A Study of Native and Non-Native North American Adolescents

Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide:A Study of Native and Non-Native North American Adolescents.

Michael J. Chandler, University of British Columbia

Christopher E. Lalonde, University of Victoria

Bryan W. Sokol, Simon Fraser University

Darcy Hallett, University of British Columbia

Final Revision—April 2003In press, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

Addresses for correspondence:Michael J. ChandlerDept. of PsychologyUniv. of British Columbia2136 West MallVancouver, BCCANADA V6T 1Z4

[email protected]

Christopher E. LalondeDept. of PsychologyUniversity of VictoriaPO Box 3050Victoria, BCCANADA V8W 3P5

[email protected]

Bryan SokolDept. of PsychologySimon Fraser University8888 University Dr.Burnaby, BCCANADA V5A 1S6

[email protected]

Darcy HallettDept. of PsychologyUniv. of British Columbia2136 West MallVancouver, BCCANADA V6T 1Z4

[email protected]

Abstract

The cross-cultural program of researchpresented here is about matters of temporalpersistence—personal persistence and culturalpersistence—and about solution strategies forsolving the paradox of “sameness-in-change.” Thecrux of this paradox resides in the fact that, onthreat of otherwise ceasing to be recognizable as aself, all of us must satisfy at least two constitutiveconditions. The first of these is that selves areobliged to keep moving or die, and so, mustcontinually change. The second is that selves mustalso somehow remain the same, lest all notions ofmoral responsibility and any commitment to an asyet unrealized future become nonsensical.Although long understood as a problemdemanding the attention of philosophers, we arguethat this same paradox arises in the ordinarycourse of identity development, and dictates thedifferent developmental routes taken by culturallymainstream and Aboriginal youth in coming to theidentity preserving conclusion that they and othersare somehow continuous through time.

Findings from a set of five studies arepresented. The first and second studies documentthe development and refinement of a method for

parsing and coding what young people say on thetopic of personal persistence or self-continuity.Both studies demonstrate that it is not onlypossible to seriously engage children as young as 9or 10 in detailed and codable discussions aboutpersonal persistence, but that their reasoningconcerning such matters typically proceeds in anorderly and increasingly sophisticated mannerover the course of their early identitydevelopment. Our third study underscores the highpersonal costs of failing to sustain a workablesense of personal persistence by showing thatfailures to warrant self-continuity are stronglyassociated with increased suicide risk inadolescence. Study four documents this samerelation between continuity and suicide, this timeat the macro-level of whole cultures, and showsthat efforts by Aboriginal groups to preserve andpromote their culture are associated with dramaticreductions in rates of youth suicide. In the finalstudy we show that two different default strategiesfor resolving the paradox of personal persistenceand change—Narrative and Essentialiststrategies—distinctly characterize Aboriginal andnon-Aboriginal youth.

2 Personal Persistence

Chapter I: Introduction

This monograph is about identity developmentand the paradox of personal and culturalpersistence in the face of inevitable change. It isalso about “First Nations people” (or what some,assuming innocence, still call “Indians”), and whatcauses the young among them to so often taketheir own lives. But more than anything, it is about“continuities” (continuities of the self, of others,and even of whole communities), and how it isthat young people—both Aboriginal andnot—regularly work to understand themselves assurviving time in ways that guarantee a past and afuture they can live with and count as their own.All of these enigmatic matters (about personalpersistence and youth suicide and culturalcontinuities) are large-scale—too large to easily fitin this, or even in several monographs. Faced withthis room shortage, we mean to hold ourselves toan account of just three questions, only two ofwhich are about killing one’s self.

The first of these questions turns on the classicparadox of sameness and change. We aredoubtlessly all works in progress, obliged tochange by the temporally vectored nature of ourpublic and private existence. Still, and just ascertainly, we must, if we are to qualify asrecognizable instances of what selves areordinarily taken to be (Cassirer, 1923), find waysto interpretively over-ride at least some of thesechanges by working to make each of thedistinctive time slices that together form thearchipelago of our life count as belongingtimelessly to one and the same person.

Understanding ourselves and others ascontinuous is not, as we will work to demonstrate,some elective “feature” of selves that can be takenup or left alone, but needs to be seen instead as afundamental condition of their actually cominginto being. The problem, then, is one ofreconciling necessary sameness in the face ofconstant change. Everyone, we will work to show,must negotiate solutions to this problem, oftenagain and again. The open question is: how do weall do it? The answer, as our research aims toshow, is: in more and sundry ways than you likelyever imagined possible. Even if we only manageto be clear about this—our major challenge—bysuccessfully lining out how young people (ofdifferent ages, and different cultures) successfullynegotiate and re-negotiate the problem of theirown “numerical identity,” that would be

something. As it is, however, stopping just here isnot an option. It is simply not possible to take theproper measure of young people’s varioussuccesses in solving the problem of samenesswithin change without also considering the likelynature and costs of their possible failures.

Problems two and three are both about thesecosts (the personal and the collective price) offailing to get question number one right, and aboutdeath incarnate. In particular, question number twoturns on the well-known fact that adolescents andyoung adults are especially at risk of dropping thethread of their own continuous existence. Oneparticularly heart breaking correlate of suchfailures is, as we will argue, the alarmingfrequency with which teenagers and young adultsboth attempt to and succeed at taking their ownlives in numbers that are out of all proportion—byvarious counts, at rates anywhere from 3 to 300times those characteristic of other age groups(Meehan, Lamb, & Saltzman, 1992). The numberswe can compute. What we can’t understand is howthey could actually bring themselves to do it. Howcould they throw away their lives and all of ourfutures, often over seeming trifles that (shouldthey somehow succeed in surviving to tell the tale)will later be judged to scarcely matter? Suicides,especially youth suicides, almost never seem tomake sense. The research to be reported here waspredicated on the assumption that coming to abetter understanding of the changing ways inwhich young people struggle, and sometimes fail,to understand themselves as personally persistentmay provide a key to the problem of youth suicide.

What ties the notion of personal persistence tothe problem of youth suicide, as we mean todemonstrate, is that, without some means ofcounting oneself as continuous in time, theresimply would be no reason to show appropriatecare and concern for one’s own future well-being.When we, as adults, contemplate our own demise,the dead person that we ordinarily imagine on thefloor is decisively us. Young people, it too oftenhappens, are not like that. Rather, handicapped byan ephemeral sense of their own personalpersistence, they often lose the thread that tetherstogether their past, present and future, leavingthem open to the risk of suicide. This, in short, isthe thrust of some of the research to be reportedhere—research that explores the relation betweenindividual and collective efforts to achieve a

Personal Persistence 3

workable sense of self-continuity or durableidentity, on the one hand, and suicidal behaviors inboth culturally mainstream and Aboriginal youth,on the other.

Our third and final question is much like thesecond, and differs mainly in that it concerns thespecial problem of suicide among the world’sAboriginal youth. In Canada, where our ownresearch has been conducted, First Nations andother Aboriginal youth reportedly take their ownlives at rates that are said to be higher than that ofany culturally identifiable group in the world(Kirmayer, 1994)—rates closely matched by theiraboriginal counterparts throughout the Americas(Resnik & Dizmang, 1971) and beyond (Carsten,2000). How does it happen that death is thepreferred alternative for so many Aboriginalyouth? (In keeping with common practice inCanada, the term “aboriginal” is used here to referto indigenous persons in general, whereas“Aboriginal” refers to several specific groupswithin Canada: Inuit, First Nations, and Métis).Again, our plan will be to make the case thatproblems in negotiating a sense of continuity (notjust personal but also collective or culturalcontinuity) lie at the heart of this third question.As our research will show, whole Aboriginalcommunities that have succeeded, againstmounting odds, in rehabilitating their badlysavaged cultures, not only apparently salvage theirpast and harness their future, but, along the way,manage to successfully insulate their youth fromthe risk of suicide as well.

Despite the fact that this monograph is meantto address the problem of youth suicide, both atthe individual and community level, this is neitherthe right rhetorical place to begin, nor the placewhere this program of research actually began.Rather, suicide, like so much of what befallsyoung persons, can only be made to makeinterpretive sense by first situating such self-destructive acts in their proper developmentalcontext. That is, what needs to be understood first,is how most young people ordinarily succeed insurviving the ravages of time with their lives andtheir identities still intact. If we understoodthis—if we get a better conceptual grip on theprocedural means by which developing personsordinarily manage to own their past and commit totheir future—then there would be grounds forsome hope of making real sense out of thoseexceptions to the more general rule who undertaketo kill themselves.

This, at least, is how our research began morethan a decade ago. Then, like now, we wanted toknow how young persons gradually succeed incoming to a defensible understanding of their owntemporal coherence—an understanding that bothallows them to own their past, and permits them aproper measure of care and concern about thefuture well-being of the self they are en route tobecoming.

We will proceed by working our way through aseries of five “talking points” that are each takenup as separate chapters in the pages that follow. Asa sort of preview to these main themes of ourresearch, here, in brief, are the matters that wemean to speak to in turn.

First, and as a way of beginning, we mean tosay something synoptic about what is usuallyintended by talk about self-continuity or personalpersistence, and to try and make clear why failingto understand oneself as a singularity—as adiachronically continuous or “numericallyidentical” self that deserves to be counted onlyonce—risks costing each of us a sense ofresponsibility for our own past and a sense ofcommitment to our own future.

Second, we will: a) describe the methods andprocedures that we eventually developed in oureffort to measure young people’s assumptionsabout their own and others’ continuity or personalpersistence; and b) present a series ofdevelopmental findings that spell out how rank-and-file young persons ordinarily grow insophistication as they repeatedly try to solve theproblem of their own personal continuity in time.

Third, we will discuss why failing to negotiatesome serviceable way of grasping one’s ownpersonal persistence works to impair that ordinarysense of care and concern that helps to ensure ourfuture well-being. Here we mean to illustrate theseprospects by turning attention to the problem ofyouth suicide, and by demonstrating howunresolved problems in the ordinary process ofwarranting a sense of personal sameness can helpin accounting for the otherwise poorly understoodepidemic of suicidal behaviors known to occurduring adolescence.

Fourth, because there are good reasons topresume that concerns over matters of persistenceexist at both individual- and group-levels ofanalyses, we undertook a still buildingepidemiological study that examines, not personalcontinuity, but cultural continuity in British


Columbia’s Aboriginal Communities. Here wemean to report a portion of these data that relatesthe variable success that different Aboriginalcommunities have had in trying to preserve orpromote their own cultures, and the frequency ofyouth suicide in their communities.

Fifth, and finally, we will turn our attention tothe comparative study of the course of identitydevelopment in Aboriginal, as well as non-Aboriginal youth, and provide details of ourongoing efforts to characterize the distinctive self-continuity warranting practices, not only of youngpersons from Canada’s “cultural mainstream,” butalso from two First Nations communities.

Chapter II: The Antinomy of Sameness and Change

In naming, as we did in our introductoryremarks, the so-called “paradox of samenesswithin change” as the first of several questions tobe addressed, the bare beginnings of a case wasmade for insisting, as we now mean to insist allthe more, that “persistence” is foundational to, orconstitutive of, what it ordinarily means to be aself or person. Although we imagine and intendfor this claim to have the automatic feel ofintuitive rightness, so much of what followspresupposes its legitimacy that a more seriousattempt at persuasion needs to be made in order tobring you along with us in this conviction. Wemean to do this: a) by assuaging any lingeringdoubts you might have about the inevitability ofpersonal change; b) by convincing you, if youneed more convincing, that any account of selvesthat did not make adequate provision forunderstanding each of us as somehow possessingreal sameness (or at least persistence) through timewould end up striking us as fundamentallynonsensical (Luckman, 1979); and c) by callinginto serious question the deeply suspect post-modern fable that characterizes all commitmentsto the continuity of selfhood as an unfortunatebyproduct of supposedly discreditedEnlightenment thought.

Of all of these tasks, the success of the onemeant to further convince you that “change” isnear the top of any list of life’s necessaryconstants seems least in doubt. Because selfhoodis everywhere acknowledged to be temporallyvectored (Gallagher, 1998), no one seriouslydoubts that change is real. Our bodies change, ourbeliefs and desires along with our projects and ourcommitments and our relationships all change,often seemingly beyond all recognition. All ironiesaside, change needs to be counted as a permanentfixture of our existence, and so seen to lie at theheart of subjectivity (Gallagher, 1998). If it didnot, then, as Unger reminds us, “we could makesense of neither the experience of innovation in the

lives of individuals, nor novelty in the flow ofhuman history” (1975, p. 56).

This talk of change is, of course, only half of amatched pair. Here is the other shoe. Except forthe occasional scorched-earth post-modernist,(Chandler, 1997), no one boldly believes thateverything is change and polysemic flux(Chandler, 2001). This follows because change,though no doubt inevitable, is rarely exceptionless.If this were not so—if nothing about us remainedthe same to ensure our reliable re-identification—then life as we ordinarilyunderstand it would simply have no followablemeaning.

With both halves of the antinomy firmly inplace, the classic paradox of sameness and changeis set—a paradox whose hoped for resolution is, aswe will argue, foundational to any workableconception of self- or personhood.Paradox and Resolution

Although it remains possible to playfullyimagine that either sameness or change is a mereillusion, or that each is the negative co-relativecontrary of the other, it is not possible to seriouslymanage one’s life on such either/or assumptions.Instead, driven by the absurdity of theconsequence to which such “split positions”(Overton, 1998) inevitably lead, our commoncontemporary obligation is broadly taken to bethat of working out how selves “can embody bothchange and permanence simultaneously” (Fraisse,1963, p. 10). That is, if neither personal samenessnor personal change can be made to work alone,then we clearly need to arrive at some viable wayof understanding selves as both simultaneouslyfixed and ongoing. This is so because, as Strawsonputs it, there is “a deep presumption that if one isarguing for the existence of the mental self, one isarguing for something that exists for a substantialperiod of time…a diachronic singleness [that]allows one to regard the series of thoughts and


experiences that make up one’s life as the thoughts[and experiences] of a single self” (1999, p. 10). Inshort, although our lives are composed ofinnumerable episodes, each with its ownviewpoint and focus and role, we are, nevertheless,all seemingly geared in whatever ways arenecessary to allow us “to hold various thingsconstant” (Turner, 1996, p. 124), and to “seeourselves as transcending our singularities” (p.134) in whatever fashion is required to render suchdifferent time-slices as all episodes in the career ofone and the same person.

