How can we empirically explore adolescent identity co-construction? Discursive approach to positioning analysis as a methodological contribution to sociocultural psychology

Abstract

The fundamental assumption of sociocultural psychologists studying narrative identity development is that individual identity is co-constructed, i.e., a product of social relations. Characteristics of this process of co-construction are, nevertheless, empirically underexplored, and this gap is especially prominent in the studies of adolescent identity. The “Big story” approach, dominant in the field, advocates individual interviews and the use of retrospective data in order to examine already established identity positions. Alternatively, psychologists observe participants’ interactions or experimentally manipulate them in order to quantify the aspects of the storyteller’s self-narrative and to correlate them to the listener’s reactions. What is missing are methodological tools that would enable researchers to examine qualitative aspects of the process of adolescent identity co-construction during interaction. In the last 20 years, the “Small story” approach has emerged within narrative psychology and it focuses on the microgenetic processes of identity development. These processes refer to the progressive sedimentation of interactive sense-making through negotiation in which various identity positions get tried out, resisted, or adopted. This paper builds on methodological resources advanced by the “Small story” approach and further develops them, with the aim to offer a methodological framework for analyzing identity co-construction. The framework entails three levels of interaction analysis, each posing different analytical questions. The first level utilizes resources of conversation analysis and focuses on the formal aspects of interaction in order to answer how the participants achieve shared understanding and demonstrate affiliation. The second level pertains to discourse analysis of strategies, demonstrating how participants negotiate and which devices they use to impose their own morally defensible account. The third level uses positioning analysis (supplemented by the ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis), aimed at determining which identity positions are co-construed and made available by the form of interaction and strategies employed. The practical application of this framework will be demonstrated to show the usefulness of presented methodological tools for sociocultural studies of identity exploration in adolescence, especially when these “Small story” resources are combined with the “Big story” methodology.