Written Life Stories Research Articles

Life stories of patients with personality disorders before and after treatment: Change and stability in agency and communion.

Studying written life stories of patients with personality disorders (PDs) may enhance knowledge of how they understand themselves, others and the world around them. Comparing the construction of their life stories before psychotherapy to their reconstruction after psychotherapy may provide insight in therapeutic changes in the understandings of their lives. As few studies addressed this topic, the current study explored changes in agency (i.e., perceived ability to affect change in life), and communion (i.e,, perceived connectedness to other persons) in written life stories of 34 patients with various PDs, before and after intensive psychotherapy treatment. Life stories showed a positive increase in agency from pre- to posttreatment, in particular regarding internal agency, societal success, and occupational success. No significant changes were observed for communion as a whole. However, the perceived number and quality of close relationships revealed a significant positive increase. The increased agency in the reconstruction of patients' life story after psychotherapy suggests that patients improved their perceived ability to affect change in their own lives. This can be seen as an important step in the treatment of PDs towards further recovery.

Cognitive and social well-being in older adulthood: The CoSoWELL corpus of written life stories.

This paper presents the Cognitive and Social WELL-being (CoSoWELL) project that consists of two components. One is a large corpus of narratives written by over 1000 North American older adults (55+ years old) in five test sessions before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other component is a rich collection of socio-demographic data collected through a survey from the same participants. This paper introduces the first release of the corpus consisting of 1.3 million tokens and the survey data (CoSoWELL version 1.0). It also presents a series of analyses validating design decisions for creating the corpus of narratives written about personal life events that took place in the distant past, recent past (yesterday) and future, along with control narratives. We report results of computational topic modeling and linguistic analyses of the narratives in the corpus, which track the time-locked impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the content of autobiographical memories before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main findings demonstrate a high validity of our analytical approach to unique narrative data and point to both the locus of topical shifts (narratives about recent past and future) and their detailed timeline. We make the CoSoWELL corpus and survey data available to researchers and discuss implications of our findings in the framework of research on aging and autobiographical memories under stress.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-022-01926-0.

Journey in a Life Story and Pilgrimage: Exploring the Connection Between Humans and Place in a First-Person Narrative

AbstractThis paper will explore the relationship between humans and place mediated in first-person narratives. By focusing on episodes that reveal the change in the ordinary role of the person, we examine how they describe the place and how they perceive the environment in their changed role. Drawing on interviews with a man who has walked a pilgrimage/hiking trail as well as a written life story from the collections of the Estonian Cultural History Archives, we analyse the description of modern journeys and the journeys that took place in the vortex of events during World War II. We suggest that the descriptions of place-making under consideration are related not only to subjective experiences and storytelling skills, but also to more general contexts, such as historical-political, economic, or religious frames. Comparing various kinds of place-making description we attempt to find the universal and context-sensitive aspects of journey descriptions. Finally, based on studies of oral history and cultural borders on the one hand, and pilgrimage studies on the other, a methodological question is asked: how should one apply these research methods and results to place-making research? Combining these research methods has turned out to be fruitful in creating a dialogue between experiences that have been formed in different circumstances, and through this to understand better the factors determining one’s sense of place.

The dynamic process of student-teachers’ construction of identity as future teachers

This paper reports the findings of a qualitative narrative-inquiry study aimed at exploring what English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) student-teachers’ life stories revealed about their identity construction as future teachers. The project was carried out among eighth-semester student-teachers from a public university in Tunja, Boyaca (Colombia). Hence, the data collection drew upon written life stories and in-depth interviews. Findings suggest that there are some critical factors that helped student-teachers construct their identities as future EFL teachers. These factors are all tied to previous experiences of student-teachers as language learners themselves, a connection and affiliation they establish with their teacher educators as projected images they have of themselves as future teachers. Moreover, real teaching experiences were opportunities for student-teachers to make sense of the myriad issues education involves, which made them, develop positions towards education as future teachers.

Relatives' experiences of sharing a written life story about a close family member with dementia who has moved to residential care: An interview study.

AimThe aim of this study was to describe relatives’ experiences of sharing a written life story about a close family member with dementia who has moved to residential care.DesignAn explorative descriptive qualitative design was used.MethodsThe data were collected using semi‐structured interviews with a purposeful sample of eight relatives and analyzed using a qualitative content analysis.ResultsResults show that creating and sharing the life story of a close family member could help relatives handle grief and stress. It was perceived as an important, yet difficult, task to ensure that the close family member got good quality care. The creation of a meaningful life story takes time and requires cooperation with family members and other significant people.

