Alchemists' Visions: Cultural Norms in Eliciting and Analyzing Life History Narratives

Comparative study within a group of systematically elicited life narratives revealed key variations in narrative sequencing and conceptual templates. These dimensions are associated with significant differences in subjective meaning, frames for interpreting experience, and personal adjustment. This paper describes the study methods and results, and proposes that life histories be studied in the context of other similarly collected narratives, instead of one at a time. It outlines limitations of current methods of eliciting, analyzing, and writing up texts which may systematically obscure important dimensions of subjectivity and of cultural norms.