This idea—the idea that self-continuity is anineradicable feature of personhood andidentity—is among the oldest of our old ideas. Forexample, in the first chapter of Book Two of hisPhysics, Aristotle states that “animals differ fromwhat is not naturally constituted in that each ofthese [living] things has within it a principle ofchange and of staying unchanged” (cited inWiggins, 1980, p. 88-89). More than a millenniumand a half later, Locke, (1694/1956) similarlywrote in An Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding that, in order to meet even theminimal condition for selfhood, it is necessary toconsider one’s self “as the same thinking thing indifferent times and places.” Nearer to our owntime, William James (1910) also made continuity acornerstone of his conception of selfhood, as havea long list of more contemporary philosopherssuch as Cassirer (1923), who speaks of “temporalunity”; Chisholm (1971), who talks of “intactpersistence”; and Strawson (1999), whoemphasizes what he calls our “diachronicsingleness.” Each of these accounts and those ofmany other contemporary philosophers (see forexample Harré 1979, Hirsch 1976; MacIntyre,1977; Parfit, 1971; Rorty, 1976; Taylor, 1991;Wiggins, 1980; to name only a few), along with asimilar complement of touchstone psychologicaltheorists (e.g. Erikson, 1968; Perry, 1976; Piaget,1968), all share the common conclusion that beingseen to remain self-same across the various phasesof our temporal existence needs to be counted as aconstitutive condition for being recognized as anysort of person at all (Chandler, Lalonde, & Sokol,2000; Lewis & Ferrari, 2001). All of this, andmore, adds up to a long brief in support of whatFlanagan (1996, p. 65) has called our self-imposed“one self to a customer rule.”

Pasts and Possibilities

The past and the possible [are] themodalities for self-making. (Ochs &Capps, 1997, p. 87)

This claim, that the earlier and latermanifestations of a life must somehow count asbelonging timelessly to one and the samecontinuant (van Inwagen, 1990), needs to be seenas true, not simply because so many importantpeople say that it is so, but for at least twopersuasive reasons, one of which isquintessentially historical and backwardsreferring, the other forward anticipating and so allabout our own as yet unrealized futures. AsWilliam James put it, a life is like a “saddleback,”or a “skiff” moving through time with a bow aswell as a stern (cited in Flanagan, 1996).

First, and with reference to things off the stern,each of us needs to be understood as temporallypersistent because, if we could not count (or re-identify) ourselves and others as the samecontinuous and “numerically identical” individualsacross time—that is, if we could not successfullylink up earlier time-slices of our lives with thepersons we have since become—then social life aswe ordinarily understand it would come to astandstill. This follows for the reason that, in itsbackwards referring aspect, self-continuity is noless than a moral, political, legal, and economicimperative (Whittaker, 1992). Without a way ofowning our own past, our concepts of moralresponsibility would be emptied of meaning(Rorty, 1973), all grounds for owning up to legalobligations or liabilities would be lost (Whittaker,1992), contracts and debts and promises would allfly out the same window, all prospects for a justand moral world would evaporate, and JudgmentDay would simply go out of business. How couldthere be a heaven or hell, where those with ahistory of good and evil are meant to languish, if itwere not possible to understand ways in whicheach of us legitimately owns his or her own past(Flanagan, 1996)?

Much the same proves to be true of our own asyet unrealized futures. Selves, in MacIntyre’swords (1984) are on a perpetual “quest.” That is,as Bakhtin (1986, p. 26) argued, we are built up,not only out of “remnants of the past, but alsofrom rudiments and tendencies of thefuture”—rudiments that give “a sense to one’s lifeas having a direction towards what one not yet is”(Taylor, 1988, p. 48). Seen, then, from the bow,


we behave as we do in the anxious anticipationthat, in Unger’s (1975) words, we will laterbecome the natural inheritors of our own “justdesserts.” In support of the same point, Flanaganargues that, “As beings in time, we are navigators.We care how our lives go” (1996, p. 67). Why, ifall this were not so, would anyone stop smoking,or go on a diet, or bother to get an education? Weforego short-run pleasures for long-term gainbecause, among other things, we find it reasonableto suppose that, when all was said and done, theknowledgeable, thin person with healthy lungswould somehow still be us. Similarly (and here weanticipate), why don’t we just put ourselves out ofour misery whenever the going gets tough? Whyshould we care one way or another about the wellbeing of the radically changed self we each are enroute to becoming? Though we mean to shortlyhave more to say about these matters, at least forthe moment, our point is only to remind you thatthere is a “rub,” and that “what doth make cowardsof us all” is, more often than not, the certainconviction that the person who wouldautomatically bear the consequence of all suchattempts at suicide or self-injury would again beus.

For all of the backwards referring and forwardanticipating reasons just offered, then, the Janus-faced notion of personal persistence is ordinarily(many would say “universally”) understood to bean immanent providence at work in the whole ofhuman affairs (Shotter, 1984).Against Persistence

There are, of course, those who take umbrageat all claims to the effect that any aspect of humannature whatsoever could possibly qualify assomehow trans-situational or trans-historical orotherwise be part of a broader “human nature” (fora review see: Chandler, 1999). The general line ofargumentation thrown up by such post-moderncritics (e.g., Lampinen & Odegard, 2000) involvespointing to real or imagined hard cases in whichthe putative “singularity of life” (Turner, 1996, p.116) is supposedly brought into deep question.What, it is proposed, if you fell into a Xeroxmachine, or your body stayed in place while yourbrain was teleported to Houston Central? What ifyou became amnesic, or suffered from a multiplepersonality disorder? More realistically, what ifyou underwent some “identity crisis,” or simplythought and behaved differently at home and at theoffice? Though none of these matters are without

interest or philosophical import, they do allsomehow miss the point. As Rorty (1973, p. 74)points out, “talk of psychological fusion, ormultiple role identification, or demonic[dis]possession [all] presuppose a person to whomall of these are referred, parts of whose continuousstory they are, or to whom they all belong.” Thatis, whatever divisive things may be going on in thereal or imagined minds of those who are said to“suffer” such assaults to their singularity, the workof having singled them out for special attentionpresupposes having already identified thepersistent person whose changeable experience isat issue—persons or selves who we (and oftenthey) invariably regard as being under some sort ofmisapprehension or delusion. Here, as elsewhere,then, it would seem that the point of such post-modern criticisms continues to be blunted as aconsequence of repeatedly bumping into one suchperformative contradiction after another(Chandler, 1999).Alternative Approaches to Continuity

Resting as it does on more than 2000 years ofEuro-American intellectual history, and backed, asit consequently is, by our contemporary version ofcommon sense, the ordinary conviction that selvesare necessarily continuous strikes most as trueenough. Still, more is likely required if you are togo away persuaded, as we intend, that perennialityis actually an exceptionless design feature of anyand all workable conceptions of selfhood. In shortorder (and more particularly in Chapter III below)we will report on a large-scale empirical attempt toillustrate how it is that, almost without exception,young people of different ages, and distinctivesocio-cultural backgrounds, are actually preparedto spend an inordinate amount of energyattempting to, and generally succeeding at,answering such continuity questions forthemselves. Before coming to this evidence,however, it seems prudent to begin by first tryingto anticipate at least some of the self-continuitywarranting strategies that the young participants inour research might take.A Literature in Absentia

Despite the fact that a long list of touchstonephilosophers and theologians dating back to thevery beginnings of Western intellectual historyhave promoted the importance of continuity as aconstitutive condition of self- and personhood, andnot withstanding the fact that key figures inpsychology’s more recent history such as James


and Erikson have made convictions about one’spersonal persistence a central pillar of theirtheorizing about identity development, actualempirical studies meant to detail the course bymeans of which young people arrive atincreasingly mature beliefs about their owntemporal persistence are unaccountably few andfar between. There is a small handful of studies inwhich young (mostly preschool) children arequeried about the persistence of artifacts andliving things, sometimes including themselves(e.g., Gutheil & Rosengren, 1996; Hall, 1998;Hart, Maloney & Damon, 1987; Peevers, 1987).These few relatively isolated studies are, however,largely given over to contrasting “individual” and“kind” persistence, and have generally failed toinitiate programmatic efforts to explore the courseand consequences of early ideas about self-continuity.

There is also a small but influential clinicalliterature that documents some of what can gowrong in the lives of those who evidently losethemselves in time, or who suffer somecatastrophic failure in their attempts to vouchsafetheir own diachronic singularity (Strawson, 1999).Associated writings by Erikson (1968), andMarcia (1966), and other like-minded self theorists(e.g., Fromm, 1970) regularly acknowledge, butrarely elaborate upon, the importance of personalpersistence in explaining the identity crises ofadolescents and other transitional groups. Spottythoughts about sameness in time also similarlyconcern those who study various sorts of displacedpersons, as they do for those interested in amnesiaand persons with so-called “multiple personalitydisorders” (Hacking, 1995, 1999). Though all ofthis is certainly important, it is not the same thingas a direct frontal attack on the larger problem ofunderstanding and learning how to measure theparticular ways in which ordinarypeople—especially young, ordinarypeople—generally succeed, but sometimes fail, inhammering out appropriate criteria for personalpersistence, or sameness within change.

The closest thing available to addressing such adevelopmental question exists in the literatureconcerned with what has come to be called“psychological essentialism” (Medin, 1989)—aliterature that, from a certain remote viewingdistance, might be seen to be reasonably on target.DeVries (1969), for example, outfitted availablecats with a dog or rabbit mask, and then putquestions to young preschoolers about the

persistence of feline identity. Similarly, Aboudand Ruble (1987) persuaded groups of youngJewish preschool children to speculate about thecontinuity of their religious/ethnic identity afterfirst obliging them to put on “Eskimo” [sic]costumes. In much the same vein, but for ratherdifferent reasons, Keil (1989), Gelman (1999) andMedin (1989), among others (e.g., Wellman,1990) documented the emergence of so-called“psychological essentialism” by pressing youngrespondents about whether, for example, a skunkwould still go on being a skunk after its whitestripe was painted out, or, more sinister still, afterits “insides were surgically removed.” All of thisis about persistence after a fashion, but the sort ofidentity being inquired into in all of these studiesis always “kind” identity, rather than “individual”identity. That is, when DeVries outfitted cats withmasks, or Keil spoke of disemboweling skunks,the “operative” question put to the respondentswas whether what remained was still a cat or askunk (i.e., whether these exemplars did or did notpersist as members of the same class), and notwhether “Tabby” was still “our one and onlybeloved Tabby,” or the skunk was still persistently“Flower,” or “Pépé LePu,” or whatever particularskunk he or she happened to have been before thesurgery. Rather, in such cases, “identity” is takento be preserved if any transformed object A’ is stillthe same F (where F is a natural kind) as was theoriginal object A before its transformation.However interesting all of this may be, suchstudies tell us next to nothing concerning thosenotions of personal persistence that underlie oursocial practices of allocating responsibility anddishing out just desserts (Rorty, 1973, p. 269). AsGutheil and Rosengren (1996) point out, bothhuman beings and spoons are specific individualsthat (within the limits of interest typicallyoperating among those concerned with questionsof “kind identity”) go right on being “tokens” oftheir same “types” through a range of rather tryingcircumstances. Such studies do all of this,however, without offering much in the way ofuseful guidance about how one might best proceedin getting at the life-conferring self-continuitywarranting practices of children, let aloneadolescents and young adults.

Still closer to our concerns are a few publishedstudies and commentaries meant to exploredirectly young children’s entry level beliefs aboutpersonal persistence. Piaget (1968), for example,cited a series of studies undertaken by Voyat that


were meant to assess “young children’sunderstanding of the stability of personalidentity…by having them draw pictures ofthemselves and others at various ages. The claimmade on the basis of these efforts is that [beforethe age of seven] such children already understandthat the drawings captured the same individualover time” (Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish &McCormick, 1991 p. 1304). Others (e.g., Guardo& Bohan, 1971; Gutheil & Rosengren, 1996; Hall,1998; Inagaki & Sugiyama, 1988) came to muchthe same conclusion. What we learn from theseseveral studies is that, by a surprisingly early age,young preschoolers and school age childrenalready share with the adults around them therequired conviction that at least “things of anatural kind” (as opposed to artifacts) successfullymaintain their individual identity across asurprising range of transformations. What wedon’t learn, and badly need to know, is how suchyoung persons justify or warrant theseconclusions, and whether they think about mattersof personal persistence differently as a function oftheir age or circumstance.

Having been generally let down by a researchcommunity whose interests are typicallyelsewhere, and yet still in need of some kind ofleg-up in deciding how to best go about measuringyoung people’s changing convictions aboutpersonal persistence, we began casting about muchmore broadly, all in the hope of capturing otheravailable best practices and best thoughts abouthow to proceed in these uncertain matters. Whatfollows is a sampler of some of the more indirecthelp that we found.Broadening the Search Pattern

However few and far between credibleempirical studies concerning beliefs aboutpersonal persistence may actually be, publicpronouncements regarding such matters are notonly thick on the contemporary ground, but form adeep vein of speculative writings that run to thevery core of, at least, Western intellectual history.In fact, a sizeable chunk of the assembled works ofEuro-American philosophy can be read as acollection of such beliefs judged worthy ofrepeating. The open question is how best to makeuse of such commentaries. Although it wouldundoubtedly be a mistake to suppose that theontogeny of our various folk or commonsensebeliefs about our diachronic singleness merelyrecapitulates the historical course of these

philosophies, it would also seem equally unlikelythat at least some of what has been archivallypreserved concerning this topic does not also haveits counterpart in some of what lay persons believeand say on the same subject. As such, parts of thisrecorded history of thoughts about the paradox ofsameness within change could potentially serve asa template or “source model” to be used inimagining what ordinary young people mightbelieve about their own numerical identity. On thisprospect, effort spent exploring past writings onthe theme of personal persistence seemed justified.

