Consistency and stability of narrative coherence: An examination of personal narrative as a domain of adult personality

Objective: Narrative theories of personality assume that individual differences in coherence reflect consistent and stable differences in narrative style rather than situational and event-specific differences (e.g., McAdams & McLean, 2013). However, this assumption has received only modest empirical attention. Therefore, we present two studies testing the theoretical assumption of a consistent and stable coherent narrative style.

Method: Study 1 focused on the two most traumatic and most positive life events of 224 undergraduates. These event-specific narratives were coded for three coherence dimensions: theme, context, and chronology (NaCCs; Reese et al., 2011). Study 2 focused on two life narratives told 4 years apart by 98 adults, which were coded for thematic, causal, and temporal coherence (Köber, Schmiedek, & Habermas, 2015).

Results: Confirmatory factor analysis in both studies revealed that individual differences in the coherence ratings were best explained by a model including both narrative style and event-/narration-specific latent variables.

Conclusions: The ways in which we tell autobiographical narratives reflect a stable feature of individual differences. Further, they suggest that this stable element of personality is necessary, but not sufficient, in accounting for specific event and life narrative coherence.