Episodic Analysis of Novels

Using personal and fictional documents to assess psychosocial development: A case study of Vera Brittain's generativity.

“…Ideally, in future studies, we would want to choose an author who wrote many novels over a long period. The work of Sears and his colleagues (Sears, 1976; Sears & Lapidus, 1973; Sears et al, 1978; Weissbourd & Sears, 1982) continues to serve as a model of what can be done with such a research design. Thus far, personality researchers have inadequately capitalized on the wealth of archival materials available in the fictional writings and personal documents of historical figures, both for generating research ideas and for testing psychological theories.…”

“…A precedent has also been set for the use of formal content analysis of a writer's fiction as a source of data about his or her personality. Sears and his colleagues (Sears, 1976; Sears & Lapidus, 1973; Sears, Lapidus, & Cozzens, 1978; Weissbourd & Sears, 1982) applied such techniques in their studies of Mark Twain's letters and novels. Sears et al (1978) wrote that although even the most transient arousals can influence the themes of brief spontaneous fantasies, … a novel's structured and goal-directed type of fantasy is less susceptible to minor perturbations; primarily its content represents powerful arousals of strong dispositions.…”

Mothers construct fathers: Destabilized patriarchy in La Leche League

“…We analyzed League publications on fatherhood utilizing an episodic or vignette method, content coding the text by brief, thematic meaning units usually about one paragraph in length (Sears and Lapidus, 1973). This method was well suited to League publications as many are written from strings of brief personal testimonies.…”

The creative spectrum of authors of fantasy1

“…Previous work has described the development of a questionnaire for the "personality assessment of books" (Helson, 1970). As this phrase implies, the method employs the trained impressions of rater-analysts rather than the rigorously defined word-counts or episodes which have been used to advantage by other researchers in the psychology of literature (Martindale, 1975;Sears & Lapidus, 1973). The books having been assessed, a second stage in the study consists of obtaining information from authors about their personalities and ways of working.…”