Although the range of available “solutions” tothe paradox of sameness within change isexceedingly broad, the large bulk of these ideasgravitate toward one or the other pole of whatamounts to a standing dichotomy. One of theseclusters, characterized here as Entity orEssentialist positions, involve efforts tomarginalize change by attaching specialimportance to one or more enduring attributes ofthe self that are imagined to somehow standoutside of or otherwise defeat time.Contrapuntally, the alternative view—solutionstrategies that we label here as Relational orNarrative, as opposed to Essentialist—proceed injust the opposite direction by throwing their lot inwith time and change, and supposing that anyresidual demands for sameness can be satisfied bypointing to various relational forms that bindtogether the admittedly distinct time-slices ofone’s life. On the prospect that something likethese classical strategies for navigating theantinomy between sameness and change mightfind their way into the thoughts of the youngpeople who would participate in our studies, itseems useful to say something more about them inturn.Essentialism

Essentialist solutions to the problem ofpersonal persistence tend to be favored by thosewhose metaphysical stance leans toward theanalytic, rather than the holistic (Norenzayan,Choi, & Nisbett, 1999); the paradigmatic andpropositional, as opposed to the discursive andhistorical (Bruner, 1986); the taxonomic, in lieu ofthe schematic (Mandler, 1984); the monistic,instead of the dialogical (Hermans, 1996); and theuniversal or transcendental, in contrast to the localor indigenous (Habermas, 1985). Their ambitionstend to favor truth rather than sincerity (Lightfoot,1997), and their commitment is to the strong claim


that all objects—selves included—necessarilypossess some timeless core of persistent sameness,some material or transcendental center or a-temporal “indelible stain,” that stands outside oftime (Shalom, 1985), or is otherwise immune tochange (Brockelman, 1985).

Of the two views, the Essentialist position isthe more venerable, or at least this is regularly saidto be true in the context of Western or Euro-American thought. As Schlesinger (1977) puts it,“the ancient philosophers” (meaning, ancientWestern Philosophers—Plato, for example)regularly insisted that “being was given once andfor all, complete and perfect, in an ultimate systemof essences” (p. 271). Clear remnants of suchlingering Platonism may have grown rather harderto detect after being filtered through successivegenerations of Western thought (Smith, 1988), butcertain signature constants remain. The kernel ideacommon to all subspecies of this Essentialist viewis that there actually is a kernel idea—someenduring something (DNA, ego, spirit, soul) that,as William James (1891) derisively put it “stand[s]behind the passing states of consciousness and ouralways shifting ways of being,” (p. 196), andsuccessfully vouchsafes our identities byimmobilizing or negating or otherwise defeatingtime.

As they obviously must, champions ofEssentialism recognize that time and all that itcontains constantly picks at the threads ofwhatever sort of identity we have been carefullystitching up. Nevertheless, and ordinarily wellbefore we threaten to come entirely apart at theseams, there still remains, it is argued, somepersistent essential kernel of existence that formsthe foundation of our identity, and from which wecan begin the work of knitting back up the raveledsleeve of our persistent selves. As such,Essentialists ordinarily commit their weight to the“sameness” foot, discounting “change” as mereillusion.Narrativity

Arranged against Essentialism, are all of thosenarrativists, hermeneuticists, and socialconstructivists, along with an assemblage ofpresentist historiographers and phenomenologistsand champions of all things dialogical, whosegeneric solution to the problem of personalpersistence is to emphasize the connective tissuebetween things, rather than to imagine theexistence of anything enduring or immune to time.

As a group (or better yet a collective orcommunity) defenders of this position areruggedly anti-metaphysical, and tend toemphasize: the extrinsic over the intrinsic(Berzonsky, 1993); process over structure(Ricoeur, 1985); the discursive over thesubstantial, and the relational over theindividualistic (Overton, 1998); and the episodicover the semantic (Tulving, 1983). Rejecting outof hand the key foundationalist assumption thatthe self is naturally rooted in some enduringsubstance, or illusive transcendental essence,Narrativists generally side with Dennett (1992) inviewing selfhood as something moreapproximating a “center of narrative gravity.” Onthis more relational account, then, the usualcontainer/substance view of the self typicallyadopted by Essentialists (Holland, 1997) isdiscounted in favor of the idea “that theconnectedness of life can only be understoodthrough meaning” (Dilthey, 1962, p. 201-202)—meaning conferred upon the disparatetime–slices of one’s life through the fashioning ofstories meant to integrate all of one’sreconstructed past, present, and anticipated futureinto some overarching narrative structure(McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield,1997). In short, selves, on this account, areunderstood to be no more than the narrativeembodiment of lives told (Spence, 1982), and theyqualify (or fail to qualify) as enduring or persistentto the degree that the stories that are told aboutthem are somehow coherent or followable. This isall imagined possible, not only because we are“story-telling animals” (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 201),but because the social and material conditions ofhuman existence themselves are also said to have afundamentally narrative structure (Kerby, 1991, p.41).

Narrative, as opposed to Essentialist forms ofself-understanding, as we (Chandler, 2000;Chandler & Lalonde, 1998; Chandler, Lalonde, &Sokol, 2000) and others (Eakin, 1999) havetermed them, are, then, grounded in an entirelydifferent intellectual tradition—a tradition thatrejects as mere illusion the supposedly hidden butessential causes imagined by Entity theorists.Instead, emphasis is placed on whole-part, orgenus-species relations of a sort that render selvessomething more like a web or diachronic patternedrelation than an entity, and identities are picturedas more akin to an awareness of process than a testof endurance. As a result, Narrative theorists, or at


least those living closest to the radical post-modern edge, tend to promote an altogether morefleeting, aimless, ephemeral, fragmentary, will-o-the-wisp sort of “outlaw” notion of selfhood that,by instantly adapting its chameleon ways towhatever contingent circumstances happen toprevail, makes a hero out of change and a goat ofsameness.

In their strongest form, such “split” Narrativeviews (Overton, 1998) amount to a kind ofcontrary, “damn their eyes,” anti-essentialism, inwhich oppositional forms of Essentialism aresimply reduced to Narrativity peevishly stood onits head. Except for the most radical advocates ofthis position, however, many Narrativists seethemselves as being as obliged as the next personto make whatever minimal concessions tosameness are necessary to get recognizable (i.e.,re-identifiable) people out the other end. Theirtypical strategy for accomplishing this, without atthe same time re-invoking some tired “idol of themind,” some “fictive” mental or substantive entityimagined to successfully defy time, is to adoptmore phenomenological views in which the streamof ideas that is said to be the mind (Gallagher,1998) is held out to be “sufficient, in and of itself,to ground the possibility of self-continuity withoutessence” (Putnam, 1988).

In briefly surveying the available array of suchnarrative-like or relational accounts, it quicklybecomes evident that they are not all of a piece,but instead come in a surprising variety ofdifferent flavors. Some, located nearest to thefringe (e.g., Gergen & Gergen, 1983; Harré, 1979)appear at risk of becoming “lost in the tropics ofdiscourse” (Zagorin, 1999, p. 23), by fullyequating selves with personal narratives, therebythreatening to completely dissolve personal historyinto a species of literature. Others (e.g., Car, 1986;Mink, 1969; Ricoeur, 1985; Zagorin, 1999) morecautiously insist that, because our lives are notamenable to just any telling, all more radicalizedattempts to equate lives and stories only succeed ingiving narrativity a bad name. In either case,however, theorists of all of these diverse stripesseem to agree that “it is in telling our stories thatwe give ourselves an identity” (Ricoeur, 1985, p.214), and that because nothing of great importanceactually does survive time in ways that couldeffectively warrant our necessary claims for self-continuity anyway, our only possible way toground personal persistence without “essence”

(Putnam, 1988) is to rely on what Flanagan (1996)calls “narrative connectedness.”On Choosing Between Narrative and EssentialistSolutions

All that has just been said about Narrative andEssentialist solutions to the problem of personalpersistence has emphasized their historicaloppositionality. Seen through the eyes of yourtypical Narratologist, story telling just is the“essential genre” (Flanagan, 1996), or “natural”(MacIntyre, 1984) or “native tongue” (Weintraub,1975) of the self, or at least represents our “best”and most “privileged” way of giving voice to it(Kerby, 1991). On this exclusionary account,Essentialism is demoted to the status of justanother negative byproduct of the Enlightenment,or Romanticism, or high-modernity, assumed to bepresent, if at all, only in a handful of Westerncultures (Miller, 1996). Essentialists, for their ownpart, tend to speak with much the same authorialcertainty, and the same air of presumptiveexclusivity, insisting that Essentialism is somehowbred into our bones. Narratologists, they argue,are, at best, practitioners of “mere” rhetoric (Ring,1987) who have somehow fallen prey to certainrecent French fads (Callinicos, 1989).

It is decidedly not our intention to somehowarbitrate these competing metaphysical claims.Our whole point of delving into this maelstrom ofdivergent opinions is to build up a more“inclusive” (Overton, 1998, p. 112) list ofavailable options or procedural alternatives thatindividuals and whole communities might drawupon, and adopt as default strategies, in workingout for themselves how best to resolve thecommon paradox of personal sameness withinchange. What this survey led us to anticipate, andwhat (to get ahead of the story) our interviewswith more than 400 adolescents have so fardemonstrated, is that some respondents do in factanswer questions about their own personalpersistence in ways that are exclusivelyEssentialist or Narrative in character, while others,in almost equal numbers draw upon both of thesesupposedly oppositional solution strategies as theirreading of the situation demands. In either case,what now needs to be made clear, is how both theEssentialist and Narrative solution strategiesevident in the scholarly literatures surveyed werepressed into service as source models in our ownempirical efforts to explore and characterize howindividuals and whole cultures actually go aboutthe resolving the paradox of sameness and change.


From Theory to Practice

When faced with the task of getting all the wayfrom the disembodied claims that Narrativist andEssentialists theorists tend to make on behalf ofthe whole of humankind, to whatever concrete,close-to-the-ground details are required in order tonail down exactly where some particularadolescent boy or girl actually stands on thesecomplex issues, the circumstances of assessmentstrongly favor Essentialism. That is, if you areconvinced that what guarantees your own orothers’ personal persistence is some more or lessconcrete something assumed to successfully hideout from time (e.g., if, when asked why you arestill one and the same person across the years, youconfidently point to your strawberry birthmark),then the job of type-casting your responses isreasonably straightforward. It is possible, ofcourse, that you may be less than clear about whatyou really do believe, or find yourself at a loss forwords. Still, all things being equal, the question isat least clear enough (i.e., “what is it that didn’tchange?”), as are the usual answers that flood theminds of the typical “lay” Essentialist (e.g., “thelightening bolt scar on my forehead,” or “mypersonality,” or “immortal soul”).

By contrast, things are often a good deal lessstraightforward in the case of those whounderstand personal persistence in what we havelabeled Narrative terms. Possible confusions arisefrom all quarters. If you interrupt someone who isin the midst of detailing how much they havechanged over the years by asking what qualifiesthem as one and the same person, and if theyunderstand their narration to already be just suchan explanation, then they tend to assume that youwere simply not paying attention, and cooperationflags. As it is, questions of almost any sort bettersuit Essentialists, who mean to reveal somethinghidden. Young Narrativists, by contrast,commonly regard questions meant to quickly getto the bottom of things as interruptions. Suchcommunication difficulties aside, however, thereal problem, is getting clear about what it couldpossibly mean to label something as Narrative-like, and, more than that, a Narrative solutionstrategy of some particular stripe.

Much of the responsibility for the measurementproblems just described grow out of the fact thatnotions about narratives obviously have theirorigins in intellectual places often remote frommainstream social science (Mishler, 1995)—in

literary analysis or semiotics, for example.Consequently, it is easy, as Bell points out, “whenimporting the term ‘narrative’ into otherdisciplines… to confuse its use as an illustrativeanalogy or metaphor with other more literaldefinitions, as for example, when talk of narrativeorder is equated with lived temporality (1990, p.172).” In short, when we begin to push at thedistinction between “narrative” and just aboutanything else “the whole question of what anarrative might be [often] begins to unravel, oftento the extent that so-called narrative discoursemight not be distinguishable from any otherlinguistic act” (McQuillan, 2000, p. 6). Whatabout, mere “description,” or “argumentation” or“exposition,” which, along with “narration,” areclassically said (Riessman, 1993) to box thecompass on the full range of discursive modes?What about “Pass the salt?” or “Help!” that aresaid by some to constitute narratives (McQuillan,2000)? Surely, we are not after all of that. Rather,what interests us here about narrativity is itsreputed ability (along with that of Essentialism)“to make sense” out of change and time [by]extracting patterns out of events that have nonecessary teleological order of their own”—toimpose “a continuous account upon fundamentallydiscontinuous data” (Freeman, 1984, p. 10). If, aswe are quick to agree, something very much likethis—something like laying bare the so-called“structure” of narrative argumentation—is whatwe are after, then we need not move too far intothe troubled, and deeply contested, definitionalwaters that surround the use of these terms(Danziger, 1997, p. 148). Instead, whileattempting to avoid some of the hazards posed bywhat Bell (1990, p. 172) describes as the “richcharge of suggestiveness” that surrounds thecontemporary use of the term “narrativity,” wemean to both pursue its relevance to the storiedways in which many young people attempt to linkup the various time-slices or “chapters” of theirlives, while still leaving the door open for otherdistinctive solution strategies meant to answerquestions about personal persistence that don’tautomatically qualify as being yet anothernarrative form.

However sharp we make the distinctionbetween Essentialist and Narrative approaches tothe problem of self-continuity, it has become agood deal sharper than it was more than a decadeago when this program of research began, andwhen the participants in our studies, along with


their responses, were primarily of Euro-Americandescent. In the interim we have become alert to theprospect that some of what adolescents had to sayabout personal persistence is better understood as

a good Narrative than a bad Essentialist effort.How we came to this more inclusive view isdetailed in Chapter III to follow.

Chapter III: On Self-Continuity and its Developmental Vicissitudes—What youngpeople have to say about the paradox of sameness and change

The concept of a personal selfnecessarily assumes the ability to modelthe future as well as the past into somecorrelated scene (Edelman, 1992, p.122).

The present chapter is given over to two tasks.The first of these is methodological, and involveslaying out the specific ways and means that wefollowed in collecting and scoring and organizingthe first wave of our data collection. Second, wewill report on two early pilot studies in which atleast some of these methods and procedures wereput to the test in a normative sample of youngpeople, with the aim of both assessing theireffectiveness, and accumulating some initialevidence about the developing self-continuitywarranting practices of culturally mainstreamadolescents.

