Life Story Narratives Research Articles

Understanding needs of Chinese American family caregivers through a life story qualitative project

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to explore the needs of Chinese American family caregivers of older adults through a life story qualitative study. Through life story narratives, a phenomenological approach revealed that the needs of Chinese American family caregivers, including effect of stress, varied by the following: type of relationship with care receivers, perceived cultural values, relationship quality between caregiver and care receivers, cognitive distortions and conflict strategies in caregiving. Discussion on methods of assisting Chinese American family caregivers through the therapeutic interventions of the life story narrative itself, self-care training, and other key supports revealed in the study will be addressed.

Early Achiever or Late Bloomer? Investigating Life Story Narratives of Star Scientists

Early Achiever or Late Bloomer? Investigating Life Story Narratives of Star Scientists

“Estar Tranquilo”: Using a Life-course Approach to Explore Perceptions of Well-being among Older Adults in Curicó, Chile

This study assesses perceptions of well-being between two groups of older adults in Curicó, Chile. One group (n=12) were residents of a long-term care center (known as ELEAM), while another group (n=13) were members of two clubs for older adults – Estrellitas del Vaticano (Vatican’s Little Stars) and Club Campo Lindo (Beautiful Countryside) – who lived in their own homes. Data collection consisted of life-story narratives to explore differences in how older adults in different living situations – long-term residential care vs. independent living – define and perceive what it means to be well in older age. Both groups were paired according to the variables of age, educational level, socioeconomic status, and physical status. In this article, I explore how both groups expressed their desire to estar tranquilo or “be peaceful” in their older age; however, each group achieved this state in different ways. ELEAM residents focused on fostering good relationships with fellow residents and maintaining their autonomy. In contrast, club members focused on practicing their religion, maintaining family relationships, and engaging in activities. Although participants shared similar backgrounds and lived through the same historical events (i.e., military dictatorship), their current situations impacted their perceptions of well-being. For individuals to achieve their desired level of well-bing or to estar tranquilo required that they adapt to different living arrangements: club members had to adapt to living without their children, and ELEAM residents to living in an institution.

Narrative-Derived Indices of Metacognition among People with Schizophrenia: Associations with Self-Reported and Performance-Based Social Functioning.

Metacognitive functioning-which broadly encompasses the mental processes involved in thinking about the thinking of one's self and the thinking of others-is often impaired among individuals living with schizophrenia and may contribute to difficulties in social and interpersonal functioning. Although the majority of studies assessing metacognition among individuals with schizophrenia use standardized, laboratory-based measurements, an increasing number of studies have measured metacognitive capacity using natural language produced by individuals living with mental illness. At the same time, less is known about how language-derived indices of metacognitive function relate to key social outcomes among people with schizophrenia. The primary objective of this study was to employ a validated language coding system (the Metacognition Assessment Scale, Abbreviated; MAS-A) to assess metacognitive functioning from the spoken life narratives of individuals with schizophrenia (n = 32) and community controls (n = 15). Among individuals with schizophrenia, we also examined the associations between language-derived metacognition and measures of self-reported and performance-based social functioning. Our results suggest that most aspects of metacognition in our sample were not significantly diminished in people with schizophrenia compared to community controls. Unexpectedly, the MAS-A subscale related to one's ability to master psychological difficulties was rated higher among individuals with schizophrenia. Further, our results suggest that among people with schizophrenia, higher metacognitive functioning in the domain of self-reflectivity was associated with poorer self-reported social functioning, while a greater metacognitive awareness of other individuals' minds was associated with better scores on aspects of performance-based social functioning. Collectively, these results underscore the utility of assessing metacognitive functioning via life-story narratives to understand social outcomes and highlight possible aspects of resiliency among individuals who have experienced a serious mental illness.

"How will we cope?" Couples With Intellectual Disability Where One Partner Has a Diagnosis of Dementia.

