Construction Of Personal Narratives Research Articles

‘Gypsum on water. That schizophrenia.’ schizophrenia – a meeting of stories: a qualitative study

The purpose of the study was to enrich our understanding of how personal and master narratives ‘met’ in stories of individuals who experienced schizophrenia. Qualitative, in-depth and semi-structured interviews conducted in Poland with people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia were processed using the thematic analysis method. Interview analysis yielded three ways in which the master and the personal narratives of schizophrenia met: reception of master narrative content, its negotiation within personal narratives, and application, i.e. using phrases from the master narrative to fill in or supplement descriptions of own experience. We emphasize the importance of self-awareness in using master narrative in encounters with individuals diagnosed with mental illness and its associated consequences. We point out the need to support the construction of personal narratives and, as postulated by phenomenological psychiatry, we stress the need to recognize subjective stories of the experience of schizophrenia as a special mode of human existence. Points of Interest This article looks in detail into stories created by people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia about their experiences and into the way they construct their narratives. Participants of this study recall in their stories statements of medical specialists and people from social environment talking about schizophrenia. Terms and phrases about schizophrenia cause versatile reactions among people with this diagnosis. Sometimes participants accept them, often they disagree with them, other times, however, they ascribe new meanings to them. It is important to be attentive in our use of language when speaking about schizophrenia and when talking to people with this diagnosis. The accounts of the participants in our study are another voice in the debate on the idea of abandoning the label of ‘schizophrenia’.

Explaining change in content of life narratives over time

ABSTRACTAiming to further the understanding of stability and change of the life story, we investigated memory age and valence of life events as possible factors influencing life narrative stability. Additionally, we examined personal memories that 145 participants ranging in age from 16 to 69 years had told four years earlier but omitted from their current life narratives. In particular, we tested the accessibility of these omitted memories and explored the reasons for omission from life narratives. Younger age of memories but not valence predicted omission. Further, omitted memories could be remembered when aided with memory prompts. Both remembering and including life events in the current life narrative appeared to be related to personal relevance at the time of telling, supporting prior research that emphasises the role of motivation, ongoing goals, and concerns for the construction of personal narratives.

Classical Myth in the University: A Contribution to Professional Teacher Development

The use of Classical Greek myth as a narrative and metaphorical tool can contribute to the construction of a professional teaching identity. Adopting a biographical narrative approach, the present study sought to assess this contribution in a group of teacher and researcher trainees undertaking a postgraduate university course. The construction of personal narratives used for collective interpretation by the participants that generated them was analysed and interpreted in relation to the development of teacher professionalism. Our findings show the effective activation of metacognitive processes in order to rethink teacher professionalism from a narrative point of view. Using the structure and content of Classical myths as a scaffold, participants established valuable reflections on crucial aspects of teaching, identifying personal achievements and conquests as well as fears and insecurities. The structures latent in myth provided an effective framework with which to project and identify at least three hermeneutical themes—symbolism, function and structure—that form constituent elements of professional identity and are not only intertwined but are also constituted within a community of practice. Thus, Greek myths continue to offer an interesting cognitive and emotional scaffold that contributes to teacher professionalism, facilitating the formulation of a reflective, collaborative and personal meaning of identity which brings together personal teaching experiences and knowledge and is necessarily shared with the surrounding community of practice.

Cognitive Response Styles and the Construction of Personal Narratives: Implications for Psychopathology in Young Adults

We investigated the concurrent relationships among life story variables (autobiographical reasoning), cognitive variables (negative explanatory style, cognitive reappraisal strategies, and rumination), and psychopathology (symptoms of depression and anxiety). Narratives of life story high, low, and turning points were collected from 164 young adults. Findings for negative self-event connections are reported here. Young adults who made some, as opposed to no, negative self-event connections reported greater symptoms of depression and anxiety and were more likely to report higher levels of ruminative thinking and less likely to use adaptive cognitive reappraisal strategies. Whether participants drew negative self-event connections predicted depression over and above the variance explained by negative explanatory style and cognitive reappraisal strategies and interacted with explanatory style to predict depression. In contrast, negative self-event connections did not incrementally predict anxiety over and above the cognitive variables. Results are discussed in terms of our current understanding of the factors that predict psychological distress.