What complicates this otherwisestraightforward descriptive enterprise is the lengthof time we have been at it. The research to bedescribed in this and subsequent sections unfoldedin fits and starts, our ways of doing thingsevolved, and the young people whose thoughtsabout selfhood we have been most interested inchanged in complexion over the course of ourmore than 10 year effort. In trying to be clearabout all of this, we could have opted for a simplechronology, beginning with first things first, andthen serially rehearsing each of our changing waysof doing business, along with each newmethodological refinement. Although some part ofsuch a historical account is required if we are toavoid confusion, it seemed altogether better tobegin instead with our current best thoughts abouthow to measure and score young people’s ideasconcerning their own or others’ temporalpersistence, and to only “flash back” to earlieraccounting practices when necessary in order toclarify relevant details about our beginning andless practiced ways of proceeding. What we mean,then, to come to first is an account of our currentmethods and procedures, followed by a descriptiveaccount that aims to explicate the range ofdistinctive ways that the young people that we

have worked with have gone about trying to makesense of their own and others’ self-continuity intime. In doing this, we will lay out a detailedtypology and associated coding scheme thatrepresents our best efforts to capture the diversityand complexity of these participants’ responses.We then present some summary findings thatdescribe the relations between the self-continuitywarranting practices of a group of culturallymainstream adolescents that differed in terms oftheir ages and levels of cognitive developmentalmaturity.General Methodology: AssessmentProcedures & Measurement

The various methods and procedures that wereemployed, naturally fall into two loose groupings.One of these, the first and largest, is about ourevolving efforts to develop measurement tools forgetting at, and coding schemes for characterizing,the self-continuity warranting practices of ourrespondents. Here, more needs to be said, and saidmore concretely, about our primary distinctionbetween Essentialist and Narrative strategies, andabout the changing procedural ways that we wentabout observing and scoring these practices.

Second, we were naturally concerned, as wewent about the business of inventing (largely fromthe ground up) various ways of indexingadolescent approaches to the problem of personalpersistence, that we might easily mistakeNarrativity for Essentialism, or for something elseentirely, simply because some of our respondentshad greater verbal facility than others, oremployed different vocabularies for describingself- and personhood, or were otherwisedifferently driven by their ethnic commitments andvalues. As checks upon these several disruptivepossibilities, a number of “control” measures wereemployed. All of these are only previewed here,but are described in detail, principally in ChapterVI.

Using Pennebaker’s Linguistic Inquiry andWord Count (LIWC) text analysis program andstrategy (Pennebaker & King, 1999), we


calculated some 74 language and text dimensionsdescriptive of the interview protocols of ourrespondents. A version of the widely employed“Twenty Statements Test” (Kuhn & McPartland,1954) was administered to a subset of ourparticipants as a way of exploring possible groupdifferences in their conceptual resources fortalking about selfhood, and a battery of measuresof ethnic identification was also administered.

Additionally, details about our various groupsof respondents need to be provided. In just one ofthe several studies to be reported, for example, weinterviewed and otherwise assessed upwards of200 young respondents who varied by sex, age,Aboriginal status, and “place” along an urban-rural continuum. Some of the participantsresponded to all, and others to only some of ourmeasures. Again, some, but not all of our youngcollaborators participated in a second follow-upsession two years later. The particulars of thislongitudinal sample, along with those of everyoneelse that cooperated in this study sequence willalso need to be, and are, laid out in detail, ascircumstance indicates, in Chapters IV, V, and VI.

Of all of these details, the ones having to dowith the shifting and age-graded ways that youngpeople talk about their own and others’ temporalpersistence are the most unfamiliar, and so arespelled out below in greatest detail.Essentialist and Narrative Self-Continuity Warrants

As already noted, there was little in either theavailable literature, or in psychology’s general setof methodological tools that directly resolved ourassessment problem of measuring how youngpeople generally succeed, but sometimes fail, inthinking about personal persistence. Further, wequickly learned that it simply won’t do to merelyask point-blank how a given adolescent warrantsher conviction about self-continuity, or justifiesher or his beliefs concerning the “diachronicsingleness” (Strawson,1999) of others. Youngpeople, not surprisingly, look at you ratherstrangely when you come at them in this head-onfashion. Nor is this measurement problem likely tobe solved by simply giving in to the familiarimpulse to invent yet another Likert-type scale orusual self-report inventory. This is true, not onlybecause of general limitations inherent in suchsurvey methods, but also because of proceduralproblems owed to what has become the cross-cultural nature of our own research agenda. Hereare some of those central limitations and problems.

First, and quite apart from any questions thatmight arise out of anticipated differences betweenyoung persons of different ages, or because somewere reared, for example, in this culture asopposed to that, the very nature of our problem(young people’s self-continuity warrantingpractices) militates against the possible use ofsimple self-report measures or paper-and-pencilrating scales. Our primary measurement difficultyarises out of the fact that, in contrast to more usualattempts to get at some denotative dimension of“self-concept,” or some evaluative attitude towardone’s attributes or features—all important parts ofthe contemporary study of identitydevelopment—our target is altogether more actionoriented or procedural. As Strawson (1999, p. 2)argues, those aspects of one’s sense of self inwhich we are most interested—aspects that arecloser to what William James (1910) described asmatters having to do with “I,” rather than “me,” orwhat Blasi (1983) characterized as “the self assubject”—are likely situated below any level ofplausible denotative, or semantic, or declarative,or abstract propositional knowledge, though still apart of our phenomenological experience (seeBlasi & Milton, 1991). Consequently, it is,according to Fiske, often “worse than useless” torely upon self-report instruments in an effort to getat more procedural aspects of the self. Suchmeasures, he argues, are “likely to [yield]distorted, biased, and confabulatedrepresentations” (2002, p. 85). Still, even if all thiswere not so—even if such measures were, inprinciple, just the procedure required—ourdifficulties would still not be over. As Fiske(2002) again points out, even if rating or otherdirect enquiry procedures did work passably wellin studies involving participants from a reasonablyhomogeneous single culture, they would stilllikely fail when cross-cultural comparisons areattempted. “There are,” he argues, “profoundcultural differences, [even] in the meaning offilling out forms, let alone in asking personalquestions,” (p. 81)—differences that multiply allthe more when such comparison cultures aredifferent from our own.

To complicate things still further, many of themeasurement difficulties just enumerated are notexclusive to Likert-like rating procedures, butpotentially extend to any free response procedurethat similarly presumes the face-validity of young,culturally diverse people’s semantic or declarativeor episodic knowledge claims. All this is said to be


true for the reason that what reliably divides oneage group or culture from the next is not typicallyto be found at the level of those values andattitudes readily accessed by rating or self-reportprocedures, but in the implicit practices andcompetencies that are, instead, “marked by theirprocedurality” (Wildgen, 1994, p.1), and thatimportantly divide this culture from that.

If, as is now broadly argued by contemporaryanthropologists and social psychologists(Kitayama, 2002), culture (and, we would argue,strategies for thinking about selves in time) is infact largely procedural and practice based, then thebest way to highlight relevant cultural, and evenage related, differences is to somehow obligatemembers of the groups in question to simplyproceed, while taking careful note of how they goabout their usual ways of doing business andunobtrusively recording what Kitayama (2002)calls their “on-line responses”. According to thisadvice, there would appear to be two general waysof approaching our problem in such a proceduralfashion. One of these, strongly advocated by Fiske(2002) and other field-work orientedanthropologists, effectively amounts to “goingnative” [sic] and to restrict one’s involvement to“observation and imitation” (Fiske, 2002, p. 85).On this account the researcher, who is said to bethe only trustworthy “criterion instrument,” mustlive and learn by being socialized into the targetculture in much the same way that, as children,local residents were themselves once socialized.What those who advocate this “total immersion”strategy fail to make clear, however, is how, afterassimilating culture as “lived experience,” suchresearchers manage to “rise above” the“distortions and confabulated representations”(Fiske, 2002, p. 85) that are said to disqualify thefirst-hand reports of rank and file members of theculture in question. If ethnographers can do it, whycan’t they?

Until this “what’s good for the goose is goodfor the gander” problem is satisfactorily resolved,the remaining “approved” alternative (Fiske, 2002)would appear to be the use of new and minimallyobtrusive measurement strategies (Kitayama,2002) that rely upon so-called “scenarioinstruments” –instruments that aim to putrespondents through whatever procedural pacesare required in order to allow us to see theirdistinctive developmentally or culturally specificstrategies, in action. Figuring out how best to acton all of this good advice, without taking up

residence in a different culture, becomes themethodological challenge confronting our ownmeasurement efforts.

One final obstacle blocking our path in comingto some workable assessment procedure arises outof the fact, that, while being personally persistentmay well be an unremitting obligation on each ofus, actively thinking about being personallypersistent on a moment to moment basis, likely isnot. Rather, it seems reasonable to suppose thatmost of the time we are thinking about somethingelse entirely, and only turn our attention toquestions about our numerical identity ordiachronic singleness when prompted to do so byperceived threats to our continuity—threats thatare unlikely to be experienced as omnipresent, butpresumably wax and wane in response to more orless evident change in what are taken to be therelevant features of the self. Consequently, whentime erodes the self so that it is marginally or evenfundamentally different than it once was, thenquestions about continuity, identity andequivalence naturally arise (Turner, 1996). On thisprospect, it seemed essential to devise somemeasurement strategy that could work to back-light any remarkable change to the self that mightbe sufficient to set in motion those availableprocedural means which serve to bridge anylooming gaps in the plotline of one’s persistentidentity.Measurement Strategy

Given that adolescents are often notoriouslyshort of declarative self-knowledge and oftenreluctant to lay bare whatever knowledge they dopossess about themselves, anything resembling afrontal attack on their beliefs about their ownnumerical identity seemed doomed from the start.The alternative measurement strategy that weeventually hit upon, after numerous false starts,was one of subtle co-optation and entrapment, andgenerally involved attempts to make our ownguiding question about possible criteria forwarranting personal sameness a question that ouryoung research participants took over as their own.We worked to accomplish this, not so much byattempting to win their hearts, but, rather, bydelicately mouse-trapping their minds.

Step one in our three-step procedure consists ofsoliciting confessions about our informants routinecommitment to the idea that they, like others, havedurable identities. Perhaps because young peopleare so commonly driven by what Elkind (1967, p.


1028) calls “age dynamisms” (that is, by theirwish to put some comfortable distance betweenthemselves and their own more juvenile past), itmatters a great deal just how one goes aboutputting this question. Still, as it turns out, mostyoung people (as Gelman, and Keil, and Medin,among many others, already cited have shown)strongly subscribe to the idea that they arepersistently themselves, and are generally happy tosay so. With this much carefully established, ourgeneral practice has been to then go on, in steptwo, to press our research participants to describethemselves, first in the present, and then(depending on their age) at a second point 5 or 10years earlier. In doing all of this we urge andprompt them to supply as many descriptive detailsas they are able. With these two sets of “now” and“then” descriptions in hand, we go on to carefullydraw out as many points of difference as areavailable, all in an effort to emphasize howdistinctive our participants’ past and presentaccounts of themselves actually are.

With these two halves of a pendingcontradiction clearly laid out before them, we then(in step three) go straight for the seeming paradoxby asking our interviewees how they can reconciletheir previously stated conviction about their ownpersistence in the face of the clear evidence thatthey themselves have offered of typically dramaticpersonal change. In almost every instance this hasproved to be good enough. That is, mostparticipants regard themselves as having beenbrought up short, and in need of offering some (tothem) believable set of reasons as to how theirown apparently discordant claims for personalpersistence, and their assertions of personalchange can and should be reconciled, or otherwisebridged with good reasons. These accounts, whichwere for some short, and for others several typedtranscript pages long, became our primary sourceof data, and the basis upon which their responseswere ultimately characterized as reflecting either aNarrative or Essentialist self-continuity warrantingstrategy.Assessing Self & Others

At least two serious problems remain. One ofthese turns on the fact that talking publicly aboutone’s self to a perfect stranger (typically two adultstrangers: one interviewer, and one recorder) is notsomething that most adolescents relish—areluctance that only multiplies when, as was often

the case (see Chapter VI), such conversations weredone across a cultural divide.

Problem number two grows out of the fact thatour procedure, as so far described, only works toaccess thoughts about the persistence of “self,”and not “other.” How serious a problem thislimitation might prove to be depends very muchon one’s research interests and on whether peopleordinarily think about their own personalpersistence, and that of others, in the same ordifferent ways. Although answers to this questionare of potential relevance whatever the age ofone’s respondents, their importance naturallygrows in studies, such as our own, that aim to tella developmental, and even a cross-cultural story.Do young informants think, for example, abouttheir own persistence and that of their elders, orpersons from other cultures in the same ordifferent ways? Is their self-continuity warrantingstrategy Narrative or Essentialist through andthrough, or do they mix and match their approachto this problem as circumstances demand? Andwhat about possible differences in the levels ofcomplexity or abstraction or formal adequacy oftheir answers? Do we employ more or lesscomplicated ways of reasoning through theparadox of sameness and change when it comes toour own life? Does familiarity count for anythinghere, or does personal distance from the problembring out our analytical best? Are problems one(the problem of attempting to shout across acultural divide) and problem two (the problem oftalking about the self vs. others) related?

Although answers to some, if not all, of thesequestions are forthcoming, the early answer to atleast the last question on this list—the oneconcerning whether inquiring about thepersistence of self and other is related— is adefinite “yes.” Most respondents answer in thesame way most of the time whether they are beingasked about continuities in their own life or in thelives of others. This finding, which emerged earlyin our initial pilot efforts, offered a potential wayaround an initial reluctance on the part of many ofour respondents to openly talk about themselves.That is, as our work initially unfolded, it quicklybecame apparent that approaching most youngpeople with a long list of personal questions aboutthe particulars of their own identity was no way tobegin and consequently, for procedural reasons, ifno other, we found ourselves driven to search out away of posing similar questions about continuities


in the lives of others—others who we strategicallychose to ask about first.

