Parent-adolescent storytelling in Canadian-Arabic immigrant families (Part 2): A narrative analysis of adolescents’ stories told to parents

Abstract

This paper is the second of two papers presenting the results of a qualitative analysis of interviews inviting Arabic-Canadian immigrant adolescents and parents to reflect on the stories they tell each other in the context of everyday family life. The first paper provides the results of a Grounded Theory Methodology and proposes a substantive theory of intergenerational storytelling during adolescence. This paper augments these results by presenting Narrative Analysis of a separate part of the interview inviting adolescents to tell a story to the interviewer as if telling it to their parents. Based on the stories told by 10 adolescents (5 male, 5 female), this analysis provides an initial representation of how the broad projects of acculturation and collective identity, as well as changes in parent-adolescent relationships, are brought directly into parent-adolescent day-to-day interaction in the form of small stories. These small stories present teens as performing in their day-to-day lives, with friends and strangers, and in the face of challenges and strange or familiar circumstances. The stories provide a context in which parent-adolescent interactional voices are prominent, and wherein understanding of unusual events, co-construction of self and family identities, broader social influences, and autonomy/connection dialectics emerge.