In 1972, Ruthellen Josselson was a young psychologist fascinated by the riddle of how a woman creates an identity and chooses one path over another in life--particularly in the face of the nascent feminist movement, which challenged as never before the traditional role models of earlier generations. Selecting at random thirty young women in their last year of college, Josselson undertook a ground-breaking study that would follow these women's personal odysseys over the next twenty-two years, from graduation to midlife. What she learned about the ways women reinvent themselves in an...

Best Friends provides the missing link to understanding and recognizing the impact of some of the most important relationships in girls' and women's lives.
Every woman remembers the sting of betrayal of a girlfriend, and every parent of a daughter has seen her come home from school in tears because a girl she thought was her best friend suddenly and inexplicably became her enemy. While boys hash out differences with fists and kicks, girls' societies are marked by secrets and whispers and shifting affection. The lessons learned as an adolescent girl are often carried into adulthood,...

Integrating psychological theories with empirical evidence, the author of this volume draws fundamental conclusions about the nature and types of relationships, and develops eight dimensions of relatedness ranging from the very casual to the deeply intimate.

First-hand accounts of the ideological, moral, emotional and practical complexities that surround the doing of narrative research are offered in this volume.

Exploring such issues as: whether work that risks exposing sensitive aspects of peoples' lives can ever be fully ethical; what effect being written about has on people; the line between narrative research and psychotherapy; and the after-effects of this research on the researcher, the contributions reveal the struggles and anxieties that narrative researchers face.

The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions.

The sixth volume in this series provides: guides for doing qualitative research; analysis of several autobiographies; hints on how to interpret what it not said in narrative interviews; discussion on how cultural meanings and values are transmitted across generations; and illustrations of the transformational power of stories.

From the premise that knowledge is co-constructed by observer and observed, and both must be clearly visible in research reports, Conversation as Method explores a rich methodology evolving from people coming together to talk, listen and learn from one another.

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just 'are', there are complicated psychological processes, outside of our awareness, that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. Psychoanalytic theory offers a wealth of understanding of how people unconsciously create what they both need and dread. But these processes are not well understood by most therapists. Too often, therapists join their patients in overlooking their own role in creating the relationships in their lives, such that it...

How do we derive concepts from stories and then use these concepts to understand people? What would have to be added to transform story material from the journalistic or literary to the academic and theoretically enriching? Addressing these and other issues such as the interface between life as lived and the social times, distinguished contributors explore this emerging new field in this unique volume.

Beginning with the philosophical framework that underlies the study of narrative, the book covers such questions as: what makes people want to preserve the stories of their past? What...

How does a narrative serve as a way to uncover and construct a person's identity? How do life and life-story influence each other? Addressing these and other issues related to the place of narratives in understanding human lives, this volume focuses on identity and gender.

Chapters explore such issues as: how women construct the lives of other women in biographical work; how individuals conduct their life episodes in patterns similar to the plots of stories; how the women's movement influenced three women's adult lives; and how girls' sense of themselves change as they move into...