Classifying the narrated #selfie: genre typing human-branding activity

Purpose This paper explores the purposive use of the selfie in the construction of personal narratives that develop and support an individual’s human brand. Selfies were divided into archetypical clusters of “genres” that reflected the combined story told through Instagram image and accompanying text captions. Design/methodology/approach The analysis drew a randomized sample of 1,000 images with accompanying text from a large capture of 3,300 English language captioned selfies. Coding for semantic and semiotic data used a three-wave technique to overcome interpretive limitations. Findings Based on their structural characteristics, seven genre types emerged from the coded sample set. These primary genres of selfie meta-narratives are autobiography, parody, propaganda, romance, self-help, travel diary and coffee-table book. Research limitations/implications The research is limited in generalization to the Instagram photo-sharing app platform by design. Samples were taken from the app due both to its popularity and its capacity to annotate images. Selfies conducted in non-public, non-annotation-based apps may produce alternative genres and classifications. Practical implications The paper presents a genre classification to examine how selfies are used to “show, not tell” a portion of the consumer’s life story. Brands, firms and marketers can apply genres to examine the selfie types that best connect with the identity of their brands and consumers, based on how their consumers communicate within the Instagram network. Social implications Selfies are an oft pathologized and moralized aspect of consumer conduct. We present a view of the selfie as a deliberate, consciously considered communication approach to maintaining social bonds between friends, family and wider audience. Selfies are presented as a combined effect of consumption of a social media service (Instagram) and the co-production of valued content (the selfie) that recognizes the individual as an active constructor of their digital self. Originality/value The paper outlines a novel framework of selfie genres to classify the deliberate human-brand narratives expressed in selfies. By taking a narrative perspective to the Instagram selfie practice, the genre type captures the combined effect of the mimesis and diegesis, where the mimesis showing of self is contextualized with the diegesis of the provided captions to capture an intentional storytelling act of image and text.

A dynamic capabilities view of employability

Purpose– The increasing demand for post-secondary education, and the ongoing difficulty students’ face in securing appropriate work upon program completion, highlight the importance of an enhanced understanding of employability resources for university graduates. Just as organizations achieve a strategic advantage from resources and dynamic capabilities (DCs), university graduates can similarly apply these principles and tactics to be competitive in the job market. The purpose of this paper is to ask the question: how can new graduates enhance their competitive advantage when entering the employment market? To address this question the authors propose to adopt the DCs framework to analyze the competitive advantage of a graduate and argue that university graduates can take specific steps to enhance their own competitive advantage in the labor market.Design/methodology/approach– An extensive review of the existing human resource and strategic management literature was used to develop a conceptual DCs model of employability. The core dimensions of the conceptual model were refined using 26 one-on-one interviews with employers of new university graduates. This study concludes by recommending specific empirical and experimental research to further test the model.Findings– The results from the qualitative study identified the importance of four specific resources that university graduates should possess: intellectual, personality, meta-skill and job-specific. In addition, the authors suggest that integrated DCs are crucial for enhancing the value of these individual resources. Both pre-graduate application and the construction of personal narratives are essential signals that university graduates can mobilize individual resources in a complementary and strategic manner, in real-world settings, to maximize value.Research limitations/implications– This is an exploratory study and is designed as a foundation for future empirical and experiential research.Practical implications– The findings suggest that, in order to increase employability, university students need to assume a DCs view of competitive advantage. As a result, students need to reflect on both their intrinsic and learned resources to create a systematic competitive advantage that is valued, rare and difficult to replicate or substitute.Social implications– This paper challenges students to assume a holistic view of education by recognizing education extends far beyond a classroom. Therefore, differentiation and value creation is reflected in the synthesis and application of both intrinsic and learned resources.Originality/value– The integration of strategic management and human resource literature is a unique theoretical approach to explore the drivers of graduate employability.

Brains creating stories of selves: the neural basis of autobiographical reasoning

Personal identity critically depends on the creation of stories about the self and one's life. The present study investigates the neural substrates of autobiographical reasoning, a process central to the construction of such narratives. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, participants approached a set of personally significant memories in two different ways: in some trials, they remembered the concrete content of the events (autobiographical remembering), whereas in other trials they reflected on the broader meaning and implications of their memories (autobiographical reasoning). Relative to remembering, autobiographical reasoning recruited a left-lateralized network involved in conceptual processing [including the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus]. The ventral MPFC--an area that may function to generate personal/affective meaning--was not consistently engaged during autobiographical reasoning across participants but, interestingly, the activity of this region was modulated by individual differences in interest and willingness to engage in self-reflection. These findings support the notion that autobiographical reasoning and the construction of personal narratives go beyond mere remembering in that they require deriving meaning and value from past experiences.

