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Patterns of Family Narrative Co-construction in Relation to Adolescent Identity and Well-Being

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Narrative Development in Adolescence

Abstract

In this excerpt, a family with a 12-year-old adolescent co-narrates a shared sad experience, the death of the adolescent’s great-grandfather. As this example points to, family narratives are a window into how families construct a shared sense of history, understand and validate each others’ emotions and create a sense of who they are as a family, and as individuals, in the present.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in this chapter was supported by the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life funded through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and was written in part as a contribution to an interdisciplinary project on The Pursuit of Happiness established by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. We thank Mary Ukuku, Kelly McWilliams, and Amber Lazarus for help on all phases of this project.

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Fivush, R., Bohanek, J.G., Marin, K. (2010). Patterns of Family Narrative Co-construction in Relation to Adolescent Identity and Well-Being. In: McLean, K., Pasupathi, M. (eds) Narrative Development in Adolescence. Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89825-4_3

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