Adolescents' Agency and Communion in Life Storytelling With Mothers: Addressing Descriptive and Inferential Questions

Life storytelling is important for making sense of lived experiences and sharing insights with loved ones. Life storytelling reflects development, personality, and cultural upbringing. There remains room to consider how young adolescents' life storytelling is relevant to development and adjustment. We were interested in adolescents' agency and communion as they shared life stories alongside their mothers. We tested descriptive questions about the ways agency and communion were expressed across multiple life stories. We also asked inferential questions about the relations between adolescent agency, communion, and psychological adjustment.

We recruited 30 mother-adolescent dyads from Missouri, USA (mean mother age = 43.0 years; mean adolescent age = 12.8 years; 53.3% boys) to complete a videorecorded life storytelling task and complete additional surveys about adolescent and mother adjustment. We rated life stories for expressions of agency (e.g., messages about assertiveness and self-determination) and communion (e.g., mentions of caring for and supporting close others).

Adolescent agency was lower during stories about upsetting life events. On average, adolescents expressed lower agency and communion than mothers. Daughters expressed more communion than sons, reflecting gender norms. Mean adolescent communion was positively related with adolescent adjustment, whereas discrepancies between adolescent and mother communion were negatively related with adjustment.

Findings add clarity and expand insights on forms of life storytelling among adolescents and in the context of family storytelling. Findings also underscore the value of studying adolescent storytelling to further understand development and adjustment.