Attending to the disembodied character in research on professional narratives

This essay provides a rationale of how Performance Analysis and Narrative Positioning within research on Physically Disabled Professionals’ Personal Narratives can provide insight into the role of the body in the analysis of professional narratives. Through analyzing the participants’ open-ended narratives as performances in which the narrators draw upon performativities to reconcile the absurdity associated with their deemed ‘unprofessional’ bodies legitimately occupying a professional space, the author traces the emergence of embodied professional heroes in four variations: the Super Hero, Warrior Hero, Tragic Hero, and Rogue Hero, each which illuminates the importance of the body in the construction of personal narratives of professionalism. In conclusion, the author calls for attention to the potential performance of the Anti Hero across personal narratives that emerge in unmarked bodies in order to attend the underlying performativities and discourses of power within all narratives of professionalism.

Narratives of West Bank women settlers in “multi-problem families”

This article presents part of the findings of a qualitative study conducted from January-July 2003, of the experiences of women in “multi-problem families” who live in a “high-risk” settlement on the West Bank. The impetus for the project was a dilemma that arose among social workers who were providing services to West Bank communities during this period. The article presents a narrative analysis of three of the interviews in order to illustrate a process of corroboration and subversion of master narratives in the construction of personal narratives.

Men's Vocal Behaviour and the Construction of Self

The following paper considers the role of vocal behaviour in the construction of Self. It examines evidence from an ongoing research project investigating the nature and function of singing in men's everyday lives. The present article looks at how men create and regulate identity through singing and through the construction of personal narratives about their vocal behaviour. Extensive, informal, vocal-history interviews were carried out with eight men who all sing in a male-voice choir in north-east Iceland. Additionally these men and sixteen others who sing in the same choir, kept one-week vocal diaries, making regular descriptive and reflective entries about their own vocal activity. Using the methodology of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study explores personal perceptions of vocal behaviour. Emerging themes suggest that singing is seen by these men as a central concept of Self. Furthermore, these themes appear to correspond closely to the psychological theory proposed by Robert Weber in his recent revision of William James's seminal, triadic model of Self. Data are discussed here in relation to this particular theoretical framework. Men's vocal behaviour appears to be an important technology of Self; that is, a forming agent and defining concept in tripartite elements of body, persona and spirit. Findings illustrate singing's agency in the changing Self and in the maintaining of core and unitary Selfs, and they exemplify ways in which personal identities can be vocally-constructed, performed and celebrated.

Toward an integrative model for CBT: Encompassing behavior, cognition, affect, and process

Dramatic changes in our science in recent years have profound implications for how psychologists conceptualize, assess, and treat people. I comment on these developments and the contributions to this special series, focusing on how they speak to new directions and challenges for the future of CBT. Discoveries about mind, brain, and behavior that have vitalized psychological science in the last few decades are providing insights into such directly CBT-relevant processes as memory and the construction of personal narratives, attention control, and executive functions, including planning and conflict-monitoring, emotion and self-regulation, meta-cognition, and unconscious, automatic processing, as well as the nature, organization, and expressions of important individual differences. As the understanding of the subsystems and part-processes that collectively constitute the person's cognitive and emotional architecture escalates, it is an opportune moment to consider the implications for clinical psychology and the behavior therapies, especially CBT. I do so, drawing on work at the vanguard of the science and pointing to some of the implications for therapies committed to growing as the cognitive and behavioral sciences on which they are based evolve.

Cultural Variations in the Construction of Personal Narratives: Central American and European American Mothers' Elicitation Styles

This study examined cultural variations in narrative elicitation styles among 2 groups of mothers: Spanish-speaking Central Americans and English-speaking European Americans. Thirty-one working-class mothers and their preschool children were visited in their homes and were asked to talk about 4 past events the children had experienced. Results showed that Central and European American mothers' elicitation styles differed by emphasizing different aspects of the narrative interaction. Central American mothers' elicitation style placed greater emphasis on conversational narrative aspects, whereas European American mothers' style focused to a greater extent on the organizational narrative aspects of the interaction. Results are discussed in relation to cultural patterns of socialization and communication.