Volume 14, numéro 2, 2025 Special Issue: Narratives from a Polish Perspective

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This article is part of narrative research that explores how storytelling helps individuals understand the world and how they interpret the stories they share. The study, conducted by the authors between April and May 2022, involved sixteen women who were war refugees from Ukraine, aged between 29 and 52. The participants came from various regions of Ukraine, and all had children, with the oldest being 15 and the youngest 3. Most of the women were married, some had partners, and one was a widow. They left their homeland at different times, between March 3 and 23, 2022, and by the time of the study, they had been in Poland for a period ranging from four weeks to three months. Given the length of the article, the authors chose to focus on two specific contexts of the research: trauma and emancipation. The analysis and interpretation of the interviews include excerpts from the participants' statements. These statements are transcribed, treated as research data, and interpreted through narrative analysis to uncover meanings related to the socio-cultural context. The research method used positions the participants as creators of narratives, which allows them to express themselves as experts in their own experiences.

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Generativity can be understood as a conglomerate of psychosocial traits focused on concern for ensuring a good future for future generations. In a qualitative study based on an inductive analysis of 36 letters written by people aged 60-93, ways of expressing generativity through the transmission of experience, wisdom and concern for a good life to younger generations were identified. The analysis focuses on the intergenerational transmission of reflections and values regarding the “good life” to younger generations. Its goal is to sensitize them to issues relevant from the perspective of those at the end of their lives. The results of the study underscore that letters are a form of expression of generativity by older people. At the forefront of the message is the need to share wisdom and values that seniors consider essential to “living well” in the context of their own experience. The letters are dominated by reflections on the meaning of life, working on one's self and engagement in one's life, seeking joy in life, the importance of relationships with others, and the need to cultivate well-being and attentiveness to daily experiences.

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The subject of the article is narrative, treated as a means of researching, describing, and understanding the social world. Narrative is understood here as both methodological orientation (narrative research) and identity (narrative identity, i.e., a sustained story about the "I"), as well as the outcome of the research, i.e., understanding based on the narratives listened to. The article explores whether school is, or perhaps can be, a space of recognition, answering this question based on the narratives of parents of early childhood education students and striking Polish teachers.

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Objective: The study aimed at data-based exploration of the subtle indicators of older persons’ attitude towards change, investigated in the light of decision-making process that initiates various self-creative activities.

Background: Traditionally, older adults are perceived as resistant to change. Their resistance can be destructive but it can also be constructive if it results from reflections over the consequences of changes and their biographical meaning. In the context of self-creation and agency, attitude towards change is not static – it is subject to modifications due to one’s acts of transgression and self-reflection.

Method: The study was constructivist qualitative research conducted by means of intensive interviewing. This method enabled exploration of narrative reconstructions of the respondents’ biographies and identification of the processes of giving meaning to their own experiences and identity formation. The study was conducted among five older adults aged 74-84 years.

Results: The analysis of the material led to some conclusions regarding two concepts that emerged from the data obtained: older persons’ attitude towards change and self-creative decision making in old age. Thanks to the data obtained, more information was obtained about attitudes towards changes in the context of different approaches to one’s own agency.

Conclusion: The study showed that self-creative decision-making mirrors the transgressive or adaptive aspect of one’s attitude towards change, whereas the reflection upon one’s own experiences favors the development of the sense of agency in olde age. A key factor in self-creative decision making is intentionality, that is, conscious formation of identity in line with individual vision of self and the world. The results indicate that the ability to thoughtfully determine one’s attitude towards a change is a determinant of self-creative decisions, whereas lack of reflection leads to passive attitude and existential stagnation..

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This paper presents an original study grounded in narrative and existential approaches to human development. The study aimed to identify strategies individuals used to balance the losses and gains experienced during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, as represented in diaries. A repository of 60 personal documents underwent multifaceted semantic analysis, which examined content, form, and meaning-making levels. This analysis was guided by categories developed in two original Coding Sheets. As a result, two distinct types of diaries were identified: Survival Diaries (S-D), featuring references to pure growth and Growth Diaries (G-D). The G-D set was further divided into two subtypes: Compulsive Growth Diaries (G-D-C) and Texistence Growth Diaries (G-D-T). The primary distinction between authors of S-D and G-D lies in their experience of loss-waiting versus liberation-opening, which depends on the positive or negative evaluation of the pandemic and their openness to new, uncertain events. The more detailed components of this distinction include: (a) self-reflection; (b) narrative competencies; and (c) commitment to personal projects. The differentiation between G-D-C and G-D-T was established based on: (a) private concepts of development (media-mediated versus highly personalised); (b) ergodic persistence in deepened intertextual storying experiences; and (c) existential saturation of textualised experiences.

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The purpose of this article is to show how different understandings of truth-correspondence, consensual, subjective, and fictional, as well as the truth of a particular interest group, affect the treatment and interpretation of autobiographical accounts. At the same time, these accounts are understood here as personal narratives told from the perspective of the narrator's personal experience, presenting events in a specific temporal and causal order. An autobiographical account captures a person's life in terms of a story about himself, but also about those whom the story depicts. The article opens with a discussion of the epistemological status of autobiographical data most often cited in the literature, which amounts to treating narratives as objective events or merely subjective accounts of them. Moving beyond this dichotomous division is presented in the remainder of the article, which discusses the meaning of truth in the four views of social reality and how this affects the treatment of life stories. The analytical areas identified provide an understanding of how to treat empirical data and what cognitive results should be expected if one adopts a given understanding of truth.

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The article addresses the issue of understanding and intentional use of researcher’s autobiographical narrative in the social research on the example of performative autoethnography. The reference point to reflection is a research project conducted as part of an initiative titled “Microworlds of Maternity”. The research involved a researcher (the author of the research) telling and analyzing her own story in the form of a short video. The researcher’s autobiographical narrative is treated as a reflective research tool. Then, the so called external investigator (the author of this article) further analyzes the video material. Interpretation of the video provides insight not only into the way the researcher’s narrative is used in the research process but also into the way it is transformed into a visual story (knowledge about maternity experience). Such an approach provides an opportunity to explore the practice of joining together interpretation perspectives in the form of investigator triangulation and allows to present interactions between the narrative and its interpretation – in the context of the researcher herself and in the dialogue with the other investigator. As a result, performative autoethnography is presented both as a research approach and a space for multiple voice interpretation and reflection on the limits of cognition in the scientific research. Reflections presented herein focus on understanding the research process as a learning situation for: researchers, respondents and recipients. The example recalled in the paper is a study conducted in the area of educational research.