Pratt (Wilfred Laurier University) and Fiese (Syracuse University) survey recent psychological research and theory on family stories, which are first-person accounts of personal experiences that have meaning to individuals and the family as a whole. Contributors focus on the act of telling family st.

`Essential reading for student, fledgling and experienced counsellors alike′ - Mark Edwards, Nurturing Potential `Beautifully written and well researched and full of useful structured exercise for therapists and clients, this is a combination of psychology textbook and counselling handbook - theoretical a, yet practical′ - Healthcare Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal Counselling and the Life Course introduces counsellors to the concept of the life course as a multidimensional and multidisciplinary framework for thinking about clients′ lives within and beyond the counselling setting. It aims to give counsellors an understanding of human development, and how it impacts practically upon their work with clients. The book engages with the tension between, on the one hand, recognizing age and life stage as important dimensions of difference, and on the other, avoiding the pitfalls of age stereotyping and ageist discrimination. At the same time, Counselling and the Life Course shows how the concept of the life course can be used as a framework for considering the commonalities between different life stages. This provides a focus for counsellors of how to draw on their existing skills and expertise when working with clients of a different age and life stage to those with whom they generally meet. The impact of both counsellor and client age on the counselling relationship is also considered. The book includes an `Activity Trail′ of structured exercises in order to encourage reflection on the concepts discussed and their relevance to clients, the readers themselves, and their counselling practice.

Stories and storytelling are one of the primary ways that families and family members make sense of both everyday and difficult events, create a sense of individual and group identity, remember, connect generations, and establish guidelines for family behavior. With so many important functions, storytelling is a significant but still understudied communicative process for the family. Family Storytelling focuses on the ways in which stories are told in and about family in order to provide insight into the processes, functions, and consequences of family storytelling. This collection of empirical articles illuminates various ways in which family storytelling affects and reflects the negotiation of individual and relational identity in the family, teaches important family lessons, and helps members make sense of and cope with difficulty. Each of these functions is explored through both scientific and interpretive investigations, thus showcasing the contributions that research on family storytelling from different paradigms make to our understanding of the family. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication.

This sourcebook is an unparalleled resource in the field of family science. It provides a comprehensive overview of both traditional and contemporary theories and methodologies to promote a greater understanding of increasingly complex family realities. It focuses on broad developments in research design and conceptualization, while also offering a historical perspective on developments in family science over time, particularly emerging theories from the past several decades. Each chapter summarizes and evaluates a major theory or methodological approach in the field, delving into its main principles; its debates and challenges; how it has evolved over time; its practical uses in policy, education, or further research; and links to other theories and methodologies. In highlighting recent research of note, chapters emphasize the potential for innovative future applications. Key areas of coverage include: · Risk and resilience, family stress, feminist, critical race, and social exchange theories. · Ambiguous loss, intersectionality, Queer, and family development theory. · Life course framework. · Biosocial theory and biomarker methods. · Symbolic interactionism. · Ethnography. · Mixed methods, participatory action research, and evaluation.

Occupational Therapy and Life Course Development is an invaluable work book for professional practice. It provides a tool to help both students and qualified professionals develop and enhance a framework for their practice that supports all individuals and settings in a holistic and inclusive way. Much of the book is organised as a work book based around a single case study. It includes theory related to life span development and managing change, and also exercises for readers to complete in order to apply the theory to practice. Chapters span such key topics as the client in context; life events; transition and loss; the management of stress; and planful decision making. The book emphasises how issues of life course development are as relevant to health and social care professionals as they are to their clients. A number of exercises invite readers to reflect on their own life course, and there chapters both on becoming and belonging as an occupational therapist, and on developing professional practice.

In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept. Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies’past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide. This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.

Monisha Pasupathi and Kate C. McLean Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going? Narrative Identity in Adolescence How can we help youth move from childhood to adulthood in the most effective and positive way possible? This is a question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers engage with every day. In this book, we explore the potential power of the stories that youth construct as one route for such movement. Our emphasis is on how those stories serve to build a sense of identity for youth and how the kinds of stories youth tell are informed by their broader contexts – from parents and friends to nationalities and history. Identity development, and in part- ular narrative identity development, concerns the ways in which adolescents must integrate their past and present and articulate and anticipate their futures (Erikson, 1968). Viewed in this way, identity development is not only unique to adol- cence (and emergent adulthood), but also intimately linked to childhood and to adulthood. The title for this chapter, borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates story, highlights the precarious position of adolescence in relation to the construction of identity. In this story, the protagonist, poised between childhood and adulthood, navigates a series of encounters with relatively little awareness of either her childhood past or her potential adult futures. Her choices are risky and her future, at the end, looks dark.

Origins We call this book on theoretical orientations and methodological strategies in family studies a sourcebook because it details the social and personal roots (i.e., sources) from which these orientations and strategies flow. Thus, an appropriate way to preface this book is to talk first of its roots, its beginnings. In the mid 1980s there emerged in some quarters the sense that it was time for family studies to take stock of itself. A goal was thus set to write a book that, like Janus, would face both backward and forward a book that would give readers both a perspec tive on the past and a map for the future. There were precedents for such a project: The Handbook of Marriage and the Family edited by Harold Christensen and published in 1964; the two Contemporary Theories about theFamily volumes edited by Wesley Burr, Reuben Hill, F. Ivan Nye, and Ira Reiss, published in 1979; and the Handbook of Marriage and the Family edited by Marvin Sussman and Suzanne Steinmetz, then in production.

The Life Story, Domains of Identity, and Personality Development in Emerging Adulthood focuses on individuals' formulations of the unique episodes and events of their lives that give one meaning and a sense of personal identity. This book brings the growing research on narrative study and the life story into focus by drawing from the existing research on personality development during emerging adulthood. In this book, authors Michael W. Pratt and M. Kyle Matsuba present a series of chapters exploring how one's life story manifests across the many components of their developing identity, including their religion, morality, vocation, society, and the relationships they have with their parents, peers, and romantic partners. Taking their cue from Erik Erikson's model of adolescent and adult development, the authors show readers exactly how a life story approach can illuminate the distinctive features of an individual's personality and development during this formative phase of life. Organized around a set of life contexts where personality is manifested (i.e. adjustment, personal ideology, close relationships, occupation, and civic life), this book draws on the authors' own longitudinal research on the development of the life story in emerging adulthood. Throughout the book, they incorporate fascinating case studies and historical examples (e.g., Darwin, Pope Francis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Fonda) of individuals' unique development during this period of life in order to better illustrate the application of this approach to understanding the whole person in context.

This volume reflects on the place of narrative interpretation in life course developmental theory. Featuring exciting chapters by the leading figures in narrative psychology, it provides insights on the narrative character in early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age. Read together, the chapters form a comprehensive description of narrative’s origins in childhood conversations and the multiple uses that narrative is used as lives unfold over developmental and historical time. A touchstone text in human development, it is a way for psychologists to rethink their approach to development through the lens of a narrative perspective that is sensitive to interpretation and context in human lives. This is the 145th volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field.