Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being

ABSTRACT. Narrative identity refers to the internal, dynamic life story that an individual constructs to make sense of his or her life. We argue that nar-rative identity is closely tied to the subjective interpretation of oneself as happy. We present a view of eudaimonic well-being that extends beyond the sense of having pleasure and meaning in one’s life (measured as self-report well-being) to include higher degrees of psychosocial integration in that meaning (mea-sured as ego development). This combination of qualities is characteristic of the good life, or eudaimonia, in a tradition dating to Aristotle. We then describe research showing how several patterns of narrative identity correspond to this extended notion of eudaimonic well-being. First, people at high levels of eudaimonic well-being tend to emphasize personal growth in their life stories, with different kinds of personal growth corresponding to different facets of eudaimonic well-being. Second, these people also tend to frame difficult life experiences as transformative experiences wherein they suffered deep pain but gained new insights about the self. Third, charting the move from suffering to an enhanced status or state, their stories often follow a culturally-shaped script of redemption, which in American society is often conceived as upward social mobility, liberation, recovery, atonement, or the full actualization of the inner self

The Role of Repeated Narration in Identity Development: The Evaluation of the Transition to College Over Time

Repeated narration of key life events may illuminate processes of identity development, such as stagnation or growth. We employed a longitudinal mixed-methods design to investigate how college-attending emerging adults narrated their transition to college. Student participants (n = 638 at Wave 1) from two distinct universities in the US narrated the college transition experience annually across four years with developmentally tailored prompts, which were coded for prominent themes. Quantitative analyses suggested that connection to campus, connection to family, and overall evaluation of the college transition were experienced more positively than were experiences of mental health and marginalization. Of those participants who completed all four assessment waves, we also employed qualitative analyses of those who remained stable or who experienced a shift in their narrative evaluations of the transition. These results highlighted that repeated narration is associated with an increase in a reflective process that revealed a deeper understanding of the meaning of the transition, especially when reflecting on experiences with mental health and marginalization. We also observed the importance of master narratives about the college experience, and the prominence of campus connection in positive transition experiences. Implications include the importance of positive campus connections in mitigating potential challenges, the need for time and reflection to understand the meaning of momentous experiences, the role of challenging experiences in identity development, and the importance of attending to personal and structural processes in identity development