People with intellectual disability are at increased risk of dementia at an earlier age. This is the first study to explore experiences of couples with an intellectual disability when one partner has dementia. Four people with intellectual disability whose partner had dementia and one partner who had both an intellectual disability and dementia took part in narrative life story interviews. One of the interviews was conducted as a couple giving direct perspectives from 4 couples overall. Additionally, 13 semistructured interviews were conducted with 9 social care professionals and 4 family members. This provided perspectives of the relationships of a further 4 couples, which collectively led to data on 8 couples. The emotional impact of a dementia diagnosis, planning for the future, and fear of separation was noted by couples with intellectual disability. Partners took on caring roles thus challenging views of being solely care-receivers. Families spoke of commitment and longevity in relationships, whilst social care staff highlighted how their own information needs changed recognizing the importance of intellectual disability and dementia-specific knowledge. Couples with intellectual disability continue to enjoy intimate relationships into later life and will face common conditions in older age including dementia. Those who provide support need to ensure that they are sensitive to the previous experience and life story of each couple and have specific knowledge of how dementia can affect people with intellectual disability.

Life outcomes after paediatric kidney transplantation: a qualitative, biographical study in long-term survivors

ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to analyse the narrative life stories of children with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) and their families to determine how health professionals can effectively support...

How do adopted adults see the significance of adoption and being a parent in their life stories? A narrative analysis of 40 life story interviews with male and female adoptees

Being adopted and becoming a parent are both highly significant events in the life course. How adopted people represent adoption and parenthood in their life stories is the focus of the current study. The research explored the views of adopted people who were parents, focusing on those adopted since the late 1980s in order to capture the experiences of people adopted through the child protection system. The participants were 40 adult adoptees who had at least one child. Equal numbers of men and women were recruited, and purposive sampling was used to ensure a diverse range of people were included. Most participants (34 of 40) were in their 20s or 30s and age at adoption varied from 0 to 12 years old. All except one person were domestically adopted in England, with two-thirds having been adopted through the child protection system; 32 were White British, and 8 were Black, Mixed or Asian ethnicity. An adaptation of McAdam’s life story interview method was used to enable participants to describe their whole life including their adoption and being a parent. Interviews were first analysed ‘within case’ looking at narrative themes and structure. Then looking across cases four types of life story narrative were identified: “continuously stable”, “pulling through”, “still struggling” and “robbed of parenthood”. The research illustrates the wide diversity of adopted people’s experiences and the ongoing impact of difficult early life experiences on adopted individuals as adults and parents. Parenting raised additional challenges for many adopted people, but could also be a positive turning point. The pathways to overcoming (or not overcoming) early adversity to succeed as parents are illustrated and the role of adoption as both a risk and protective factor is discussed.

The Impact of a Narrative Medicine Life Story Pilot Program on Press Ganey™ Scores in an Outpatient Cancer Center

ABSTRACT Oncology patients face challenges beyond those directly affecting their cancer management. Guided personal narrative programs have been shown to help patients with chronic conditions and life-framing events. Few such narrative programs have been reported for cancer patients or analyzed for their impact on patient experience. We established our Life Story Narrative Program, modeled on the United States Veterans Affairs’ “My Life, My Story” for outpatient oncology patients in our hospital’s cancer center. Press Ganey™ patient experience scores from program participants were compared retrospectively with scores from patients who were not participants. Over an eight-month period, we invited 30 cancer center outpatients to participate. Twenty-seven individuals accepted, and 18 had their stories edited, approved, and scanned into their electronic health record. Cohort matching yielded a control arm consisting of 255 responses from 48 surveys, while the intervention arm consisted of 68 responses from 12 surveys. 78.4% of responses from the control arm were rated 5 compared with 100% in the intervention arm. The mean Press Ganey™ score response in the control arm was 4.71 compared with 5.00 from the intervention arm. Wilcoxon U value was 10,540 with p < .001. An outpatient narrative medicine program for cancer patients to tell their life stories can easily be organized. Patients were willing to participate, enrollment was brisk, and the use of resources was limited. Although our sample size was small, participation in our Life Story Narrative Pilot Program resulted in a statistically significant improvement in Press Ganey™ scores.

