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Narrative Approaches with Older Adults

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Geropsychology

Synonyms

Account; Story; Tale; Chronicle; History; Description; Record; Portrayal; Sketch; Portrait; Statement; Report; Rehearsal; Recital; Rendering

Definition

Narrative = a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.

People are storytellers. From fireplaces to crowded cinemas, humans are immersed in the telling, sharing, and receiving of stories. Stories are exchanged to entertain, to express values, to form social connections, to make sense of experiences, and to teach. People understand their current experiences, anticipate the future, and reflect on the past, through stories (McAdams and McLean 2013). As social beings, individuals construct their sense of who they are – their identity – through the telling of stories. The telling of stories, or the narrative, offers a reconstruction of memories of past events and expectations of the future, in such a way that the story no longer simply is a disjointed and factual account of one’s experiences, but rather a simplified...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology H99, PO Box 218, Hawthorn, VIC, 3122, Australia

    Sunil S. Bhar

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  1. Sunil S. Bhar
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Correspondence to Sunil S. Bhar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Nancy A. Pachana

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Bhar, S. (2016). Narrative Approaches with Older Adults. In: Pachana, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geropsychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_95-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_95-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-287-080-3

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