Whereas asking about the personal persistenceof others was judged necessary for all of theconceptual and strategic reasons just outlined, amoment’s reflection makes it obvious that thiscannot be done easily. Obviously, differentinformants know different people, some of whomare believed to have changed a lot and others verylittle. Where is one to find proper target caseswhose circumstances are commonly understood,and whose lives are jointly known to besufficiently kaleidoscopic as to put one’s abilitiesto search out grounds for persistence in the face ofchange to a serious test? The right answer, as wehope to persuade you, is “in literature.”Stories of Character Development

What we gradually came to see as the not soobvious solution to our measurementproblem—the problem of finding appropriate“others” whose personal persistence is called intodoubt by familiar circumstance—was that certainliterary genres are self-consciously crafted to beabout just the problem of personal persistence thatwe have in mind. In particular, stories of characterdevelopment, or so-called Bildungsromane(Kontje, 1993), are purpose-built to be about livesin transition, and, if they are any good, to at leasthold the potential of persuading you that they arestories about one and the same person frombeginning to end. That is, in order to qualify asbona fide stories of character development, orotherwise meet what has come to be taken as thegold-standard for successful modern literature,their authors need to craft a credible case that theirhero or heroine, who, despite starting out one wayand ending up remarkably different, still qualifiesas a singular person whose transformations andwhose continuities are both believable. In all ofthis there is the germ of a solution to ourmeasurement dilemma. All we needed to do wasto persuade more than 400 adolescents of differentages and cultures to read some number of the greatbooks of Western literature and to attempt anaccount of how, for example, Ebenezer Scroogemanages to qualify as one and the same,admittedly much changed, person over the courseof one fate filled Christmas night, or how JeanValjean managed to work his way from being agalley slave to village patron without becoming anumerically different person along the way.Fortunately, as it is, not all of that reading is

necessary thanks to (depending on one’s tastes)the miracle or travesty of “Classic Comic Books”.These comics reduce classic works of literature toseveral dozen densely illustrated and easilydigested pages. With a set of these in hand the taskbecomes much more manageable. Adolescents canbe persuaded (as we can stand witness) to: a) readstill further abbreviated versions of these“classics”; b) comment on what such storycharacters were like at the beginning and end oftheir stories; and, c) be struck by thetransformations that occur in their lives. Mostimportant of all, they can be engaged in seriousdiscussion—discussions of the same sort that theyare later led into about themselves—concerningthe grounds upon which they judge these comicbook characters to be one and the same personthrough thick and through thin.Personal-Persistence Assessment Procedures

All of the above is, in fact, precisely what weinitially asked the young informants in ourresearch to do. That is, they were all asked: a) toread (and simultaneously hear a narrated audioversion of) at least one, and more typically two,such comics or pictured stories very much likethem; and, b) to respond, in the context of a tightlystructured interview, to a series of before and afterquestions about the continuity of these storycharacters; all before, c) finally being asked a setof parallel questions about themselves and changesin their own life.

At various points in this program of research anumber of variations on this theme wereintroduced. While more than half of the 10- to 20-year-olds that we interviewed were presentedabbreviated versions of either or both of VictorHugo’s Les Miserables, or Charles Dickens’ AChristmas Carol, and while most of these were inwhat we refer to later as the “Comic BookCondition,” others, who participated in lateroccurring studies, were instead made to watch aradically edited version of the classic (1951)Alistair Sims film based on Dickens’ story—all asa check upon the possibility that the readingdifficulties of some might unduly influence ourresults. Although our so-called “Self-Interview”was always given last (for reasons alreadydetailed), the order of stories presented and themedia in which they were presented were carefullycounterbalanced. Finally, because it struck us asunconscionable to attempt a cross-cultural studywhile relying more or less exclusively on story


materials drawn from Western European literature,we succeeded in locating, with the assistance ofexperts on West Coast Aboriginal film and storyforms, a picture-book version of a much repeatedFirst Nations story of character transformation(The Bear Woman), and a film produced by a teamof Aboriginal cinematographers that roughlyparallels the story of A Christmas Carol, that weagain edited down to a comparable length. Again,we worked to control the numbers of our FirstNations and culturally mainstream informants whowere exposed to written and filmed versions ofthese Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal stories.

In short, our measurement tools for accessingyoung people’s beliefs about their own and others’personal persistence eventually came to include: a)Classic Comic Book versions of Hugo’s LesMiserables and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; b) anillustrated Aboriginal story, The Bear Woman; c)excerpted fragments from the Alistair Sims filmversion of Dickens’ story, and a short film aboutchanges in the life of an Aboriginal adolescent;and finally d) a Self-Interview protocol to whichall participants responded. With occasionalexceptions that are noted elsewhere, allrespondents in all of the several studies to bereported were first interviewed about changes inthe lives of two of the story characters listed outabove, and then posed similar questions aboutchange and sameness in their own life. Whetherparticipants first responded to illustrated or filmedstories or both was varied in systematic waysacross the several studies to be reported. In everycase, however, the structured interview thatfollowed the presentation of these materials wascarefully standardized. This interview schedule,and the identically structured Self-Interviewprotocol, are both reproduced in Appendix A.

All respondents in all of the studies to bereported were “volunteers” who signed informedconsent agreements matching those alreadyprovided by their parent(s) or guardian(s), and(regardless of their level of participation) all werepaid a nominal “participation fee”. All wereaccompanied to their individual interview by anadult member of their school, hospital, orAboriginal Band. Two project staff (one a FirstNations co-worker in the case of Aboriginalrespondents) participated in each interview––oneas an observer-recorder. All interviews wereaudio-tape recorded, and typically lasted for onehour. With some (particularly the youngest)respondents these interviews were broken into two

30 minute sessions. In ways to be detailed later,some of these participants, depending on the studyin which they were involved, also completed otherquestionnaires and paper-and-pencil assessmentmeasures.

While the details of these secondary measureswill be introduced as the need arises, what cannotwait is a close accounting of the coding schemethat evolved across the course of our multiplestudies. Not all parts of this resulting typology ofalternative continuity warranting strategies wereavailable at the very outset of our program ofresearch. This is particularly the case with respectto those portions of our eventual coding schemethat have most to do with various Narrativesolution strategies––response types that only fullyemerged in countable numbers after we beganincluding First Nations youth in our samples.Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, we havedetailed below our most current and bestaccounting of this categorizing scheme, and willwork to make plain those earlier occasions onwhich all of the scoring distinctions on which wehave subsequently come to rely were not yetavailable.

A Typology of Alternative Self-ContinuityWarrants

Summed across the several studies we mean toreport, all of these assessment efforts have resultedin some 500 pages of typed transcripts thatrequired being (often multiply) coded in ways thatare detailed in the sections that immediatelyfollow. The part of these coding efforts that, bynow, will hopefully sound at least somewhatfamiliar is the part having to do with decidingwhether the continuity warranting practicesemployed by our informants generally qualified asbeing representative of what we have come toterm, either an Essentialist of Narrative “Track.”What we hope to capture by this particular choiceof language is the fact that, even though ourinformants varied in age and general cognitivesophistication, and consequently responded to ourinterview probes in more or less complex ways, itwas still typically possible to reliably code theirvaried remarks as instances of either an overallNarrative or Essentialist trajectory or track. Weprefer the term “track” to the more static andcategorical sounding notion of “type,” because itcarries with it some of the connotations of forwarddevelopmental movement that we mean toemphasize.


What is still left obscured by these broadcategory judgments are all of the more or lesssophisticated forms that these alternativecontinuity warranting strategies can and did take.Altogether, we have succeeded in conceptuallyand empirically distinguishing five different“Levels” of both Essentialist and Narrativeaccounts (see Table 1). The claim that we mean tomake about these parallel sets of Levels is thattogether they form an ascending sequence ofincreasingly “adequate” ways of framingEssentialist or Narrative arguments. That is, eachof the Levels that together make up either theNarrative or Essentialist Track represent responsetypes marked by the degree to which they makeroom for evidence of both sameness and change.Essentialist Levels judged to be lower in thesesequences, for example, either argue sameness atthe expense of change, or, in more or less heavy-handed ways, either discounted or trivialized orbracketed change in ways intended to securepermanence on the cheap. What immediatelyfollows is a more detailed accounting of thisproposed and practiced scoring typology. Thisaccount begins, as our research began, with adetailing of the Essentialist Track, and itsassociated five levels, all before turning to aparallel account of different levels within theNarrative track.A Typology of Alternative ContinuityWarrantsTrack I: “Essentialist” Explanatory Frameworks

All of the five distinctive sorts of entity basedcontinuity warranting strategies that we havebrought together under the broad banner ofEssentialism, or Track I, have as their commondenominator the fact that those who employ themall imagine that it is possible vouchsafe personalpersistence by identifying some aspect of self orother that stands apart from time, therebyjustifying their minimizing the significancepersonal changes recognized to be occurringelsewhere. When confronted with such evidenceof large-scale personal change, the first impulse of

all of our respondents who have, in one way oranother, taken an Essentialist turn has been toidentify something more enduring—somethingsupposedly immune to the ravages of time. That is,they worked to define themselves and others interms of some more or less abstract or substantive“entity” or “essence” (Barclay & Smith, 1990) thatthey understood to stand apart, or hide out fromtime in ways that rendered those personal changesthat do inevitably occur as somehow only partial,or merely presentational, or otherwise trivial.

Altogether, five progressive “Levels” ofEssentialist forms of argumentation have emergedfrom our analysis, which we have gone on to label:1) Simple Inclusion; 2) Topological; 3) Preformist;4) Frankly Essentialist; and, 5) Revisionistcontinuity warranting practices. Here they are inturn.Level 1: Simple Inclusion arguments

The least elaborate of these Essentialistaccounting strategies, labeled here as “SimpleInclusion Arguments,” are predicated on an “addon” picture of personhood according to whicheach of us is imagined to be something analogousto what Lacan (1968, p. 599) called a “corpsmorcele” or “body in parts”—some looselyfederated additive assemblage of merelyjuxtaposed autobiographical bits and pieces thatare haphazardly collaged on, and can be just aseasily sloughed off. When compelling evidence ofpersonal change is highlighted, such respondentseffectively change the subject by re-directingattention to something else about themselves orothers that is, at least for the moment, morechange resistant. The individual elements of thisbuilding bricolage are, then, generally seen tocome and go without remarkable consequence, orwithout seriously calling into question issues ofpersonal persistence, at least so long as theremnant bits and pieces still available include atleast one discrete atomic fact that stubbornlyremains, and can still be pointed to as theguarantor of one’s diachronic singularity.

Although evidently only minimally committed

Table 1: Forms of Personal Persistence Warrants

Track I: Essentialist—Selves as Enduring “Entities” Track II: Narrative—Selfhood within a “Relational” Framework

Level 1: Simple Inclusion Accounts Level 1: Episodic AccountsLevel 2: Topological Accounts Level 2: Picaresque Accounts

Level 3: Preformist Accounts Level 3: Causal AccountsLevel 4: Frankly Essentialist Accounts Level 4: Frankly Narrative AccountsLevel 5: Revisionist Accounts Level 5: Interpretive Accounts


to the notion that claims on behalf of personalpersistence require serious backing, whatever partof this obligation respondents pursuing Level Iresponse strategies do experience is apparentlyseen by them to be easily satisfied by whateverleap-to-mind, concrete, often physicalistic featureof the self appears to have most successfullywithstood the ravages of time. More particularly,those of our respondents who were scored at thisSimple Inclusion level were quick to grant thatthey or others have changed in all of the ways thatthey themselves had listed out, but went on tohappily rest their case for continuity on thepersistence of names, addresses, the straystrawberry birthmark, or whatever randomsignature feature of their identity came mostreadily to hand.

What is obviously wrong with this simplest ofEssentialist strategies is that it fails to seriouslyengage the permanence-change dialectic, butadopts instead a less articulated, divide-and-conquer solution strategy that centers exclusivelyon sameness, while simply ignoring change.Worse still, although readily available emblematicbadges of personal persistence, such as one’sfingerprints, for example, do ordinarily manage tostand somewhat apart from time, they are,nevertheless, typically rather poor at passing whatphilosophers (and life) call “survival tests” (i.e., ifyou are still you only because your fingerprintsendure, what would happen if your hands were cutoff?). In short, such Simple Inclusion (I-1)continuity warranting strategies can generally bemade to work only by trivializing who or what it isthat we take ourselves to be.

Examples. Respondents coded at this levelordinarily have little to say about change, andconcentrate their attention almost exclusively onwhatever ready-to-hand thing that, for themoment, seems to be standing pat, including: “Myname is the same.” “I guess it is my DNA, itsalways the same.” “…the way he looks is thesame…just his actions are different.”

Still, not every version of such SimpleInclusion arguments is as “simple” as those justlisted out. John Updike (1989) captures somethingof the special flavor of more grown-up instancesof Level I “Essentialist” arguments in thefollowing passage about an old puncture wound.

In the palm of my right hand [he tellsus], in the meaty part below the indexfinger, exists a small dark dot, visible

below the translucent skin, a dot that is Iknow the graphite remains of a stab witha freshly sharpened pencil that Iaccidentally gave myself in junior highschool one day, hurrying betweenclasses in the hall, a moment amongcountless forgotten moments that hasthis ineradicable memorial. I stillremember how it hurt, and slightlybled—a slow dark drop of blood, roundas a drop of mercury. I think of it often.(Updike, 1989, p. 213)

It is possible to be both literate and at Level I,but more often, when more mature judgment isbrought to bear on the problem of one’s diachronicsingleness, it results in responses (eitherEssentialist or Narrative responses) that are codedat higher levels. The more sophisticated forms ofEssentialism that, with increasing age or cognitivecomplexity, commonly take the place of suchLevel I arguments still share in common a relianceupon identifying some unchanging part on whichclaims for persistence are made to rest. What doesordinarily change is the level of abstraction orinternality at which such structural claims arepitched, and in the amount of care and concerntaken to explain away the relevance of thoseaspects of the self or other that do suffer evidentchange.Level 2: Topological accounts

What gives this second Essentialist basedgroup of Topological (I-2) continuity warrantingstrategies their defining character is that theybegin by rejecting as inadequate all still simplerclaims to the effect that the self is no more thansome transient collection of arbitrary parts, andsubstitute in their place a somewhat betterorganized architecture according to which the selfis envisioned as a kind of empty surface structurenot unlike one of those hollow polyhedronic deskcalendars that presents a different plastic face orfacet for each month, and that lends itself to beingdifferently viewed from different vantages.Responses coded at this second Essentialist levelare, therefore, the first to seriously flirt with theproblems of sameness and change simultaneously,at least in so far as they evidence some initialappreciation of the fact that their argument forself-persistence is undermined if evidence in favorof real, unadulterated change is simply allowed tostand. The tensions generated through thisminimal engagement of the problem are quickly


resolved, however, by discounting the “change”half of the “sameness-change dialectic” as beingmerely “apparent” or “presentational,” andinsisting that, although one or another aspect ofone’s identity may well be thrown into temporaryeclipse, real foundational change is impossible,amounting, when it seems to occur, to no morethan what Shotter (1984) has called a spatialrepositioning of parts. The continuity warrantingpractices which grow out of such topologicalconceptions of self do manage, then, to “solve” theproblem of personal persistence, but only bydiscounting, or otherwise writing off all realchanges as matters of mere appearance.

