128 I. Theore TIcal Pers PecTIves and c once PTual u nITs
Neegle and Habermas (2010) compared 
adolescents’ narratives of the same event 
over a 4-year span. They found that over 
time, narrators tended to tell more con -
densed stories of the original event, tended 
to distance themselves from the emotions 
experienced in the original event, and tend -
ed to engage in greater levels of meaning 
making. As they got older, the participants 
in Neegle and Habermas’s study expended 
greater effort in trying to explain what the 
original event might mean in the context of 
their overall life and personality.
Dimensions of Life Stories: 
Methods  and Constructs
Every person creates a life story in a unique 
way. Nonetheless, commonalities in form 
and content may be observed across differ -
ent accounts. Research in cognitive science 
suggests that people readily organize their 
life stories in terms of (1) broad periods in 
life, or chapters (“childhood,” “my first mar -
riage,” “when we lived on Vermont Street”); 
(2) recurrent or prototypical events (“family 
dinners,” “dates with Becky,” “getting fired 
all those times”); and (3) specific moments 
or scenes (sometimes extended) that stand 
out for their clarity, vividness, or psycholog -
ical significance (“the day my mother died,” 
“the amazing Rome vacation”) (Conway & 
Pleydell-  Pearce, 2000; Singer & Salovey, 
1993; Thomsen & Berntsen, 2008).
Life- narrative researchers have developed 
structured interviews and other assess -
ment protocols that parallel the categories 
observed in research on autobiographical 
memory and life stories. For example, Mc -
Adams (1985; McAdams & Guo, 2015) has 
developed various versions of the life-story 
interview,  which typically begins by asking 
participants to sketch and give titles to the 
main chapters in their lives, to be followed 
by a detailed narration of specific key scenes 
(e.g., life-story high point, low point, turn -
ing point, positive childhood scene, negative 
childhood scene), then a projection of how 
the life-story plot is likely to develop in the 
future. Other researchers adopt more abbre -
viated approaches (some verbal, others writ -
ten), zeroing in on a few key scenes or experi -ences in life, such as a self-  defining memory 
(Singer & Salovey, 1993) or a turning-  point 
experience (McLean & Pratt, 2006), or they 
may ask participants to narrate their experi -
ences within a particular life domain, such 
as experiences in psychotherapy (Adler, Ska -
lina, & McAdams, 2008) or with respect to 
religion or vocation (Bauer, McAdams, & 
Sakaeda, 2005a).
Most research on narrative identity, there -
fore, asks participants to provide extended, 
open-ended, verbatim accounts of experi -
ences in life. These accounts are then coded  
for expressly defined themes or forms, 
typically resulting in numerical ratings and 
scores. Along the way, researchers must be 
trained to analyze the narratives in a partic -
ular way, and acceptable levels of interrater 
reliability must be achieved. Life-  narrative 
researchers have developed and validated a 
number of content analysis systems for cod -
ing life-  narrative accounts. Among the more 
commonly used are systems to assess narra -
tive coherence, the motivational themes of 
agency and communion, the emotional se -
quences of redemption and contamination, 
and variations on the ideas of autobiograph -
ical reasoning and meaning making. Each 
of these coding systems defines a particular 
construct in the study of narrative identity. 
Therefore, like the term personality,  there 
is no single, all-  encompassing measure of 
“narrative identity” writ large. Instead, re -
searchers typically focus on one or two spe -
cific constructs within the broad research 
domain, coming at narrative identity, as it 
were, from a particular conceptual angle. 
Table 5.1  provides definitions and examples 
of the most commonly used coding systems 
for assessing individual differences in di -
mensions of narrative identity.
Narrative identity itself functions to pro -
vide life with coherence. Yet life-  narrative 
accounts vary widely with respect to just 
how coherent they seem to be. Accordingly, 
a growing body of research has focused on 
individual differences in narrative coherence. 
The findings suggest that crafting narrative 
accounts rated by coders to be especially co -
herent (e.g., clear, consistent, easy to follow, 
exhibiting a good form) tends to be positive -
ly associated with psychological well-being 
(Waters & Fivush, 2015). Moreover, low 