Does life story work improve psychosocial well-being for older adults in the community? A quasi-experimental study

BackgroundPrevious studies have demonstrated that life story work has positive effects when used on older adults. This study aimed to examine the effect of life story work on the general mental well-being, self-esteem, and life satisfaction of older adults by comparing two groups – one with and one without depressive symptoms.MethodsA quasi-experimental design was adopted in this study. One hundred and twenty-three adults aged 60 or above were recruited from community centers through convenience sampling. They were allocated into two groups based on their level of depressive symptomatology as measured by the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). The intervention was to produce a written life story with pictures and memorabilia in four to six semi-structured sessions facilitated by trained volunteers. The outcome measures included general mental well-being (General Health Questionnaire, GHQ), life satisfaction (Life Satisfaction Scale Index A, LSI-A), and self-esteem (Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale, RSES). Data were collected at baseline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), and at the 3-month follow-up (T2). Generalized estimating equations were used to examine the effect of the intervention on the outcomes.ResultsThere was a significant interaction effect between the two groups at T1 (β = 0.244, p < 0.05) with improvements in the GHQ observed in the group with depressive symptomology. No significant time and interaction effects were seen on the LSI-A and RSES. The Friedman test was also used to examine whether the intervention itself would have any effects on the GDS score, with two groups combined. A reduction in the mean GDS score was found to be close to reaching a level of significance (χ2 = 5.912, p = 0.052).ConclusionThe findings of this study provided some preliminary evidence that life story work was effective at improving the general mental well-being of community-dwelling older adults with depressive symptomology. Because older adults with different levels of depressive symptoms might respond differently to life story work interventions, our findings offer interesting directions for future studies – for instance, on what population would benefit the most from Life Story Work and what would be the mechanism that renders Life Story Work effective.

Creating a Pedagogical Space that Fosters the (Re)Construction of Self Through Life Stories of Pre-Service English Language Teachers

People’s true selves comprise a life story that may be considered as a narrative. With that idea in mind, the purpose of this article is to report on a pedagogical intervention that bridged life stories and a narrative perspective to examine nine, out of eighty, pre-service English language teachers’ (re)construction of their true selves while engaged in a three-step introspective practice. Such (re)construction was manifested in written life stories which were interpreted and found to reveal these main themes: Meaningful Others in Shaping Their Self-as-Teacher, The Human Dimension in the Formation of Teachers of English, and Becoming Teachers of English Who Are Transformative, Instead of Transmissionists.

Continuity or Discontinuity: On the Dynamics of Remembering “Mature Socialism” in Estonian Post-Soviet Remembrance Culture

Remembering the early Soviet period is still one of the main anchor points for identity building in Estonian society. The experience of the Soviet occupation is used as a filter through which meani...

Three stories about mother: narratives by women who have lived in care

ABSTRACTFamilies and social work interventions in their lives are at the core of child welfare. Child welfare practices can shape children's and parents' family memories and narratives of different family relations. However, there is little social work research so far based on the personal narratives of people who have lived in care. The study data consist of the written life stories and biographical interviews of three women who have lived part of their childhood in children's homes. In their narratives, the most central family relation was their relationship to the mother. They used different narrative strategies in their stories while trying to manage both living their childhood in care and presenting their mother morally in the same story. The central moral and emotional stance in the narratives of the mother–daughter relationship was love. Through the analysis, three moral characters of the mother were constructed. The first told about an absent mother, the second a loved and loving mother and in the third, the mother's moral character was continuously negotiated and contested. Constructing a personal story and moral character of oneself and of one's mother can be truly risky in the context of a childhood in care.

Changing Notions of Lone Motherhood in Twentieth‐Century Finland

Through written life stories of lone mothers, this article examines changes in lone motherhood in twentieth‐century Finland. While the older life‐story writers’ narratives are clearly influenced by an ‘ethos of survival’ and the regulation of female sexuality, the younger writers relate their experiences with the help of scripts on gender equality and the psychological importance of ‘good’ parenting. These narrative shifts point to important changes in cultural scripts on women’s positions in families, on the labour market, and in society.

Mälestuste kogumisprotsessis loodud tekstide žanrilisus. 1905. aasta sündmuslugude näitel. Generic Status of Texts Created in the Process of Collecting Memories

