize “qualitative over quantitative research, hermeneutic over logical-positivistic frames, idiographic over nomothetic points of view, and inductive over hypothetico-deductive strategies of inquiry” (McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2001, p. xi). What implications do narrative approaches have for teaching about the self? In the first place, students rou-