Ke mosali oa Mosotho: reflecting on indigenous conceptions of womanhood in Lesotho

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the invisibilisation and silencing of indigenous conceptions of womanhood in feminist scholarly work. It argues that “Mosotho woman,” as we know it today, is a colonial construct for it is located within and fixed to hetero-patriarchal binarised hierarchies. It further argues for the reflection on historical narratives of women the likes of ‘Manthatisi of the Batlokoa as exceptional representations of precolonial conceptions of womanhood in Lesotho. As we interrogate the current invocations of “woman” in Lesotho, we ought to use these herstories as springboards to understand the silenced indigenous conceptions of bosali (womanhoods) that are not only complex but multifarious and beyond the confines of binarised hetero-patriarchal constructions. Drawing on the narrated life stories of 20 “never-married” women – methepa – the paper discusses boithlompho (self-respect), mosali oa ‘mankhonthe (perseverance), sexual empowerment, and botho (personhood) as underpinning the indigenous definitions of bosali. This paper argues for retrieval, elevation, and continuation of indigenous languages, rituals, and spaces as sources of knowledge and theory on womanhoods in local contexts.

Enduring Borders: Precarity, Swift Falls and Stretched Time in the Lives of Migrants Experiencing Homelessness in the UK

In this article, we draw attention to the border and border governance as key mechanisms of class and ‘race-making’ in the context of an increasingly hostile immigration environment. Focusing on the life story narratives of migrants experiencing homelessness, we extend the reach of analysis beyond the experiences of asylum seekers to gain a stronger understanding of migrant experiences more broadly. In our analysis, we reveal the temporal continuum of suffering endured, ranging from the ‘slow violence’ of the everyday, rooted in precarity and restricted access to the labour market and support services, to moments of rupture where there is a swift decline in circumstances, leading to homelessness. When, at last, the tempo of suffering slows again, these individuals are increasingly excluded from meaningful calendars of activity as they spend their time waiting, often in vain, for an outcome of a Home Office application or for the possibility of some longer-term accommodation.

A Framework for Person-Centred Recordkeeping Drawn through the Lens of Out-of-Home Child-Care Contexts

This article examines the concept of co-created and person-centred recordkeeping and the needs for this in out-of-home child-care contexts, drawing out a recordkeeping framework. The article uses the research of the UK MIRRA (Memory – Identity – Rights in Records – Access) project as its critical evidence base. MIRRA is a participatory research project, hosted at the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL) since 2017, which places Care Leavers as co-researchers at the heart of the work. The study has gathered evidence from care-experienced people, social workers, archivists, records managers, and researchers. The case context of care-experienced people provides a powerful focus for shifting views of records creation and ownership. Care-experienced people across the globe are situated within organizational systems that act as surrogate parents, but where the children or young people are often powerless to co-create and store their own memories, which would enable them to forge positive identities and revisit these through time. Positive and holistic life story narratives are rarely found. In addition, children’s care records are often accessible to care-experienced people only through legislative processes and without critical support. This research reframes the recordkeeping model, placing the care-experienced person at the heart of the process in order to ensure the co-creation of records and the maintenance of identity through time. The research acknowledges the complex and sometimes conflicting needs of diverse actors in children’s recordkeeping, including social workers, archivists, records managers, and researchers. It rethinks the actors’ relationships and responsibilities around the records and systems, drawing out a framework that makes explicit the value of active person-centred recordkeeping.

Upwardly mobile biographies. An analysis of turning points in the careers of working-class faculty.