In this article I will focus on how the situation of storytelling influences the nature of stories based on memories. More precisely, I will look at the texts that have been collected at the initiative of the researchers and stored in the archive. These are partly written life story accounts and partly oral recollections that have been written down. How do we define their genre? To what extent is it possible to study the interpretations of history from the folk--or any other perspective--through these texts? To what extent is it possible to explore the aspects of these texts that relate to reminiscing and storytelling? The research is based on material collected by the members or grant-aided students or scholars of three academic societies (The 1905 Society, Academic Historical Society and Estonian Literary Society) in the 1920s and 1930s, which are now stored in two collections of the cultural historical archives of the Estonian Literary Museum: the collection of the 1905 Society (f 172) and the collection of Historical Tradition (f 199 and 200). The texts under discussion have a common theme, the 1905 events in tsarist Russia on the Estonian territory, and are based on memories. When the collected materials were compared it became clear that the collectors of the stories had posed their questions in a similar way (how the events were remembered). But the general context of the interviews highlighted other aspects. In the first case, the emphasis was on the events in 1905, in the second case it was just one of many events to have happened over a couple of centuries. The roles that the interviewers assumed were also different: the collectors of historical tradition listened to what the storytellers themselves wanted to talk about on a given topic; those collecting memories on behalf of the 1905 Society presented a clear plan to their interviewees, telling them about what events they wanted to get information. The result was that the storytellers within the framework of historical tradition concentrated on the consequences of the events. The interviewees talked about what the people had experienced. The stories in the 1905 Society collection featured a first-person narrative and focused on mass meetings and the unrest. Two methods were used in collecting the memories: responding to written calls (collection of the 1905 Society) and fieldwork (both collections). Although the stories in the archive are written in both cases, the situation of storytelling is different depending on the method of collection. In the first case the respondent wrote his/her own account, following a questionnaire compiled by the researchers. In the second case the researcher put down a spoken conversation, editing it later for an archive. In editing three rules were followed: the contradictions in a storyteller’s account were smoothed over, the events were put in a chronological order, and the isolated fragments of one and the same topic were combined in the written text. The storyteller’s actual wording and style remained unchanged, and the first person was also retained. The genre of the texts created during the collection of memories is connected with the spoken or written form of the story. The wording of the source texts reveals that a memoir belongs to the genre of written text. During oral communication, the storyteller relied on memories, but did not call the retold story a memoir. “Life stories” can be written or spoken, but as a folk narrative genre they have been instigated by the researcher. During the practice of collecting memories a genre --a questionnaire--is created that is used for supervising written papers. Oral and written texts differ from each other not only because of their presentation, but also because of their comprehensibility: a text for reading requires a different composition than a recounted oral story. When the oral presentation is the basis for a sentence in the written archival text, certain aspects of storytelling can be studied (such as themes, points of view, or style), but not the structure of storytelling or the schemes of recalling. When the researcher’s point of view is prevalent in creating the archival text, then we should, in the analysis of texts, look at the interconnections between the different points of view (academic and folk) rather than look for one or the other view of the past.

Language transmission revisited: family type, linguistic environment and language attitudes

This article revisits factors in intergenerational language maintenance and shift within the family. It does so through an in-depth analysis of what 14 migrants to Australia from German-speaking Switzerland reported in written life stories and subsequent life story interviews. The participants represent four family types and a wide age range, and they migrated over several decades. Whether they transmitted Swiss German to the children and if so, to what extent, cannot be unequivocally correlated with either the family type or the time of migration. However, participants who migrated and raised their children during a more assimilationist period in Australia tended to transmit their language to a limited degree only or not at all. The analysis of the personal narratives also considers the specific language variety in question (Swiss German) as well as the role of the parents’ attitudes and their beliefs about language, bilingualism and language learning. The paper argues that a life story approach is a valuable complement and extension of macro-level research into language transmission, highlighting the diverse experiences and the complexity of the variables involved.

Brunetto Latini, le Livre dou Tresor et l’histoire sainte

This paper focuses on how Brunetto Latini incorporates into his Livre dou Tresor a section devoted to sacred history. The underlying reason is that Brunetto’s conception of history is directed by the notion of law. He is thus led to draw from written life stories of Old Testament prophets and of the disciples of Christ. Foremost among them is De ortu et obitu patrum, written at the end of the VIth century by Isidore of Seville. This study is intended to shed light on the relationship between these two texts.

Storytelling and Ethnographic Intersections

The exit of approximately 2,000 Vietnamese orphans in April 1975 through Operation Babylift is a key part of Vietnam War debates. The Babylift volunteers, American women who aided with the children's evacuation, published autobiographies of their involvement and publicly commemorated the history. This article uses pedagogy, collective memory, and commemoration theory to examine how Vietnamese adoptees negotiate the volunteers' accounts and how they reclaim their history by labeling the volunteers' narratives as inadequate, recognize their community's agency, and create new commemorations. The article uses interviews, participation observation, and Vietnamese adoptee written life stories to discuss Vietnamese adoption. It also explores some issues of using life story texts in ethnographic research.

On Being a `Good' Mother

This article examines how women present a moral self in relation to public norms that constitute`good' motherhood.Thefocus of this article is on two types of written life story: first, those written by mothers who express a past or current wish to divorce and, second, those written by lone mothers.The life stories offer insights into how individuals account for their actions in situations where they face the moral dilemma of clashing ethical norms — care for self and care for children — and how individuals with a `spoiled identity' manage a moral presentation of self. The article concludes by critically examining the consequences of using written life stories rather than face-to-face interviews as data in a study of the moral tales that individuals tell.

