Building narrative identity in a context of audience failures: Stories of resistance among young adults formerly in foster care

Background

Child maltreatment survivors with extensive foster care involvement are tasked with building identities that allow them to make sense of difficult pasts in ways that help them build adult lives.

Objective

To use narrative identity theory to explore identities and identity-building challenges of young adults formerly in foster care.

Participants and setting

Twelve young adults who aged out of the foster care system in Illinois.

Methods

Participants were interviewed three times with semi-structured protocols that focused on their life stories and the meanings derived from them. Data were analyzed using an adapted grounded theory approach.

Results

Many participants forged resistance identities around a fierce sense of agency, motivated to not be another foster care statistic or like their parents. Challenges to identity construction included the scarcity of trusted audiences willing to listen fully to their life stories, missing information about key events, and the senselessness of maltreatment experiences. College and work opportunities provided normative contexts and new audiences where identities shifted, but often at the cost of not revealing their histories, limiting social relations. Temporal coherence was evident in most life stories. Causal and global coherence was more difficult to achieve.

Conclusions

Intervention efforts designed to provide willing and helpful audiences for narrative formation work may help young people from foster care find meaning in their pasts that help them forge identities that promote satisfying and successful adult lives. Narrative identity theory may benefit from greater engagement with theories of oppression and marginalization.