Narrative identity’s nomological network: Expanding and organizing assessment of the storied self

Abstract

The life story, or narrative identity, is a psychosocial construction that brings together and integrates the self and experience within a broad story-based framework. Personality psychologists typically capture aspects of this inner story by prompting participants for descriptions of life chapters and/or specific and self-definitional autobiographical key scenes (e.g., high points, low points, turning points). Features of participants’ responses are then quantified for their thematic and/or structural content. There exists a number of additional and complementary assessment techniques that could buttress study of, and theory pertaining to, narrative identity. Here, I work to identify these assessments, which include self-reports, informant reports, and behavioral observations, and organize them within narrative identity’s nomological network. This work concludes with a number of suggestions for the ways in which traditional assessments may be better attuned to capture narrative identity’s integrative nature.The field of narrative identity is at a unique an enviable crossroads. We have now amassed a sizable literature demonstrating that our typical approach for assessing features of participants’ storied identities (in which we prompt for oral or written descriptions of key scenes and then quantify the resulting text for certain thematic and structural features) is valid. One path forward consists of continuing with this more-or-less standard assessment paradigm. A second path consists of expanding our assessments, beyond the analysis of text, to capture narrative identity’s broader nomological network. This theoretical review explores the second of these paths. As such, it holds relevance to narrative identity researchers, those who wish to better incorporate the study of narrative identity in their work, and personality psychologists interested in measurement and assessment. The assessment of narrative identity is reviewed. Suggestions are made for the expansion of assessment within the narrative identity literature. These suggestions are organized on the basis of data category. These suggestions also touch on ways to target narrative identity’s integrative nature.