Beyond the Memoir: Telling Life Stories Using Multiple Literary Forms

Critical discussions on written life stories and the elderly often focus on the memoir format alone. Consequently, the role that literary form plays in influencing what types of stories are voiced and what are silenced is often not addressed. This article describes an approach to written life story work that includes the use of several literary forms such as letters, poems, and third-person stories. Through writing examples from older adults who participated in a series of “Share Your Life Story” writing workshops, I argue that literary form greatly influences what story is voiced, and stress the importance of a multiform approach in life story work.

Children's Life Paths Through Preschool and School

This article is based upon two studies applying a life history approach, letting 15-to 16-year-olds reconstruct their own childhood in preschool and school, to see what meaning and importance children's experiences have in forming their self-concepts and philosophy of life. A combination of methods was used: written life stories, round tours in the educational settings and interviews. The round tour, a new method, helps the youths to remember and to work inductively, using later experiences, here called post-understanding, to analyse their childhood memories. The results show that relations both with people and content characterized by dialogue and reciprocity are crucial for development and learning; the project of learning and knowledge cannot be separated from the social interpersonal project. Meetings, good or bad, could become existential questions and lead to new choices and values in life. Memory plays an important part both methodologically and in forming the young people's self-concepts, values and philosophy of life.

Patients’ written life stories: A gateway for understanding

Objective. To explore how statements drawn from patients’ written life stories can help general practitioners understand their patients’ maladaptive thought patterns and their negative schemata. Design. Qualitative study of written life stories. Setting. General practice in Copenhagen, Denmark. Subjects. A total of 22 consecutive patients aged 23–49 years, who were invited by their GP to participate in cognitive therapy owing to depressive or anxiety-related disorders, including unexplained bodily symptoms. Theoretical frame of reference. Beck's information-processing model of anxiety. Results. Analysis of the written life stories disclosed aspects of negative expectations of life, the self, or the values and capabilities of others or of the patient him- or herself. Three main beliefs were identified: (1) the world is evil, (2) only the perfect is of value, and (3) emotions are dangerous. The patients describe events and experiences in negative terms that others might have interpreted as neutral or positive. For some this translated into a sort of all-or-nothing kind of thinking. Anger and other strong feelings were forbidden. Responsibility for the life of others was a dominant feature. Conclusions. Written life stories reveal knowledge of the patient's dysfunctional thought patterns. This may be a useful shortcut in therapy.

Metodologiska val i studien av biografiskt material - metodologiska val och deras epistemologiska konsekvenser i studien av biografiskt material

Epistemological Questions Concerning the Study of Biographical. Material: The Consequences of Choise of Methodology Using my own research on written life stories of Finnish lone mothers as a case study, this paper examines the consequences of choice of methodology when using biographical material as data. I focus on two methodo-logical alternatives: analysing biographical material as documents of preceding events, or as meaning-making con-structs. Treating biographical material as a gateway into studying events in people’s lives reduces the heuristic value of the material, and consequently questions of truth and reliability become problematic. Nevertheless, this still seems to be the preferred methodological alternative of many sociologists. If biographical material is analysed for its own sake, focussing on the creation of meaning through story-telling, the above-mentioned problems of truth and reliability diminish considerably. Using research on lone motherhood as an example, I ex-plore arguments for the use of narrative analysis, examining what it has to offer methodologically, theoreti-cally and conceptually.

Narratives of Birth in Swedish Popular Autobiography

My paper concerns a corpus of workers’ autobiographical writings at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1945, the Nordiska Museet began to systematically collect workers’ narratives (Nilsson 1996). The museum, in collaboration with almost twenty labour unions, urged retired workers to relate the stories of their lives in writing and issued a series of guidelines suggesting appropriate themes. By 1960, the collection of Workers’ Recollections in the museum amounted to approximately 2000 written narratives, comprising more than 30,000 pages of text. The narratives are mostly personally written life stories, in which the narrators, using the first person, tell of their experiences. A significant proportion, however, were written down on behalf of the narrators by local informants who then sent the material to the museum. The primary context for these workers’ recollections was the museum’s investigation into Swedish cultural history and social life. During the inter-war years ethnologists and museum curators began to change the thematic focus of investigation, so as to include the history of the modern working class in addition to the old peasant culture. This new perceptual field was necessitated by the social change that Swedish society was going through at the time. The first phase of industrialisation had been completed and the industrial working class had become one of the main forces in society. When the Social Democrats assumed governmental responsibility in 1932 the construction of a modern welfare state began. In my thesis, Workers’ memories in the Swedish Folkhem. A study of the historical and discursive preconditions of Swedish working class biography (Nilsson 1996), I have shown how descriptions of the old class society gave the development of modern welfare its legitimacy, creating a historic situation where the workers’ class-based “weexperiences” became relevant for the society in large. If my earlier project thus concerned a historic and discursive contextualisation of the collection of material, my present work