Abstract
This article advances a methodological shift in narrative identity research by addressing the field’s protagonist bias – the tendency to rely on first-person autobiographical accounts as the primary evidence for identifying cultural master narratives. We integrate Erikson’s psychosocial identity framework, Vygotsky’s “tool and result” methodological insight, and sociolinguistic approaches to narrative to develop a three-stage analytic logic: (1) identifying small-n narratives through scenes conveyed in discourse; (2) grouping these into Big-N narratives that cohere thematically across scenes (Tannen, 2007, 2008); and (3) assessing candidate master narratives using McLean and Syed’s (2016) five criteria. We demonstrate this approach through a case example from an interview-based study on rural youth outmigration showing evidence of a “boomerang” master narrative reflecting a regionally specific, normative trajectory marked by departure and return across stages of early adulthood. Our approach broadens narrative sampling beyond first-person accounts, avoids assumptions about parallelism between personal and cultural narratives, and offers a method for tracing how master narratives circulate, gain normative force, and shape identity beyond protagonist storytelling in autobiographical interviews.
Department
Education; Recreation Management and Policy; New Hampshire Youth Retention Initiative
Publication Date
4-2026
Journal Title
Qualitative Research in Psychology
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://dx.doi.org/http://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2026.2666781
Document Type
Article
Link to Full Text URL
http://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2026.2666781
Recommended Citation
Coppens, A. D., Seaman, J., & Hartman, C. L. (accepted). Beyond a protagonist bias in narrative identity research: Methods for identifying master narratives in interview data. Qualitative Research in Psychology. http://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2026.2666781
Comments
This is a preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Qualitative Research in Psychology in 2026, the Version of Record is available online: https://dx.doi.org/http://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2026.2666781