Narrative Identity in Context: How Adults in Japan, Denmark, Israel, and the United States Narrate Difficult Life Events

Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). While narrative identity has been found to be associated with a range of psychological and social phenomena (e.g., Adler et al., 2015; McAdams & Guo, 2015), cross-national variation in narrative identity has been only minimally examined. For the purposes of the current inquiry, 438 adults from the United States (N = 102), Japan (N = 122), Israel (N = 103), and Denmark (N = 111) wrote narratives on adversity (low point and life challenge) and completed self-report measures on psychological well-being. Part 1 examined the narrative topics discussed, the frequency of narrative indices (redemption, contamination, agency, communion, meaning-making), and their relationship to well-being across the four countries, finding the most cultural difference in levels of redemption and meaning-making and the kinds of events narrated. Part 2 involved a qualitative, thematic analysis of the Japanese, Danish, and Israeli narratives to derive a set of narrative indices characterizing each country. Several emerged in the Japanese narratives (acceptance, attribution of blame, unresolved), the Danish narratives (balanced affect, communal growth, normality), and Israeli narratives (collective responsibility). Taken together, our findings regarding narratives of adversity support the idea that narrative identity cannot be fully captured without an understanding of culture but needs to instead be studied in tandem with the cultural context in which stories reside.