title: Life story development in childhood: the development of life story abilities and the acquisition of cultural life scripts from late middle childhood to adolescence.
abstract: The authors investigated the relationship between the acquisition of cultural life scripts and the degree of coherence in children's and adolescents' life stories. Three groups of Danish school children aged 9 to 15 years participated. In 3 sessions, they wrote down a recently experienced single autobiographical event, their life story, and their cultural life script. Single-event and life stories were scored for coherence; life scripts were scored for normativity compared to an adult norm. Single-event stories and life stories were longer and more coherent in the older participants. Younger participants wrote significantly more coherent single-event stories than life stories. When controlling for age, single-event story coherence and global life story coherence did not correlate significantly, suggesting different developmental pathways. Life script normativity increased steadily across childhood and adolescence. Further, a significant relationship between the normativity of life scripts and the coherence of life stories, but not the coherence of single-event stories, was found.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Arhus, Denmark. anetboh@psy.au.dk
authors.forename: Annette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bohn
authors.forename: Dorthe
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Berntsen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D001076:Aptitude; D002648:Child; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D033262:Narration; D012945:Social Values; D014956:Writing