Narrating Your Struggle Story In Your Own Words Can Benefit You Immensely

Psychologist Laura Blackie explains why questionnaires might pale in comparison to narrative methods when recording adversarial growth.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | June 16, 2023

A new study published in the Journal of Research of Personality highlights why it may be so valuable to tell your story of going through adversity in your own words.

I recently spoke to Psychologist Laura Blackie of the University of Nottingham to understand why narrative methods produce better breakthroughs as compared to questionnaires when it comes to charting one's "adversarial growth," or the positive changes individuals may report in their identity, relationships, and worldviews after facing adversity.

Here is a summary of our conversation.

Why were questionnaires critiqued negatively as measures for adversarial growth? What prompted you to pit narrative methods against them?

Questionnaires assessing adversarial growth have been critiqued by researchers for several reasons. Some of the earlier questionnaires asked people to report on how much they have changed positively in different life domains (e.g., appreciation of life) after the adverse event has happened.

This requires people to engage in a mentally taxing process of comparing their past and current selves, and research has shown that people are not very good at doing this process accurately.

Other researchers, such as Adriel Boals, have raised concerns about the phrasing of the questions. Typically, questions are all positively worded (e.g., "I feel much more appreciative of life now") and people rate how much this change is true for them since the adverse event occurred.

This can bias people to report more adversarial growth than they otherwise would if the questionnaires were more neutral in their wording; this is what Boals and colleagues have found in their research. They have developed questionnaires that are more neutrally-worded and allow people to report positive change, no change at all, and negative change, and found these to be less biased assessments to measure adversarial growth.

However, this questionnaire still asks about changes directly, despite giving people the opportunity to report no changes have happened in their lives.

In our study, we wanted to give people the opportunity to report their experiences in their own words, and with a measure that did not explicitly ask them to consider and weigh up whether or not the event had changed them either positively or negatively. We reasoned that this would further reduce the demand people may feel to report adversarial growth to researchers simply because of the assessment tool researchers were using to measure it.

Is there something specific narrative methods are able to capture about adversarial growth that other methods might miss out on?

There are three advantages to measuring adversarial growth with narratives compared to questionnaires:

1. Narratives do not constrain reports of adversarial growth to only the domains that the questionnaire asks about.
2. Narratives prioritize people's own accounts of their experiences. They allow people to share what is most meaningful and impactful from their own perspectives. Related to point one, this will lead to greater diversity in what is reported as expressions of adversarial growth and enhance researchers' understanding of this construct.

3. Narratives collect data that would normally require multiple questionnaires to assess. In a narrative, a person can tell you how they have changed - capturing expressions of adversarial growth - and the process of how this change happened. Narratives give insight into not only what has changed, but how and why it changed for that person.

Questionnaires of adversarial growth only measure the degree to which that change happened. Without further questionnaires included in the study, researchers cannot assess the thought processes that lead the person to identify a change or the significance it has in their lives.

What do you think was the most critical finding of your study?

We found some novel expressions of adversarial growth when we analyzed people's narratives, which were either not measured by, or not measured very comprehensively in questionnaires of adversarial growth.

For example, we found that people were talking about adversarial growth as a newfound prioritization of their health and well-being.

This involved many different things, including challenging one's character flaws, learning to value and appreciate oneself, and disengaging from activities or people that came at too high a cost to one's health or emotional well-being.

Although the narrative accounts of adversarial growth did not associate with well-being (as assessed with questionnaires) any more strongly compared to a newer (less biased) questionnaire of adversarial growth, our findings did demonstrate that narratives can undercover novel expressions of adversarial growth, which might be very useful to researchers in contexts where traditional accounts of adversarial growth should not be presumed to be present.

Does your research have any practical takeaways for someone struggling to see the silver lining while going through a difficult phase of their life?

We found that 52-64% of people across our college students and online community samples did not report experiencing any form of adversarial growth at all. The percentages of people not reporting adversarial growth were similar when we assessed it with personal narratives or with a questionnaire that was designed to reduce bias.

These percentages are meaningful because they suggest that adversarial growth is not necessarily the common or expected outcome to occur after adversity. People should not feel pressure or obligation to be transformed by, or better versions of themselves, after adverse and difficult experiences in their lives.

Recovery from adversity is a diverse experience and does not always have to involve expressions of adversarial growth.