ABSTRACT
Life stories can be traced back to narratives of people with a learning disability on leaving long-stay institutions in the latter half of the 20th century. Initially, life stories tended to be sequential accounts of people’s lives within a particular social or historical content. More recently, life stories have been expanded to include elements such as the authors’ hopes and aspirations for the future. Evidence does point to the fact that completing a life story can promote personal growth within these individuals (Hussain and Raczka 1997;Walmsley 1995). Life stories can give people with a learning disability the opportunity to tell their own version of their life, perhaps for the first time.
