ABSTRACT
N arratives are everyday forms of communication. At the same time, they are a particular mode of knowing (Bruner, 1986) and the organizing principle of our knowledge about our life history and about the history of our groups. Following Antonovsky (1987), Erikson (1959), László (2003, 2008, 2011), Lszló and Ehmann (Chapter 12, this volume), Liu and László (2007), and McAdams (1985) have argued that individual life narratives and group narratives are the building blocks of personal and group identity, respectively. By their power to construct reality (Bruner, 1986), narratives compose the significant life events in a manner to support the construction of an adaptive identity. Narratives facilitate historical continuity on both individual and group levels and also have a function in coping with the effects of threatening events (see Chapter 12, this volume). They do not merely account for past events but construct identity in a sense that they define who we are, where are we from, how we deal with conflicts, and what are our relations to significant others. Narratives have several structural-compositional features each having correlates with the identity organization and identity state of the narrator. To map these structural-compositional features, a content analytic program NarrCat has been developed that measures configurations or patterns of words instead of word frequency. NarrCat, by using advanced grammar that assigns these contents to the narrator or to each character, places psychological contents (e.g., emotions, evaluations, cognitions, or agency) into identity relevant interpersonal and inter-group context (see László, 2008; Chapter 12, this volume).
