Stories about transition to higher education: Empirical narrative organization of freshman-year students from south Europe

Abstract

This study focuses on the transition to higher education experienced by Portuguese freshman-year students, displaced and nondisplaced from their parents homes, residents on a peripheral island located in the south of Europe called Madeira island. To understand better how students perceive this transition, we collected their narratives and analyzed them with three instruments of analysis of narratives: Structure, Process and Content narrative manuals. The results were an indicator of the narrative enrichment of the students in this transition period. The findings indicate that there is no significant differences between the two groups of students in terms of narrative elaboration. The two groups scored low on narrative richness: in terms of content, structure and narrative process. This might be explained by the changes and reorganizations that the transition to higher education system implies, causing stress and confusion on students, that evolve into an impoverishment of their narratives about that transition life task.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• narratives
• students
• transition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.