Building upon Bourdieusian sociology of education and Randall Collins' theory of, interaction ritual chains, this paper contributes to the literature on the biographical life course by analyzing the biographies of upwardly mobile academics, i.e. those who, escaped the "collective fate of their class." Based on the collection of 25 unstructured, narrative interviews (life story narratives) and additional individual in-depth interviews, (repeated interviews, interviews with families, and friends), a total of 75 qualitative, interviews, I trace the main biographical metamorphoses of upwardly mobile, academics. The meticulous analysis of the narrations brings about an answer to the, question "What was the role of a social class in their biographical metamorphoses?", The analysis of the turning points in the under-researched context of the postcommunist, semi-peripheral, and yet neoliberal academic system enables the paper to, discuss social circumstances which play a crucial role in this kind of upward mobility, e.g. early discovered talent, presence of books at home, choice of high school, early contact with the legitimized culture, opportunity structure of the higher education system under transition and transnational experience.

Tracing women’s intersectional geographies of encounter in a Melbourne neighbourhood: the entanglements of discourse, perception and life-story narrative

Conceptualising discourse as an everyday practice which positions people in localised hierarchies of power, while simultaneously embedded in broader discursive landscapes, underscores encounter as an important site in which social structures produce and reproduce inequality. However, the interdependent role of discourse and encounter remains under-theorised within the field of intersectionality. Drawing on semi-structured interviews from a place-based case study, this paper examines the life-stories of three diversely positioned women to show how they construct, perform, and narrate their identities through encounter. Building on the emerging literature of intersectional geographies of encounter, this paper considers how, at the scale of encounter, dominant discourses become entangled with women’s life-story narratives to shape how they perceive themselves and others, and how they feel perceived by others which informs their situated and contingent relational positioning in hierarchies of power. This highlights the centrality of everyday encounters and discourses to the negotiation of hierarchal social structures and intersectional relations.

Making a complex story simple: The exclusion of social media from life stories

This article offers an account of the absence of media in general, and social media in particular, from a set of life story narratives. After conducting both unstructured life story interviews and semi-structured interviews with 15 Muslim Palestinian women in Israel, we analyzed the stories presented in each interview and the explanations given by interviewees for excluding items about (social) media from their life stories. Interviewees resolved what they saw as a contradiction—referencing “shallow” media in their “serious” stories about their identity—by sifting out items that could threaten the proper flow of such stories, as they perceived it, despite acknowledging their centrality in identity change. Cultural context and individuals’ beliefs are presented as preventing events related to media, especially new media, from being related in life stories. Moreover, our findings show the significance of life story interviews in interviewees’ identity development. It is argued that identities of both interviewer and interviewee play a role in constructing the story told. Life-storying occurs in a complex context that involves introspection, which itself affects the process of the storyteller’s identity formation. This study contributes to debates about the place of media in everyday life, as well as to our understanding of the relationship between identity and life-storying. The argument proposed here—that the absence of media from life stories might be due to conscious considerations rooted in the cultural specificity of those stories—is one that can be tested in further research.

Making, unmaking and remaking of context in entrepreneurial identity construction and experiences: a comparative analysis between Türkiye and the Netherlands

This study analyses how women entrepreneurs of Turkish origin do context in constructing their entrepreneurial identities and experiencing their entrepreneurship in two national contexts, namely Türkiye and the Netherlands. In order to study context, we use the term opportunity structures and analyse how these entrepreneurs interpret and perceive opportunity structures, and construct their entrepreneurial identities in relation to their interpretations. Relying on the life story narratives of 21 women entrepreneurs, we analyse social, political and institutional opportunity structures and the relationship between these and the processes of entrepreneurial experiences and identity construction. We propose that Turkish women entrepreneurs make, unmake and remake context during these processes. In the Netherlands, these entrepreneurs challenge existing opportunity structures either by providing alternative images of a Turkish migrant woman or questioning culturalist perspectives behind these opportunity structures. In Türkiye, they are compelled to be more hesitant in challenging the opportunity structures. They either have to step down from their enterprises or downgrade their entrepreneurial affiliations to fulfil the requirements of opportunity structures. This study contributes to the field of entrepreneurship in its contextualisation by providing an extended understanding of the ways in which entrepreneurs do context.

