Measuring narrative identity: rater coding versus questionnaire-based approaches

ABSTRACT

Narrative identity – how individuals narrate their lived and remembered past – is usually assessed via independent rater coding, but new methods relying on self-report have been introduced. To test the assumption that different methods assess aspects of the same underlying construct, studies measuring similar components of narrative identity with different methods are needed. However, such studies are surprisingly rare. To begin to fill this gap, the present study compared the narrative variables, temporal coherence, causal coherence, and thematic coherence, measured via rater coding of participants’ self-generated narratives of the remembered past and via subscales of the self-report measure Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ). The results showed that the ANIQ subscales did not correlate significantly with their corresponding rater-coded dimension, and that the ANIQ subscales were generally unrelated to the other rater-coded dimensions. Furthermore, an exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that the ANIQ subscales loaded together on a factor that did not include any rater-coded variables. The findings suggest that the narrative variables share little empirical overlap when assessed via the ANIQ and rater coding of self-generated narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative identity
• self-report
• rater coding
• autobiographical memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

DB acquired funding and conceived the original idea, with contributions from DCR and RHH. DB, TBG and NPN designed the study. TBG and NPN collected the data. TBG and DCR analysed the data. TBG, DCR, RHH and DB interpreted the data. TBG wrote the first draft for the manuscript. All authors took part in editing and reviewing the first draft and approved the final version.

Data availability statement

The data has not been made available on a permanent third-party archive given the nature of the data (i.e., participants’ life stories) and General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). However, access to the data (in anonymized form) will be granted from the corresponding author upon request, but may require the completion of a formal data sharing agreement, in compliance with GDPR and Aarhus University rules.

Notes

1 Only full scales, that is, not subscales.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund, Denmark [9037-00015B]. The funding source had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.