[8] In addition, young children whose parents or caregivers engage in more elaborative reminiscing techniques with them (such as asking open-ended questions or including emotional information) when co-constructing stories about past events tend to tell more coherent stories in both childhood and adolescence.
[10] The capability to independently construct narratives for a life story framework and form an identity emerges in adolescence.
[11][12] This aligns with Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, which posits that the central developmental task during adolescence is to establish an individual identity.
[17][18] Entire life narratives [12] and single event stories tend to increase in coherence and meaning-making over the course of adolescence.
[21] Dispositional traits, drawn from the Five-Factor Model of personality[16][22] are broad, decontextualized descriptors that are relatively stable across the lifespan and are useful for drawing comparisons between individuals.
Characteristic adaptations encompass a person's motivations, developmental concerns, and life strategies and are used to describe the individual within their contextualized time, place, and social roles.
[26] The hermeneutic approach seeks to capture the specific, personal, and highly contextualized elements of an individual's story.
The general extent to which coherence is present or absent in a narrative has been found to be related to a variety of important outcomes such as overall psychological well-being[25] and the nuance and complexity of meaning-making processes (ego development).
When participants in research studies are asked to recount a personal narrative, researchers code the story on the following seven constructs: redemption, contamination, agency, communion, exploratory narrative processing, coherent positive resolution, and meaning making.
For example, in one psychological study, adolescents aged 14 to 18 wrote narratives about significant turning points in their lifetimes.
For example, in one study, participants narrated personally meaningful events from their pasts; these could be positive, negative turning point, or early childhood memories.
Voicing and ventriloquation of past selves positioned against current self or others yields a trajectory of narrative and an evaluative tool of the construction of self-identity.
The life story allows individuals to organize recollective memories and more abstract knowledge of their past into a coherent biographical view.
[11] Different types of memories have been identified and classified, and have unique influences on how individuals develop their narrative self.
[10] The opportunity to tell stories about their lives can help autobiographical narrators establish a coherent sense of who they are.
[40] Narrative identity is mainly concerned with autobiographical memories and often are influenced by the meaning and emotions the individual has assigned to that event.
Richard Bauman states that different forms of conversational genres (personal experience narrative, tall tale, practical joke), interrelatedly, add texture and flavor to one's life.
Together, they provide the narrator with a toolset of means to figure him/ herself in a variety of alignments to a remarkably consistent and coherent set of epistemological and social-relational concerns.
Additionally, stories are told for social reasons, in particular communication, persuasion, and entertainment purposes.
The concept of narrative identity, and its associated research techniques have been applied in a wide variety of fields.
Specifically, the concept of master narratives (story scripts common within a cultural context) has been investigated in this domain.
One of the foundational papers asserts that a study of gay identity must take into account cultural and historical factors.
The paper demonstrates that gay-identified individuals must navigate through a world where master narratives exclude their desires and experiences.
A prospective longitudinal study tracked clients' narrative identity from before they began treatment through the early phase of psychotherapy.
[51] The study demonstrated that clients told stories about their experiences with an increasing sense of agency over the course of treatment.
Narration is a meaningful learning structure, which improves the educative process, and guides the student to develop a strong and healthy identity.
Since identity is essential for psychological development and teachers should find ways to help students to get a complete human growth, to work on narrative eases the student to obtain a deep knowledge, useful for class and life[52] Narratives written by individuals with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, have been studied in order to determine the potential influence of treatment using therapy and/or antipsychotic medication on narrative formation.
[53] Other studies have indicated that people with schizophrenia are better able to confront their illness after time spent in therapy, and subsequently develop more coherent narratives.
[58] With new connections, the patient can lead a healthier life with a positive outlook instead of revolving their lives around their illness.
[31] Some actually attempt to follow the script but it does not help them succeed due to the clash of the cultural norm and what is desired by the athlete.