Personal, Master, and Alternative Narratives: An Integrative Framework for Understanding Identity Development in Context

By Kate C. McLean, M. Syed. Human Development, 2016

546 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we propose a model for examining personal identity development that moves attention from a relatively exclusive examination of the individual to an examination of the intersection between self and society. We propose that a master narrative model of identity development allows researchers to: (a) align the study of culture and individual on the same metric of narrative, (b) investigate the processes of negotiating personal and cultural narratives, the latter of which are embedded within the structures of society, and (c) investigate the internalization of those structures in personal identities. In laying out this model we define a narrative approach to identity development, five principles for defining master narratives (ubiquity, utility, invisibility, rigidity, and their compulsory nature), three types of master narratives (life course, structural, and episodic), and case examples of each type. This model brings attention to the interaction between self and society, as well as to the constraints on individual agency to construct a personal identity. We conclude by raising questions that emerge out of this framework that we hope will inspire future work on the relationship between self and society in the study of identity development.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3067cb6f1105a686eb02b38bfd11606a00aa5aa8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Hiromitsu Morita
2. Isabela Granic
3. H. Scholten
4. Eranda Jayawickreme

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Hiromitsu Morita
2. Isabela Granic
3. Beth T. Bell
4. H. Scholten
5. Eranda Jayawickreme

Citations in the corpus

• Beyond Screen Time: Identity Development in the Digital Age (2020, background): “For individuals whose personal values and needs do not fit master narratives well, the optimal course of action may be to resist master narratives and adopt or co-construct alternative narratives (McLean & Syed, 2015).”
• “Let Me Do What I Please With It . . . Don’t Decide My Identity For Me”: LGBTQ+ Youth Experiences of Social Media in Narrative Identity Development (2020, background): “These stories are constructed from preexisting sociocultural templates or master narratives (Cohler & Hammack, 2007; Hammack et al., 2009; McLean & Syed, 2015) that individuals rely on to tell big or small tales of a human agent embedded in a social world (Bamberg, 2006).”
• Fixing the Growth Illusion: New Directions for Research in Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth (2019, background): “Such reports may also be influenced by expectation biases stemming from dominant cultural scripts and salient “master narratives” (McLean & Syed, 2015).”