The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing, and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions. This stellar collection of scholars examine such topics as how the larger construct of ‘personality’ can be read out of life story; life narratives of reform, i.e., the transition away from delinquent behavior; the importance of cultural continuity for understanding loneliness in elderly refugees; race relations and how it relates to the meaning of the decade in which the interviewees came of age; the experience and meaning of resilience among survivors of childhood sexual abuse; and the use of narrative work as an additional approach within a larger quantitative research project. Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson provide insight into how the narrative appraoch enriches the study of the rare, the unusual, the common, and the prevalent, always searching for meaning in peopleÆs lives.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction – Amia Lieblich
The Discursive Construction of Personality – Pertti Alasuutari
National Identity or Multicultural Autobiography – Gabriele Rosenthal
Arbiters of Female Purity – Susan Starr Sered
Conversations with Israeli Ritual Bath Attendants
Going Straight – Shadd Maruna
Desistance from Crime and Life Narratives of Reform
Soldiers′ Narratives of Selective Moral Resistance – Ruth Linn
A Separate Position of the Connected Self?
Loneliness in Cultural Context – Jane A Bennett and Daniel F Detzner
A Look at the Life History of Older Southeast Asian Refugee Women
Lost in the Fifties – Jannelle L Wilson
A Study of Collected Memories
Adolescence, Gender and the Development of Mental Health – Phame M Camarena, Pamela A Sarigiani and Anne C Petersen
In Search of Resilience in Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Jacquelyn Boone James, Joan Huser Liem and Joan Gately O′Toole
Linking Outlets for Power Motivation to Psychological Health