Fundamental to this warranting strategy is thecontention that, whatever others might hold up asevidence for the existence of some apparentlynovel aspect of the self, these were in fact alreadypresent from the beginning, although perhapstemporarily obscured (e.g. “It looks to you likeI’ve changed, but that’s just because you’ve neverseen this side of me before”). The idea thatsomeone has an angel on one shoulder and a devilon the other, or that some otherwise well-intentioned people are “mean drunks,” are bothfamiliar instances of these Level 2 forms ofEssentialist reasoning. Considerably more matureexpressions of this same polyhedronic approachcan be found in Bakhtin’s (1986) account of the“polyphonic” voices at work in the inner lives ofDostoevsky’s characters, or in the “dialogicalselves” described by Hermans, Kempen and vanLoon (1992).

Examples. Our own young informants oftenrespond in ways that amount to the same thing:“Scrooge will say ‘I’m not that way anymore…maybe there’s something that hasn’tchanged’…maybe [he’s] still angry and just keepsit to himself;” or “Frank might have times when hegets depressed again and angry...but then again, hecould have his days when he just doesn’t want totalk to anybody anymore...like get back to thesame old Frank...that’s what I think of people thatchange.”

What sets these Level 2 Topological accountsapart from the continuity warrants offered by theirLevel 3 counterparts is their synchroniccommitment to the idea that all of the diverse partsthat make up a self are necessarily simultaneouslypresent. By contrast, Level 3 “Preformist”arguments to which we now mean to turn, allowfor the possibility that some of one’s enduring

parts are, at times, merely nascent and waiting inthe wings.Level 3: Preformist accounts

Third in this list of increasingly complexEssentialist solutions to the paradox of samenesswithin change is a class of, this time moretemporally organized, “Preformist” models thatmake some modest provision for the workings oftime. Such Level I Track 3 (I-3) accounts of selvesand their associated continuity warrantingpractices are variously maturational or“epigenetic” in character, and happily allow forapparent novelty, so long as those changes involvethe coming to fruition of some always present, butpreviously obscured, nascent aspect of the self, theeventual emergence of which was necessary andpre-ordained. That is, although sameness andchange are both recognized, the strategy adoptedas a way out of what would otherwise beunderstood as a paradox is to view the self aspossessing enduring attributes—attributes that,though not all equally evident at everydevelopmental moment, are at least alwaysimmanent, and merely waiting in the wings fortheir natural time of ascendancy, typically inaccordance with some imagined pre-arrangedground plan. On this account, the apparently novelaspects of one’s character that often emerge duringadolescence, for example, are understood (by suchadolescents themselves) as being the analogue ofrelated and more physical changes, such as the lateemergence on one’s “grown-up” teeth, or one’ssecondary sexual characteristics. That is,respondents at this third Essentialist level continueto imagine that it is impossible to get morecomplex structures out of less complex structures.As such, Level 3 Essentialist accounts fail to allowfor emergence or true novelty, instead regardingany seemingly new structures of the self asnecessarily having already been present, at least insome nascent form, from the very beginning.Snapshots taken at different junctures along anindividual’s pre-ordained life-course sometimescreate what is, at best, the false impression thatthere is actually something really new under thesun. The appearance of novelty is an illusionsuffered by those lacking a proper understandingof how life normally unfolds. Such epigenetic ormaturational continuity warranting strategiesserve, then, primarily to ward off such illusions byfinding ways of winning the argument that, despiteseeming evidence to the contrary, each and everyimportant aspect of the self is, and has always


been, in some sense, present from the verybeginning.

Examples. Examples of such Level 3Essentialist arguments include such comments as:“I know that I look like I am different, but Ialways had it in me to be just the way you see meright now;” or “because everything she did, shecould have done before —it was all there. Thebear people just made her realize it was there. LikeValjean, Rhpisunt had Bear Woman in her all, allthe time, but she needed somebody to help her seehow to get it out;” or “Monsieur Madeline wasinside Valjean all along. It’s just when he helpedthose people in that burning fire, he changed.Madeline came out and stayed out.”

Whereas Level 3 Preformist accounts, like theirLevel Two predecessors, do minimally succeed indealing (dismissively) with novelty by gesturingmore or less vaguely in the direction of regularitiesin the customary process of human growth anddevelopment, they lack any really effectiveprocedural means for counting some changes asbeing less important than others. That, in anutshell, is the advantage achieved in responsesscored as Essentialism, Level 4.Level 4: Frankly Essentialist accounts

Fourth in this list of increasingly more complexsolutions to the problem of personal persistence isa class of warranting strategies that hinge upon theintroduction of something like a genotype-phenotype distinction—a division of labor thatpermits one to actively acknowledge and subsumechange, rather than simply overlooking or denyingits existence. Committed to something like whatPolkinghorne (1988) has characterized as a“metaphysics of substance,” according to which itis automatically assumed that foundational mattersof great importance are always buried deep, suchLevel Four Frank Essentialists are alwaystunneling into themselves and others, all in aneffort to get past their changeable surface-structureand down to the real essential heart of thematter—their unchanging core self. That is,persons who employ this strategy necessarilyregard the self as a hierarchically organizedstructure with a certain internality, the deeperlying foundational layers of which are taken to bemore central to, and defining of, the true “essence”of one’s unique nature. Given this hierarchicalarrangement, change, or at least changes of acertain presumably superficial sort, can be writtenoff as mere epiphenomena, while, beneath this

transient phenotypic surface layer, there can stillbe imagined to remain at work some moresubterranean core of essential sameness—somerock bottom of stubbornly persistent selfhood,capable of productively paraphrasing itself inendless surface variations.

Armed with this new procedural move,practitioners of such Level Four (I-4) strategies areable to argue in favor of “real,” if superficial,change, without also being required to abandon thepossibility of personal persistence. This isaccomplished by envisioning the deepest levels ofthe self as having a fixed foundational status,while more surface level attributes (mere windowdressings) are thought to be free to vary. Giventhis distinction between those supposedly deeper-lying and definitive things that are thought to formthe subterranean and productive, but unchangingcore of one’s identity, and all of those endlessconcrete variations that make up the phenotypicsurface structure of one’s outward life, any changethat can be made to fit within the second of thesecategories can be easily discounted as beingmerely superficial, and so really beside the pointof personal persistence. In short, change is seen tooccur only at the surface, while an essentialist,subterranean, genotypic core is imagined toremain unaltered.

Examples. Paradigmatic examples of suchLevel Four Essentialist continuity warrants includesuch claims as: “I have always been competitive.When I was little I wanted to win races, now Iwant to get the best grades;” or “Valjean wasalways trying to do the best he could. In thebeginning people just didn’t want him aroundbecause he looked like a bum. Once the priest hadgiven him that silver he was able to get ahead.”

Running across the things that are imagined tovary across different versions of such essentialistaccounting schemes is a kind of depth ofprocessing dimension, expressive of the relativedegree of abstraction in terms of which seeminglydistinct past and present aspects of the self areimagined to be joined. Toward the shallow end ofthis continuum are, for example, relatively modesttrait concepts such as “artistic” or “athletic,” thatserve to join the differences seen to arise when, forexample, one’s interests switch from the visual tothe performing arts, or from swimming to fieldhockey. At increasingly subterranean levels onefinds more disembodied notions such as“personality,” or even (pulling out all the stops)


something as top-lofty as an immaterial,featureless and immutable “soul.”

By successfully getting both permanence andchange inside the same problem space, Level I-4Essentialist accounts of this sort move importantlybeyond the Simple Inclusion, Topological, andPreformist arguments outlined earlier. Howeverotherwise successful in helping to finesse theparadox of sameness and change, there arepotential costs to be paid for hiding away theenduring stuff and making what is publiclyavailable little more than a cover story. Evenstaking one’s hopes for persistence on anything asfickle as a “trait” can prove to be a riskyinvestment. Given enough time, traits often changetoo. Souls, or something like them (whichpotentially solve the problem of personalpersistence by claiming, among other things, to beboth featureless and attributeless), are long ongenerality, but short on interpersonal currency, andso work to promote various unstable dualisticassumptions about indwelling spirits or other“ghosts in the machine” (Barclay & Smith, 1990)decoupled from the practical concerns of daily life.While change can scarcely catch you out if theessential you is entirely denuded of all of itspotentially fickle features, this would-be escapehatch comes equipped with its own rather steepmaintenance costs.Level 5: Revisionist accounts

Finally, and perhaps because people sometimesbridle at the fatalistic implications of having thepresumptive core of their selfhood “given onceand for all, complete and perfect, in an ultimatesystem of essences” (Schlesinger, 1977, p. 271),there exists at least one further form of Essentialistcontinuity warrants that we have labeled Level 5Revisionist Accounts. What respondents whoadopt this strategy seem to appreciate is thatwinning the argument in favor of one’s personalpersistence at the cost of invoking an absolutelyimmutable soul or some die-cast personalitystructure is simply too high a price to pay forguaranteed protection against failing the test ofdiachronic singleness. Rather, they voice a newdisenchantment with persistence purchased at theprice of even genotypic fixity, and work to amendwhat were often their own earlier assumptionsabout enduring sameness by bracketing theirpresent beliefs about core aspects of themselves assomehow provisional and “theory-like.” Theyoften do this by offering up various competing

views about their own or others’ personality orcharacter, and by suggesting that either account isequally in the running for a truth in a way that issomehow beyond knowing. By such lights, claimsabout the basis of personal persistence and changeare understood as something more akin to a“working hypothesis” than a brute fact of thematter literally uncovered by somehow turning themind’s eye back upon itself. As will be made clearin subsequent sections, such talk about revised orprovisionalized conceptions of selfhood begin tocross over and are hard to distinguish from othermore relational or Narrative like conceptions of“re-emplotment.”

Examples. Given the relatively tender age ofthe young people who participated in the studies tobe reported here, instances of such Revisionist orLevel Five arguments are rather far and fewbetween. Still, responses of this sort were presentin our data set, including answers of the followingsort: “I am the ship that sails through the troubledwaters of my life;” or “I feel like I understand‘me’—but I know things can happen and I’ll haveto see ‘me’ all different all over again”.Track II: “Narrative” Explanatory Frameworks

In contrast to their more Essentialistcounterparts, those of our informants coded asrelying upon some Narrative-like accountingstrategy were less quick to dismiss as irrelevant allof those parts of themselves and others thatrefused to remain the same. Instead they appearedmuch more ready to actually embrace change, andto harness or tame time by somehow serializing it,or otherwise locking it into some maturational orcause-effect or plot-like relational structure thatcould successfully bind the different installmentsof their identity into some ordered “leading to”system of follow-able meanings. In short, for thosewho fell into this second Narrative Track,questions about personal persistence were seen asless of a challenge to ferret out those parts of theself that had successfully hidden out from time,and more of an invitation to find new ways ofexplaining how change from beginning to endtakes place.

As already hinted at above, respondents codedin this fashion also seemed generally lesschallenged by being directly confronted with thefact that they (or others) had changed dramaticallyacross time, and when reminded of how differentlythey had described themselves and others “then”and “now,” they often appeared puzzled as to why


this was meant to count as some bone ofcontention. More often than not, they simplybegan again explaining how they were once thisway and had later gone on to be some other wayentirely—all of this without reneging for amoment on their insistence that, yes, they were,without personal doubt, relentlessly one and thesame person. When finally clear about why thismight be seen as a problem, they standardlybrought out whatever sort of umbilical relationsthey were relying upon all along to bridge suchevident differences—relations they had tacitlyassumed were already obvious. Like theirEssentialist counterparts they were, however, notborn into the world fully fledged, and so were notall equally clear about what they intended to use asglue to hold all of the diverse time slices of theirlives together. Nor were all of these brands ofadhesive equally effective in keeping the story oftheir life from falling apart.

Again, in direct contrast to those of ourrespondents who proceeded in a more Essentialistfashion by trying to locate some entity-basedisland of sameness in an otherwise horizonless seaof personal differences, those who practice moreNarrative-like strategies were further distinguishedby the fact that they more or less reject out of handthe very possibility that there might exist somesubstantive something—some enduringarchitecturalized feature of the self—thatsuccessfully stands outside of time. Instead, theseinformants tended to rest their case for persistenceon the claim that all of the various time slices thatmake up a biography are somehow stitchedtogether by the fact that they are meaningful andunderstandable parts of a common chronology orpersonal narrative. That is, instead of dismissingas irrelevant all of those parts of themselves thatchange, respondents of this second more Narrativesort dismiss nothing.

What distinguishes these various Narrativeefforts, one from the other, is that not all of ourrespondents made an equally good job of thebusiness of emplotting their lives, nor did theyseem to have the same idea about what is entailedin making an account a real story. Consequently, itis again possible to distinguish what turn out to befive progressively different lines of such Narrativearguments, each of which have some counterpartin the wide literature on discourse based, ornarrative approaches to the meaning of selfhood(e.g., Lightfoot, 1997; Rorty, 1976). That is, eachof these alternative Narrative approaches to the

problem of continuity takes as its starting point adifferent conception of the structure or architectureof the self, and makes different assumptions aboutthe nature of the connections between the variousepisodes that collectively make a career out ofsomeone’s life story.Level 1: Episodic accounts

As is the case with those at each of the otherNarrative Levels to be summarized here, responsescoded as being of this Level One or Episodic (II-1)sort generally concluded that the telling of somesort of story that was naturally shot through withtime was necessary, if not sufficient, to guaranteepersonal persistence. That is, in contrast to themore Essentialist based accounts of their lessdiscursively oriented counterparts, a definingfeature of this and all Narrative responses is thatthey each “take time seriously” (Schlesinger,1977, p. 271), and otherwise reflected anunderstanding that selves are inescapably “beingsin time” (Flanagan, 1996, p. 67). What does go onto set Level One Episodic accounts apart fromother more complex Narrative strategies is thatthose who relied on them seemed to have missedE. M. Forster’s (1927/1954, p. 51) admonition thatjust having a story “is not the same as [having] aplot.” Rather, when laying out the putativelycontinuous bits and pieces of their own and others’lives, they seemed only to imagine, as Whiteheadfamously put it, that life is just “one damned thingafter another” (Gallagher, 1998, p. 87). As such,they only minimally engage the problem ofcontinuity, and attempt to vouchsafe permanenceby offering up a simple, add-on, chronologicallisting of the contingent events that, taken togethermake up the episodic details of a passing life—alife without noticeable rhyme or reason.

