Introduction

1. Perceptions of Good Parenting at Age 17 Predict Use of More Prototypic Life Story Themes at Age 26: A Narrative Analysis of Personality Development in Youth Michael W. Pratt, Susan Alisat & Sean Mackinnon Wilfrid Laurier University • Introduction • Narrative approach to identity: People’s life stories draw on cultural prototypes to help shape a unique sense of identity, constructed from their own autobiographical memories (McAdams, 2006) • Good family parenting in adolescence is linked to better social and cognitive adjustment in young adulthood (e.g., Simpson et al., 2007; Steinberg, 2001) • How does good family parenting in adolescence predict to use of more or less culturallyprototypic life stories in young adulthood? Table 1. Life Story Types and Correlations with Standard Identity Achievement Measure .* p<.05; + p<.06 Results: Hypothesis 1: More use of prototypic themes in life stories at age 26 by those scoring higher on standard measure of identity achievement, except for parent scenes (see Table 1) Hypothesis 2: Better adjustment at age 26 associated with use of prototype stories for low points, romantic stories, parent stories, but not for religious high points or friendship scenes (see Table 2) Hypothesis 3: Use of prototypes in all stories at 26 associated with better rated parenting at age 17 (see Table 2) • Table 2. Correlations between Prototype Use, Adjustment at 26, and Good Parenting at 17 (a) • *p<.05 • Controlled for high school grade point and family social class. Hypotheses H1: Use of more prototypic life story themes at 26 will be linked to greater identity achievement H2: More prototypic story themes at 26 will be associated with better personal adjustment H3: Positive parenting at 17 will predict more use of prototypic life story themes at 26 Sample Stories Romantic Relationship Scene (Coded: True Love): “ My spouse and I had a pretty accelerated courtship, we’d been spending a lot of time together, … we became really good friends, but the end of the semester I was like alright we might have something going here, so we decided to try it out, …Anyway, I was like, here’s a woman that I can respect without having to remind myself she’s intelligent, let’s see how far we can go with this, because that’s important, equality. Anyway, she flew out here to visit in June and spent almost two weeks, and I was trying to figure out if I was falling in love. We ended up talking about it, while she was here … by the end of the day we were like, yeah, I think we’re falling in love, we kind of just decided, so that was the turning point and from then on, it tangibly changed the substance of our relationship, and we knew that there was a future.” Religious High Point (Coded: Developing Sense of Identity): “Well, I guess when I got married, we got married in a Catholic church and it was really important to me because I was Catholic. My husband’s Presbyterian and, they’re both Christian religions, so we felt that that was fine, I wasn’t pressuring him into anything, he was fine with it. It was very important to me at the time that the priest was so understanding, so it made me feel happy about the religion that I had chosen. Like I didn’t feel like wow, why am I in this religion, you’re making me feel bad because, sometimes you hear about negative things, when people get married outside of their religious culture. The impact on me was that I wanted to continue a Catholic, bringing up my children, my husband and I decided that our children will be Catholic. Um, and it basically just says, for myself, that I’ve made the right choice, this is who I want to be.” Personal Low Point (Coded: Coherent, Positive Resolution): Um, probably losing L (daughter). It was a long journey/draining, court battle. Um, in the end, at the time I was just getting my life back on track. I had quit my job, left my husband. Um, I was staying at my parents’ house because I wasn’t working. Probably because I lost custody um, I was a wreck for probably a year. Um just trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Um, trying to figure where I was going to go, how I was going to handle not having her every day. Um, I was angry at everybody (crying). I was mad at my ex-husband. I was mad at my parents, and they had nothing to do with it! But I think even though it upsets me and I still get angry um, I deal with it a lot better than I used to. It’s made me stronger as a person, um, just being able to deal with anything basically now. Nothing can be worse than not having your child anymore. So, I think it’s made me a stronger person to deal with everyday situations. • Method • 100 Canadian high school students, age 17, followed 4 times (ages 17, 19, 23, 26) • Age 17: measures of parenting: • parenting style, family cohesion and communication (Dumas et al., 2009) • Age 26, questionnaire and interview: • identity status (the OMEIS of Adams et al.) • adjustment measures: • depression (CES-D), • loneliness (UCLA), • life satisfaction (SHARP) • Interview: • told personal stories about several diverse domains (see Table 1) • Life story themes were coded for each story type, based on a combination of open coding and some theoretically-identified frameworks (see Table 1 for brief descriptions) • Interpretation and Future Work: • Good parenting in family in adolescence tended to predict more prototypic life stories at 26, as hypothesized, parallel to prior research on parenting and actual young adult behaviour. • Greater story prototype use was linked to better adjustment, may reflect smoother actual life courses in development, or simply be a sign of better meaning-making capacity in a cognitive/emotional sense. • Further research should study how prototypic life stories may be linked to actual life experiences and behaviours in relationships.