Narrating lives across 16 years: Developmental trajectories of coherence and relations to well-being in a lifespan sample.

Abstract

The ability to narrate a life coherently develops first in adolescence, but little is known about its course across adulthood and into old age. Also, the potential association of life narrative coherence with well-being has never been studied. Our aim was to investigate lifespan development of coherence and associations with well-being using data from the longitudinal MainLife study. A total of 172 urban Germans (8-80 years; 87 females) narrated their lives up to six times across 16 years (N = 803 brief entire life narratives). Most were highly educated, and the proportion of a migration background was typical for the local population. Life narratives were rated for three types of global coherence (temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic) and coded for two types of autobiographical arguments (stability maintaining and change engendering). Multilevel models were used to investigate their lifespan development and relations to well-being. While most life narrative measures increased up to emerging adulthood and then remained stable, thematic coherence continued to increase into middle adulthood. Only change-engendering autobiographical arguments slowly decreased from midlife onward. Unexpectedly, neither autobiographical arguments nor global coherence correlated significantly with well-being. Data exploration suggested an association between thematic coherence and self-continuity. We conclude that life narrative coherence may only be related to well-being if samples include cases with more extreme noncoherence (e,g., clinical disorders). Our findings add to understanding the development of the life story across the lifespan, especially in older age, and suggest studying relations of coherence, self-continuity, and well-being specifically in life crises and in clinical samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).