Date of Award

12-24-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Ed de St. Aubin

Second Advisor

Alyson Gerdes

Third Advisor

Stephen Saunders

Fourth Advisor

Staci Young

Abstract

There is a dearth in research regarding the narrative identities of Black women. Narrative identity is an individual’s internal story that evolves and transforms as one encounters new experiences and adopts new viewpoints. It is a person’s reconstructed past and imagined future, providing one’s life a degree of coherence and meaning. The present study is part of a larger project (N=79) that employed the Modified Life Story Interview; a semi-structured way for collecting one’s self-defining life story. Participants from the larger project also completed measures of psychosocial well-being. For the present strength-based study, only those participants with the highest psychosocial well-being scores (N=10) were included. Narrative Analysis was used to identify themes for each of the ten Modified Life Story Interview responses. There were 3 common themes that emerged from these 10 narratives: Faith, Helping, and Blinders. Faith emerged in various ways from each of the 10 participant narratives. Most commonly, faith emerged in the form of guidance (N=6) and strength (N=5). Helping also emerged from each of the 10 participant narratives, the most common ways being helping one’s own child(ren) (N=7), in general (N=7) and through one’s work (N=6). The final common theme, Blinders, emerged from 9 of the 10 narratives. Blinders help one block out obstacles, difficulties, and/or systemic biases that have potential to impede, slow, or diminish one’s cognitive resources that are required to progress towards one’s aspirations. Dissonance, understood as a tension, clash, or lack of harmony in one’s responses, was a pattern of theme present for the top three psychosocially thriving individuals in this study. When examined further, each dissonant topic reflected the tensions between societal dominant narratives and the individual’s sense of self. This may indicate that the measures used to determine psychosocial well-being may inadvertently attribute higher scores to those more closely aligned with the dominant narrative. Thus, further examination of psychosocial well-being in Black women is fertile ground for future scholarship. These common themes could be used in the psychotherapeutic process and as a foundation to strength-based social service programming that serves Black Women, such as peer support groups.

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