title: Women narrate later life remarriage: Negotiating the cultural to create the personal.
abstract: Narrative provides a window to experience in a way that is different from traditional research methods. In this study, narrative affords both a holistic vantage point on later life relationships, and at the same time, a "view from the inside"-older women's own accounts of single life, relationship development, and remarriage. The narratives were obtained in interviews with eight recently remarried women between the ages of sixty-five and eighty. A two-stage analysis addresses, first, the narrative content-the phenomenology of remarriage for these older women. The second stage focuses on process, analyzing how cultural-level narratives are drawn upon in the creation of the women's personal stories. Based upon these analyses, we discuss the ways that a narrative approach can inform our understanding of later life relationships, and we comment on the potential of narratives such as these to rewrite a script for older women's relationships.
authors.affiliation: Bowling Green State University, Department of Human Services, 223 Health Center, Bowling Green, OH 43403, United States.
authors.forename: Wendy K
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Watson
authors.affiliation: Texas Tech University, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, P.O. Box 41230, Lubbock, TX 79409-1230, United States.
authors.forename: Nancy J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Bell
authors.affiliation: Bowling Green State University, Department of Human Services, 223 Health Center, Bowling Green, OH 43403, United States.
authors.forename: Charlie
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stelle
keywords: Counter narrative; Identity; Master narrative; Narrative processes; Older women; Relationships; Remarriage