The last chapters of life: A proposed research agenda for studying narrative identity in older adulthood

The study of narrative identity—the ongoing process of authoring our life stories and being shaped by them—has provided a rich conceptualization of adult personality, yielding important insights about the storied nature of meaning making in personality, particularly for young and midlife adults. However, little research has been done to investigate narrative identity in older adulthood, potentially resulting in a constrained understanding of narrative identity across the life span. I propose that much-needed research on narrative identity in late life could substantiate or undermine a hypothesized shift in emphasis from authoring to reading life stories (McAdams, 2015), complicate and refine the master narrative framework (McLean & Syed, 2015), and offer new targets for narrative identity questions across the entire life span.