What's in a Story? The Relationship Between Narrative Completeness and Adjustment to Relationship Dissolution

Abstract

The construction of narratives has been shown to assist sufferers of emotional or traumatic events -such as the ending of relationships -in making sense of and coming to terms with the event. Despite this connection, few studies have explored how the completeness of the narratives contributes to positive outcomes. Building on research in both communication and psychology, we conceptualized a complete narrative as one that clearly and extensively (1) segmented the experience episodically/sequentially, (2) represented causes and consequences in the explained events, (3) developed characters relative to the story, (4) evoked and made sense of affect, (5) drew meaning from the events in the narrative, (6) provided a coherent narrative, and (7) attributed responsibility to the characters in the story. We collected and analyzed the break-up stories of 90 participants. We then rated the narratives to see if relationships exist between narrative completeness and adjustment to relationship dissolution as well as to the teller's role in the break-up and his or her current relationship status. In addition to the implementation of a new method for coding and analyzing narrative content, the results indicate that certain elements of completeness are more related to adjustment than are others.

Quality Interactions and Family Storytelling

“…This latter trend suggests that the pleasantness of the interaction was central to understanding the quality of family interactions. Previous research identified perspective-taking (Koenig Kellas & Manusov, 2003;Koenig Kellas, 2005) and coherence (Trees & Koenig Kellas, 2009) as particularly important predictors of family satisfaction and functioning. Although these findings support these interactional storytelling behaviors' impact on family well-being, the current findings suggest that-in regard to family members' feelings about the interaction-these interactional storytelling behaviors matter less to individual family members' feelings about the interaction than does engagement or the extent to which the family is warm, involved, lively, and tells the story with positive affect.…”

“Looking behind the veil”

“…These case constructs on the nature of narrative are similar to those proposed by Kellas and Manusov ( 2003). For example in the cases, the narrative broke up the value creation processes by explaining sequences in each sub process, by discussing major events in companies and markets, and by explaining how these and corporate actions created cost, income and value consequences.…”

“…Kellas and Manusov ( 2003) in the context of narrative about personal relationships, conceptualise a complete narrative as one that clearly and extensively (1) segmented the experience episodically/sequentially (2) represented causes and consequences in the explained event (3) developed characters relative to the story (4) evoked and made sense of affect (5) drew meaning from events in the narrative (6) provided a coherent narrative, and (7) attributed responsibility to the characters in the story. These were similar to case constructs in this study concerning the nature of narrative for value creation.…”

“…These were similar to case constructs in this study concerning the nature of narrative for value creation. Kellas and Manusov ( 2003) also analysed written stories (about relationship breakdown) for these components, and these were individually rated for their degree of representation and completeness along a five point Likert-type scale (p295). Scores for each element were added to produce a composite score for each narrative.…”

“…The table also focuses on the perceived information content of each element in the narrative as the key narrative quality to be measured and as the primary meaning drawn from the narrative. It also includes Kellas and Manusov ( 2003) categories where they relate to the case data.…”