Examples. “First Bear Woman dropped herberries, then the bears came. Then she was aprisoner…;” or “Because five years ago I was inthe 7th grade, then we moved, later we moved backagain…”

Such chain-link Episodic accounts differ fromtheir Level 2 counterparts, to which we now turn,primarily because the young people who employthem apparently feel no compunction to lay anyreal claims about what, beyond the mere passingof time, connects one episode in a life to the next.Level 2: Picaresque accounts

In contrast to Level 1 Episodic accounts,responses scored as Level 2 (II-2) tended torepresent real, if somewhat run-on, stories


reminiscent of what Rorty (1976) and Lightfoot(1997) describe as early “Picaresque” novels, orstill earlier “Medieval Romances”—stories inwhich the episodes of one’s own life (like the livesof Sir Lancelot or Don Quixote) are not so muchactively “related,” as arbitrarily strung together,like so many beads on a string, sans legitimate plotor coherent changes of character. Althoughcontaining the germ of a plot, it is not much of aplot, and certainly doesn’t contain much in theway of coherent character change. In fact, thewhole point of such Medieval Romances andPicaresque tales is precisely to illustrate thatknights are true and unwavering in theirconstancy. Similarly, some of our respondents toldrelated stories about themselves, and they tendedto return again and again to the theme that,adversity aside, they were, after all, relentlesslythemselves. Respondents scored at this secondlevel, then, like the heroes of the other stories onwhich they commented, tend to offer up whatRorty (1976) calls “characters” or “figures,” asopposed to something less transparent orpredictable, such as “persons” or “selves” or“individuals.” What passes for a plot in theseaccounts is simply a listing out of episodes inwhich the hero acts in ways that confirm their truecharacter. That is, they and others are understoodto possess only a kind of “functional identity”(Rorty, 1976, p. 306), according to which onesimply is what one does. Within such accountscircumstances change, but persons—so long asthey are true to their nature—do not.

Examples. “Well, he would probably tell themthe way he was and that he… I don’t know, justbelieved in his dream to become that leader...;” or“Even when I was real young I knew I wanted tobe a doctor. You could just say that everything isrelated to that.”

Picaresque arguments, while they do run somethin narrative threads through the sequentialepisodes of lives, do so minimally and rarely inways that support more fundamental change.Level 3: Foundational acounts

According to respondents scored at this thirdFoundational level, (II-3) the present self is seenas either: a) the inevitable effect of which one’sancestral past is the antecedent or determinantcause; or b) the natural outgrowth of a perfectlypredictable process of maturation. In contrast torepresentatives of Level II-2 Picaresque forms ofNarrative self-understanding, subjects categorized

at this level understand themselves and others tohave actually discovered a sort of directionality orcanalized “plot” in the form of such maturationalor cause-and-effect sequences—sequences thatgive coherence and meaning to what areacknowledged to be real changes in their lives.The defining feature, then, of this Foundationalapproach is to be found in the fact that the threadsthat are imagined to stitch together the fabric ofpast and present lives are always understood to befully determinate, such that the new person onehas gone on to become is taken to be the inevitableconsequence of antecedent causal events whichhave set such a life on its unwavering, andtherefore fatalistic, course. Here, self-awareness ischaracterized by a kind of nostalgia, or backwardlooking sense, in which one’s life is givenNarrative meaning by tracing back somematurational/cause-and-effect sequence. In thesecases, permanence is understood to be onlyapparent, or epiphenomenal, and the result of atautological argument in which one claims that“I’m always what I’ve been caused/led to be.” Allof this needs to be understood as an advance overstill simpler Episodic or Picaresque Accounts thatlack this more diachronic, or “leading to”dimension. At the same time, however, responsesof this Level Three sort are unremittinglyfatalistic, and trapped by their own determiningpast. Present life is only the passively sufferedeffect of which one’s earlier life is the antecedentmechanical cause (Bunge, 1963).

Examples. “I’d say [Scrooge] had no choice butto turn into a better man because he didn’t want toturn out like his friend…;” or “Its because theBear People caught her and wouldn’t let her go.She had to change, and couldn’t change back.”

Level 3 Foundational accounts differ fromthose that succeed them in that the cause-effectsequences on which they rest are generallycontingent and arbitrary, and so lack thedimensions of meaning and authenticity(Lightfoot, 1997) of those that come later.Level 4: Frankly Narrativist accounts

What distinguishes responses scored at thisFourth Level from their counterparts at Level II-3is not so much their “leading-to,” or past-to-present orientation, which they both share, as it isthe fact that their whole understanding of suchdeterminate relations appears to have becomesomehow more liberalized. Available evidencesuggests that this happens in one or both of two


ways. First, respondents who operate at this levelbetter understand that the causal effects of pastcircumstances are not confined within one body orone consciousness, but radiate out centrifugally toinclude the activities of others, including, forexample, one’s parents and teachers, and otherswhose lives intermingle with one’s own. At thesame time, such Level 4 respondents come to viewthemselves less as pawns of circumstance, or whatBandura (1986, p. 12) calls simple “mechanicalconveyors of animating environmental forces,”and more like what Lakoff and Johnson (1999)have called “embodied agents,” who shareresponsibility for the way that things go in theirlives. Taken together, these centrifugal andcentripetal forces act to increasingly free themfrom the dead hand of a determining past, butobligate them still to consider the vectored forcesat work in their lives, and to solve this differentialequation by computing the conditions that they seeas dictating the broken-field course of their ownand other’s run at the future. They do this, inimportant part, by imagining, as Dennett (1978,1987) and Flanagan (1996) jointly suggest, that theself works as a desubstantialized “narrative centerof gravity” at work in one’s own life—a narrativewith a plot that one is obliged to “discover” ifproper sense is to be made of what has and willhappen. Consequently, this effort to grasp andexplicate the hidden plot-line assumed to berunning through their lives is always a work inprogress, and such respondents’ accounts ofthemselves often begin with some version of “Iused to think that X, but given Y, I now realize thatZ.” In short, such Level Four respondentsregularly see the path of self-“discovery” asmarked by multiple missteps and miscalculationsthat need to be corrected if they are to properlyduke out what is up with them.

Examples. “[Life] is just like reading a bookand not liking it, ya know? Like if there’s a changeor...if you skipped a couple of pages...youcontinue reading it and you find [how] it turnsout...if you read on and realize what type of person[he is], like if he changed and if he didn’t;” or “okay I’ll tell you something...why he’s the sameis...like you can’t be...you couldn’t do this like intwo days...but (only) through a lifetime... [Frank]mentioned that he was going to take a first stepand that step was in a new direction and in a newlife...”; or “I used to be quiet and stuff...but I had achange...I just realized that...okay...I don’t knowhow to explain it...I guess it would be a shock to

others. It is not as much of a shock to me because Iknow my life...and if they want to know out ofcuriosity, they could ask me...and I could tellthem.”

What is generally missing from such franklyNarrativist accounts is any sense that, even givenadequate resources, it may still remain impossibleto ever come to the true and hidden plotline ofone’s life, or, more to the point, that such “plots”are themselves a human construction.Level 5: Interpretive accounts

Narrative or Track II continuity warrantsscored at this fifth, and final, level are principallydifferentiated from other less “provisionalized”antecedent forms by the emphasis that respondentscoded into this scoring category manage to placeon their own and others’ active roles ininterpretively constructing whatever order isascribed to the temporarily sequenced events oflife. In particular, what largely set such argumentsapart from others sorted as Level II-4, is theiremphasis on the fact that the plot now imagined tobest characterize the unfolding events of their livesis not some pre-ordained drift in the course of theiraffairs that needs to be hit upon or “discovered,”but, rather, merely represents their current bestapproximation of an imagined pattern seen to lendtheir autobiography some followable, ifprovisional, interpretive meaning. That is, inunrecognized concert with contributors tocontemporary discourse theory (e.g., Holland,1997), such respondents no longer understandtheir current efforts to emplot their own lives asthe “discovery” of some guiding principle thatcould hardly have been otherwise, but instead,regard their own efforts at meaning making asonly the latest in a perhaps endless series ofattempts to interpretively re-read the past in lightof the present (Polkinghorne, 1988). In otherwords, because such informants respond in waysthat signal an awareness that the story of their lifemust necessarily include, among other things,what they now judge to be earlier failed attemptsat emplotment, they typically evidence a certainskepticism about the future prospects of what theypresently take to be true about themselves(Ricoeur, 1983). Rather, the text of their life, “likeany text, is ‘naturally’ seen to be open to multiplereadings” (Derrida, 1978, p. 227). Faced with apotential cutting room floor covered in earlierdrafts of their life story, such young peopletypically see no alternative to effectively de-


substantalize the job of scripting themselves andothers, and so evidence some recognition that, asHarré (1979) suggests, their only hope of findingreal continuity in lives is through their ownongoing efforts to make sense of them.

Examples. “It’s like in your mind…like Frank’spast will always be with him, but he doesn’t wanthis future to be the same. …what happened orwhat he did to his past...like he will always havedisrespect for that, but he can try to make up forit...act on his past.”The Morphology of Personal Persistence at aGlance

In summary, this typology, with its 2 Tracks(Essentialist and Narrative) and 5 associatedLevels, came to serve as the eventual scoring keyagainst which the responses of the participants inour most recent studies were held up andclassified. While our earlier and previouslypublished studies made use of somewhat less fine-grained distinctions, and, in particular, overlookedsome of the Levels that now compose theNarrative response Track, these oversights are not,we believe, sufficient to break the general threadof sameness that runs through all of these data.Because all respondents in the various studies tobe reported received both a Track and a Levelscore for their responses to both the Self-Interviewportion of our general assessment procedure, andfor at least one, and more regularly two, attemptsto account for continuities in the lives of variousfilm or storybook characters, as many as sixdifferent data points (3 Track and 3 Levelassignments) were available for most of ourparticipants. This allowed for a variety of differentorders of comparison, all of which are taken up inthe studies that follow. More particularly, it waspossible to determine whether participantsresponded in the same or different ways whenconsidering their own and other’s personalpersistence, and whether the Track or Level oftheir responses varied as a function of the culturalcontent of the story materials employed, or the“media” in which they were presented. Toanticipate the results of all of these latercomparisons, it generally proved to be the casethat the large majority of the participants tested inour most recent studies responded inindistinguishable ways (i.e., received the sameTrack and Level scores) regardless of whetherthey were commenting on self or other, and inways seemingly immune to the cultural content(Native vs. non-Native) of the story materials

employed, or the media (comic book vs. film) usedfor their presentation (see Chapter VI for details).In those cases in which not all of the measurescollected were interchangeable, and when a singleTrack or Level score was required, participantswere credited with the “highest” Level obtained,and assigned the Track most commonly or mostadequately employed.Data quality & Scoring Reliability

Because, as signaled earlier, both ourassessment procedures and scoring criteriaevolved across the more than 10 years of datacollection to be summarized, there is no single setof numbers that fully capture the quality of ourdata, or the coherence and replicability of ourcoding efforts. What we take to be the bestavailable window onto these measurement issuesis provided by the largest and most recent of ourcompleted studies, more fully reported here inChapter VI. In this omnibus study, 175 Aboriginaland non-Aboriginal youth were posed a total of554 opportunities to comment on their own orothers’ personal persistence. Of these, 513, or 92.6percent were sufficiently clear and detailed tosupport our coding efforts. Here, then, aselsewhere in our extended sequence of studies, ourtesting materials and interview protocol proved tobe sufficiently interesting and clear to produceuseable evidence from the large majority of ouryoung and culturally variable participants.

Of these 513 scoreable units, more than half(60%) were independently coded by two trainedraters, one of whom was always blind to the sex,age, and cultural status of the respondents. Withregard to the primary assignment of responses to“Track” (i.e., Essentialist vs. Narrative continuitywarranting strategy), these raters achieved an 85percent agreement rate. With reference to thepotentially more variable matter of “Levels”assignment, the overall agreement rate was 86percent for all of the cases in which there wasprior agreement on Track. These results, which arein close accord with other of our previouslypublished findings summarized elsewhere in thisMonograph, offer reasonable grounds forconfidence that our novel measurement proceduresand elaborate scoring typology do produceevidence that meets the accepted standardscommon in social science research.Early Lines of Evidence

Before coming to the bulk of newer evidence tobe presented in Chapters V and VI, it will prove


useful to begin by first briefly recapping certainearlier and previously published findings––datathat has, in several cases, been supplemented withthe addition of new cases––that have served aspilot efforts and justificatory support for ourongoing work. Chapter IV revisits andsupplements two studies by Ball and Chandler(1989) and Chandler and Ball (1990) that linkabsolute failures on the part of certainpsychiatrically hospitalized adolescents tounderstand the basis for their own continuity intime to the presence of serious suicidal behaviors.Before coming to this more clinical account,however, the balance of the present chapter isgiven over to a brief synopsis of a still earlier setof studies (i.e., Chandler, Boyes, Ball, & Hala,1986; 1987) that represent our beginning efforts tomeasure young people’s beliefs about self-continuity and to set these findings in relation toage and more standardized measures of cognitivematurity.

Before taking up these studies in turn, specialattention deserves to be drawn to the fact that, inneither of these earlier efforts, is there anyreference to what we have gone on to callNarrative solutions to the problem of personalpersistence. With the benefit of hindsight,responsibility for this shortfall is now seen tobelong, not only to our own initial culturallysanctioned biases––as Rorty (1987, p. 57) pointsout, Western “Judeo-Graeco-Roman-Christian-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Romanticist” cultureis, first and foremost, an Essentialist culture––butto the fact that, as our recent data shows, the largebulk (80+%) of culturally mainstream youth of thesort who filled up the ranks of our earlier studysamples rely almost exclusively on Essentialistself-continuity warranting strategies. In short,Essentialism is quite common among the largelyCaucasian, middle class youth who found theirway into our earliest studies. In retrospect, itwould appear that the rare instances of responsesthat would now be confidently coded as Narrative-like were, at the time, simply overlooked orotherwise discarded as unscorable. While suchscoring confusions no doubt becloud certainmatters that we would prefer to have kept clear, asit turns out, they were simply too few and farbetween to present any serious practical problemsfor our present purpose of rehearsing certainotherwise clear relations between young people’sthoughts about personal persistence, on the one

hand, and matters of age and cognitivedevelopment, on the other.Pilot Study One: Age and Self-Continuity

The first of these initial studies was simplymeant to pilot what was then a newly craftedmeasurement strategy and to explore the sorts ofthings that young people of different ages actuallysay in response to close questioning about thegrounds for their beliefs about their own andothers’ personal persistence. An ancestral or firstdraft form of the typology, and the rudiments ofthe associated scoring criteria, described earlier inthis chapter (or at least that half of it concernedwith Essentialist continuity warranting strategies)was largely abducted from our reading of thetangent literature reviewed in Chapter II, and theemerging findings of this study. As more fullydescribed in the earlier published study (i.e.,Chandler, et al., 1986) a total of 40 boys and 40girls drawn in almost equal proportion and equalnumber from the first, third, fifth, seventh, tenthand twelfth grades of a middle income Canadianmetropolitan public school system served asrespondents. Finally, a sample of conveniencemade up of 15 male and female first and secondyear college students was added as a way ofanchoring this age distribution.

