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Chapter 2 - Getting a Life

A Historical Analysis

from Part I - How Research on Autobiographical Memory Contrasts with and Integrates the Life Story Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2025

By
Susan Bluck  and
Mary Kate Koch
Edited by
Christin Camia  and
Annette Bohn
Christin Camia
Affiliation:
Zayed University Abu Dhabi
Annette Bohn
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
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Summary

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

Keywords

Philosophy of sciencehistorydevelopmenttopic modelingadolescence

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Type
Chapter
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Autobiographical Memory and the Life Story
New Perspectives on Narrative Identity
 , pp. 9 - 33
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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