Introduction: Reconstructive biographical research

Reconstructive biographical research is a diverse and differentiated sociological field. In this introduction, we trace its interdisciplinary and transnational historical development, consider the most important theoretical influences, and characterize central research areas. In this way, we show that reconstructive biographical research is a distinct sociological approach to social analysis. It offers a reflexive access to understanding, classifying, and explaining social processes and social challenges through the analysis of experienced and/or narrated life stories.

História de Vida de Empreendedores Socioambientais

Abstract This research aimed to analyze the influence of the antecedents of the behavior of social entrepreneurs (SE) through their life stories. For this, the dimensions of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) were used, which cover personal attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, in addition to behavioral intention. For this proposition, a basic qualitative, descriptive-exploratory research was carried out, classified as a field study. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty Brazilian social entrepreneurs, in the form of autobiographical narratives. To analyze the data, the strategies of content analysis and the abductive method were used. In both stages, the New NVivo software was adopted. Among the results obtained, a theoretical model is presented, through dimensions, which emerged from the TPB and from the field research, characterizing these dimensions as predecessors, explaining how the life story, which acts in a transversal way, influences the antecedents of the behavior of social entrepreneurs. This study enables the advancement of discussions and the display of new perspectives on socio-environmental entrepreneurship. It is noted that this investigation contributes to filling a theoretical gap, pointed out in the literature, on the identification of characteristics and trajectories of social entrepreneurs, starting from the life story narratives, from the point of view of the entrepreneur, as a person, and not at an organizational level of institutions.

Examining trans student narratives of transitioning while in college

We collected narratives from five undergraduates who identified as either in the process of or had formerly transitioned from one gender to another while enrolled in a postsecondary institution. We used a narrative life story protocol to explore the greater context of participants as individuals. Participant stories focused on: the importance of relationships including roommates, friends, romantic partners, and role models; their experiences during enrollment, and institutional structures such as campus environments, faculty, and staff. We found the presence of health services focused on trans students’ needs and a trans-specific student organization contributed to perceptions of an affirming campus. We also found that gender binary norms still impacted participants through their struggle to align with cisnormative practices. Implications for higher education educators and administrators include proper training of faculty and staff on trans issues and the need to systemically address practices and policies rooted in the gender binary.

Understanding the Significance of Listening to Older People's Life Stories in Whole Person Care-An Interview Study of Nurses in Gerontology.

Aim: The purpose of this study was to explore the significance of performing a life story interview for gerontological nursing students. Method: The study had a qualitative exploratory design, focusing on hermeneutical understanding using thematic analysis. Seven nurses in older people nursing were interviewed. Findings: Two main themes emerged from the analysis: "Engaging fellowship" and "Understanding the importance of life stories." The participants experienced increased engagement and fellowship with their patients after the life story interview; the change in their perspective was characterized by renewed interest, connection, and recognition of the individual person. The participants also gained a deeper understanding of the significance of listening to an older person's life story narrative, and this was expressed through them gaining an understanding of people's actions, achieving an altered mindset, gaining a greater generational understanding, and integrating a life story focus in their everyday professional life. Conclusion: Knowledge of human life and stories makes older people's situations easier to understand; this insight affects how we as nurses think about others. Seeing each patient as an individual and unique person and being aware of this in daily care is essential for nursing.

Biographical Study with Hermeneutic Approach in Psychiatric Care Delivered at Community Mental Health Centers

When the literature studies on the services provided in community mental health centers (CMHCs) are carefully evaluated, it is seen that there are research results with positive feedback. On the other hand, a structured daily work standard has not yet been reached regarding the psychiatric care services provided in the increasing number of centers. In order to establish such a standardized work, there is a need for nurses to carry different approaches to the services they provide to sick individuals to their practice areas. Biography study, which can be defined in general terms as the use of the possibilities available to the individual in the process of coping with the events affecting his/her life, is compatible with the need for the formation of community mental health centers and the understanding of multidisciplinary work as such an application area. In this article, the introduction of biography work, its transfer to psychiatric care practice services in CMHC and the interpretation of the individual's life story narrative with a hermeneutic approach are discussed.