The longitudinal study of brief life narratives: Mainlife Study (2002-2019). Study Report

Abstract

The MainLife Study is a cohort-sequential study of brief (15-20 minutes) life narratives of a total of 172 participants, covering ages 8 to 80. The four younger cohorts were 8, 12, 16, and 20 years old in 2003, and the two older cohorts, beginning in 2007, were initially on average 40 and 65 years old. Data collection took place every 4 years (2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019). In 2003, two life narratives were collected two weeks apart. Life narratives of 123 participants from all cohorts ar deposited at Qualiservice, and complementary questionnaire data by 171 participants are deposited at GESIS; ratings/codings of life narratives will be uploaded at GESIS probably in 2025. The MainLifeStudy offers a unique collection of life narratives across 16 years and across almost the entire lifespan, and link them to a variety of standardized psychological tests. The original goal had been to demonstrate that only in adolescence people learn how to narrative entire lives. Later we became interested in the relative stability of life narratives and their determinants as well as in questions of relations to well-being, symptom-load, mastering of life events, and to trait-personality. The unique combination of life narratives with quantitative data in an age-diversified sample of over a hundred participants is open to be used by researchers from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, narrative studies and other social sciences and humanities. Potential uses regard linguistic aspects of autobiographical narrating, change of autobiographical self-interpretations across the life, autobiographical remembering, subjective life course. Due to privacy issues, access to the pseudonymized life narratives is highly restricted.