Narrative Inquiry - Online First

This article focuses on how the concept of “turning points” can be used in narrative research when studying people’s (professional) identities and identity formation. By examining various understandings of turning points, we aim to show how they can be identified and used as analytical tools in different ways when conducting narrative analyses of (professional) identity formation. A case study from a research project on police identity is used to illustrate the application of various perspectives on turning points. The article offers guidance for researchers on choosing a context and focus for analysing turning points, as well as on the theoretical perspectives that come with these choices, and thereby suggests directions for analytical attention. The article shows how different perspectives on turning points have consequences for the understanding of professional identities.

This study investigated the associations of narrative processing while recounting a past victimization experience with different forms (i.e., physical and relational) and functions (i.e., reactive vs proactive) of aggressive behavior. Moderating effects of respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity and gender were explored. Two hundred college students participated in a semi-structured laboratory interview about a past victimization event, during which their respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and narrative processing (i.e., perpetrator hostility evaluation, narrative coherence, and positive resolution) were assessed. Participants reported their tendency to engage in aggressive behaviors. Findings indicated that low narrative coherence and high perpetrator hostility evaluation, respectively, in combination with RSA activation, were associated with reactive physical aggression in men but not in women. Perpetrator hostility evaluation was also associated with reactive relational aggression for both men and women. Findings shed critical light on the joint influences of narrative processing, physiological reactivity, and gender in subtypes of aggressive behavior.

Applying Bamberg’s (2012) practice-oriented analytical framework for narrative identity as produced through specific linguistic behaviours, this research focuses on the context-specific construction of multiple identities in the accounts of Chinese leftover women (sheng nü). It also seeks to investigate how they negotiate selves and handle struggles in both the storyworld and the storytelling-world by examining the trinity of form, content and context narrated in seven semi-structured interviews. This research reveals that these unmarried Chinese women attempt to narrate a positive positioning of self. They deconstruct the socially ascribed leftover identity but renegotiate a gendered self as either invisible or visible women integrated within an agentic ‘excellent’ (youxiu) self, albeit somehow disrupted within the diverse embedding of patriarchal cultural accounts.

This study examines the use of ungendered third person Chinese pronoun ta in digital first-and-third person voiced discourses (i.e. small stories). The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for audience design and the facilitation of character empathy. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective focused on deixis relative to the notion of empathy in storytelling, the study investigates emergent practices which involve the orthographic manipulation of gender. The study proposes that ta is an interpersonal resource whose deictic properties as a non-standard spelling are exploited as a property of audience design to facilitate an appeal to empathy. This facilitation is advanced by the script choice which offers a wider scope of reference, and thus targets a wider audience.

This study applies sociocultural narrative theory and method to integrate children’s perspectives into research on classroom climate. Sociocultural narrative theory explains how individuals use expressive genres to make sense of environments, how they fit, and what they would like to change. This study incorporates such theory and method into a qualitative research design, applying quantitative analysis techniques to understand trends in student attention and expression. The main goal of this study is to examine whether and how students enact and express socioemotional and spatiotemporal (climate) sensitivities with their use of regular narrative elements. This study employs plot and character analyses to understand 22 sixth graders’ narrations of best and worst classroom experiences. These analyses reveal diverse patterns of focus on classroom events. Differences in the young narrators’ attention highlight areas for ongoing inquiry, with implications for mixed methods studies of classroom climate and related developmental research.

HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrating a difficult event into one’s life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and examine whether good EW outcome cases (in terms of well-being improvement) would be characterized with different types of narratives than poor outcome cases. Results show that texts produced by good outcome cases presented more emotional involvement than poor cases. Furthermore, good cases presented with a more complex and well-integrated narrative of their story than poor cases. It is suggested that good outcome participants’ writings are more emotionally involved, integrated and personal. Our findings emphasize the importance of context-sensitive and function-oriented accounts of EW texts.

Much of the research on narrative identity has used the Life Story Interview (LSI) to better understand the person through the story they construct of their life. However, the effect that the LSI has on participants has not yet been examined. Study 1 looked at 163 middle-aged adults who completed a measure of self-reported positive and negative affect both immediately before and after being interviewed. Results indicated that participants experienced a significant increase in positive affect and that this mood boost was experienced regardless of background, personality, and mental health. Study 2 involved a qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts of the 20 participants who experienced the most and the least benefit from the interview, with results indicating three emerging themes (identity development, identity fulfillment, the storied self) that appear to reflect two forms of storytelling: autobiographical versus episodic.