Although the methods and procedures followedin interviewing the seventh, tenth, and twelfthgraders were close approximations of thosealready described, the actual story materials thatwe used as prompts to discussions about personalpersistence for the younger half of our samplewere not. With the aim of offering story materialsmore in keeping with the abilities and interests ofthe first, third and fifth graders, we provided, inthe place of the more usual comic book versions ofA Christmas Carol and Les Miserables, two otherillustrated stories: one, a scaled down version ofJohn Locke’s classic tale about The Prince and theCobbler who exchanged memories; and thesecond, a synoptic version of The Ugly Duckling.The Self-Interview protocol was an early draft ofthat previously described, and was the same for allage groups. The entire interview procedure for theyounger participants was approximately 30minutes in length.

Scoring. Again, because of the early days inwhich this first study was conducted, the scoringprocedures applied to this first round of interviewprotocols also followed a somewhat degradedform of those outlined in the first half of this


chapter. Nevertheless, it was possible, for thepurpose of this monograph, to collapse theseearlier data onto a rather more rough-hewn versionof our current five level Essentialist codingscheme. This was accomplished by: a) bracketingunder the general rubric of Simple InclusionArguments our current Level I and II (both ofwhich operate by ignoring change); by collapsing,as related variants of Essentialism, responses thatwould now qualify as instances of our currentLevels III and IV (both of which acknowledge, butotherwise discount change as being beside thepoint); and c) by labeling as “Best ExplanationArguments” responses that we would currentlycode as either Track I, Level V, or Track II, LevelV. Each participant in this study was assigned toone or the other of these three scoring categorieson the basis of their best response to interviewers’questions about their own or others’ personalpersistence.

Putting to work the combinatorial scoringscheme just outlined as a means of regrouping ouroriginal (i.e., 1986) data, it is possible toreconstruct an 8 by 3 contingency table displayingour participants’ responses to questions aboutpersonal persistence plotted by grade (see Table2).

As can be seen from an inspection of this table,it is clearly the case that, all other things beingequal, growing older (or at least qualifying for ahigher school-grade placement) does in fact co-vary with one’s assigned place in our typology ofalternative continuity warranting strategies; witholder and better educated respondents most oftenassigned to increasingly higher Levels in ourabridged scoring scheme.Pilot Study Two: Cognitive Competence and Self-Continuity

The second pilot study, though previouslyreported separately (i.e., Chandler et al., 1987),was part of a common assessment enterprise, andinvolved a subset of 50 of the same third, fifth,seventh, and tenth graders who participated inStudy one. In addition to completing the measures

of identity development already described,members of this sub-group were also individuallyadministered the Goldschmid-BentlerConservation Assessment Task (1968)––astandardized measure of “operativity” that allowsthe loose characterization of young persons aseither pre-operational, concrete operational, orformal operational thinkers. The aim of this studywas to search out possible relations betweencognitive and identity development without beingforced to rely on age or grade as loose proxies forcognitive development. In light of the fact that thefirst study had already demonstrated a strongrelation between grade level and reliance on one oranother of the continuity warranting strategiesoutlined above, and in view of the different levelsof abstraction presupposed by their use, there wasevery reason to suppose that general cognitiveresources of the sort measured by the Goldschmid-Bentler would set necessary limits on theparticular continuity warranting practices thatthese respondents could bring to bear on theproblems posed by our Personal PersistenceInterview.

For this reason, it was hypothesized thatincreasing cognitive competencies of the sort saidby Piaget (1970) to define the consolidation offirst concrete and then formal operational thoughtwould accompany movement from the first to thethird Level of continuity warrants outlined.Reframed as a question, this amounts to askingwhether (using, in this case, cross-sectional data)some relation can be anticipated to hold between“progress” through the three level sequence ofcontinuity warranting strategies outlined in pilotStudy One, and movement from preoperational,through concrete operational, to formal operationalmodes of thought. More particularly, we alsohoped to address the questions of: a) whether thesorts of reflective abstraction that Piaget (1970)took to be definitional of formal operationalthought were or were not prerequisites for thekinds of interpretive or constructive epistemologyimplied by what we earlier called “BestExplanation Arguments” for personal persistence;

Table 2: Type of Personal Persistence Warrant by Grade Level

Grade Level

Continuity Warrant Gr 1 Gr 3 Gr 5 Gr 7 Gr 10 Gr 12 UNIV

Simple Inclusion 7 9 7 4 2 1 1Essentialist 0 4 8 11 7 4 2

Best Explanation 0 0 0 0 6 10 12

Note. c2 (12) = 71.318, p <0.001; Kendall’s tau b=.640, p<.0001


b) whether Essentialist warrants, with their evidentreliance on at least first order abstractions, wouldonly be accessible to those with at least concreteoperational competence; and c) whether thosecharacterized by only preoperational competenciescould hope to achieve anything more cognitivelydemanding than what we have called “SimpleInclusion Arguments”?

In order to test these hypotheses, the resultsobtained from the administration of theGoldschmid-Bentler operativity task were cross-tabulated with each participant’s assignment onhis/her earlier uses of either a Simple Inclusion,Essentialist or Best Explanation Self-Continuitywarranting strategy (see Table 3).

As can be seen from an inspection of this table,there is an evident and strong relation betweenthese two sets of measures. Moreover, ashypothesized: a) no participant who scored at thepreoperational level on the Goldschmid-Bentleremployed more than Simple Inclusion grounds forwarranting their own or others’ continuity; and noconcrete operational participants succeeded inresponding to the Personal Persistence Interviewby offering continuity warrants at the “BestExplanation” level, although more than half ofthose categorized as formal operational did adoptthis strategy in reasoning about personalpersistence in time.

To further press this analytic issue, weconducted a Prediction Analysis of Cross-Classifications. Prediction Analysis (Hildebrand,Lange, & Rosenthal, 1977; von Eye &Brandtstädter, 1988; von Eye, 1997) provides amethod of estimating the statistical reliability ofmodels of developmental change using cross-sectional data. In a Prediction Analysis, the cells ina table of cross-classifications are assigned either‘hit’ or ‘error’ status according to theircompatibility with the model of developmentalchange being tested. According to the modeldescribed above, cells 1, 2, 5, 6 and 9 in Table 3would be considered ‘hits’, whereas cells 3, 4, 7,and 8 would be considered ‘errors’. The analysis

determines the extent to which the number ofobtained ‘errors’ falls short of what could beexpected if the profiles of individual subject’sperformance across the tasks were randomlydistributed. Specifically, the analysis determineswhether the value of the test statistic DELsignificantly exceeds zero (DEL = ∑e"-"∑o

∑e , where∑e = the number of expected errors, and ∑o = thenumber of obtained errors). In the case of thismodel, DEL=.609, z=5.349, p<.0001.

Three broad conclusions can be drawn from anexamination of the straightforward results of thesetwo pilot studies. First, it was possible to seriouslyengage children as young as 9 or 10 in detaileddiscussions about their own and others personalpersistence. Second, increasingly older groups ofyoung persons do, as hypothesized, ordinarilygrow more sophisticated in the ways that theyreason about matters of self-continuity. Finally,there are demonstrable and highly interpretablerelations between young people’s thoughts aboutpersonal persistence and key transition points inthe general course of cognitive development.Chapter Summary

Chapters I and II were meant to make the casethat the job of exploring how young people thinkabout personal persistence and the paradox ofsameness within change is important work—workthat holds out the promise of advancing ourunderstanding of key concerns about the course ofidentity development, and how it sometimes goeswrong. Chapter III, which has been all about howsuch matters might best be explored empirically,had as its goals the tasks of describing andadvocating for a particular way of addressing thisotherwise unsolved measurement problem, and ofdetailing how young people’s responses to hardquestions about their own and others’ personalpersistence might be conceptualized and scored.Finally, we have also offered some empiricalevidence to support the common intuition that theway young people think about personal continuityin time is generally age-graded, and otherwise

Table 3: Type of Personal Persistence Warrant by Level of Cognitive Competence

Level of Operativity

Continuity Warrant Pre-operational Concrete Operational Formal Operational

Simple Inclusion 12 5 0Essentialist 0 12 8

Best Explanation 0 0 10

Note. c2 (4) = 44.6, p <0.001; Kendall’s tau b=.794, p<.0001, Cramer’s V = 0.689


related to other familiar milestones in the usualcourse of cognitive development.

What we have not yet done, shy of a fewintroductory remarks, is to describe how all of this

is related to the problem of youth suicide, eitherinside or outside of Aboriginal communities.Providing these missing conceptual connections isthe business of Chapter IV, to which we now turn.

Chapter IV: Self-Continuity and Youth Suicide

This chapter is about our original “questionnumber two,” which is itself about the hard tofathom fact that young people kill themselves, orattempt to kill themselves, in numbers that are allout of proportion. Our original promissory note,laid out in Chapter I, committed us to anexploration of the hypothesis that suicidaladolescents could be better understood if theirself-destructive acts could be set in relation to theirown struggles to warrant a sense of personalpersistence in time. What follows is an attempt tofulfill that earlier promise.

Chapters I and II were meant to have providedgood reasons and authority for the claim thatyoung people, along with more or less everyoneelse, are, in fact, under an identity preservingobligation to work out some viable conceptualmeans of successfully warranting their ownpersonal persistence. Given the several findingsreported in Chapter III, we also believe we haveassembled supportive evidence for the propositionthat rank-and-file young persons do ordinarilysucceed in satisfying this obligation by adoptingone or another of a finite set of age-graded, andmore or less cognitively complex, continuitywarranting strategies meant to accomplish thispurpose.

What we have not yet done, but mean to turn tonow, is to run this argument in reverse by offeringreasons and a line of empirical evidence in supportof the contrary expectation that young personswho somehow lose the thread of their own andothers’ personal continuity in time will alsobehave in ways that show a lack of appropriatecare and concern for their own future well-being.As a way of putting this possibility to the test wechose suicidal behavior as a stark demonstration offailed commitment to one’s own future, andproceeded to search out possible relations betweenfailures to sustain a workable sense of diachroniccontinuity and the occurrence of serious suicideattempts.

We mean to move this case forward in twosteps. The first section of this chapter is given overto constructing a conceptual bridge capable of

carrying enough weight to move our discussionfrom its earlier focus on normative developmentalmatters—matters concerning the usual course ofidentity development—all the way to a far shorewhere our attention is re-centered ondevelopmental psychopathology in general, andyouth suicide in particular. Having hopefully madethese necessary conceptual links, we then mean tomove on in Part Two to a brief presentation ofsome of our own previously published empiricalwork (Ball & Chandler, 1989; Chandler & Ball,1990). We present old and new evidence thatoffers what we take to be compelling support ofthe claim that suicidal and non-suicidaladolescents not only differ in their handling of theparadox of sameness within change, but thatyoung people who seriously attempt to end theirown life are also characterized by having, at leastfor the moment, utterly lost their ability toconvince themselves and others that there is realpersistence in their lives.On how efforts to warrant personalpersistence can go wrong

As with developmental processes moregenerally (Noam, Chandler, & Lalonde, 1995), anumber of things can potentially go wrong withthe train of public and private events that carriesyoung people toward a more sophisticated orformally adequate understanding of theargumentative grounds upon which their own andothers’ claims for personal persistence mightpossibly rest. One particularly straightforwardexample of how the wheels of development mightspectacularly come off is fixation or delay. That is,one can just go on getting older without alsosimultaneously getting better at juggling bothhalves of the standard sameness vs. changeantinomy, and so fail to arrive, in some timelyfashion, at the new and progressively more age-appropriate ways of justifying personal persistenceserially adopted by one’s peers. In support of thispossibility, ordinary experience, along with ourown earlier data, does strongly suggest that thereare more and less age appropriate and formallyadequate ways of handling the problem of


warranting personal persistence, and that failing tomove along this trajectory in a developmentallytimely way would be at least statisticallyanomalous, and perhaps socially inappropriate. Itwould not seem particularly odd, for example, tohear 8- or 10-year-olds defend their convictionsabout self-continuity by pressing the point thatthey have always lived in the same house or arestill called by the same name, but similarstatements out of the mouths of young adultswould obviously seem inappropriately child-like.Although such delays may well set one apart, andotherwise signal that all is not well in the arena ofone’s identity development, bringing up the rear insuch a fashion is not the same thing as having nosuch identity preserving strategy at all, and sowould not obviously cost one all commitments tothe future, or necessarily predispose one tosuicide.

Not all developmental disorders, however, canbe laid off to matters of delay or fixation. Rather,psychopathology can sometimes be seen to emergejust because developmental processes continue.This is the case, for instance, in the research ofBorst, Noam, and Bartok (1991), demonstratingthat a group of hospitalized adolescents wereactually at greater risk of suicide when at higherlevels of ego development than lower levels. Suchyouth, it was shown, became more internalized,leading to greater self-blame and depression—atrain of events that eventually ended with elevatedsuicide risk. Higher stages of development, then,need not invariably be seen as more adaptive orbeneficial.

A related case can be made for heightened risksassociated with failed developmental transitions(Noam et al., 1995). That is, beyond the prospectof merely stumbling or falling into arrears it is alsopossible that, in regularly moving from less tomore adequate and age-appropriate ways ofunderstanding one’s own and others’ personalpersistence, some young people may lose theirway as a consequence, abandoning earlier and lessmature ways of warranting their own self-continuity before coming to some next and moreadequate way of newly solving the same problem.Such young people, lost (perhaps onlytemporarily) in the transition from one to anotherlevel of self-understanding, would, we suggest(Ball & Chandler, 1989), find themselves withoutany workable accounting system for thinkingabout personal persistence, and so any specialreason to be concerned about the well-being of the

person they are en route to becoming. It is duringjust such indifferent transitional moments, wepropose, that young people are at special risk toreacting to adversity by putting their future selvesin harm’s way through various suicidal behaviors.

Imagine, for example, an earlier version of“you”—someone who, only weeks or monthsearlier, was still confident in her or his convictionthat, just by hanging on to the same fingerprints,or bit of embedded pencil lead, all matters ofpersonal persistence could be kept comfortably inhand. Imagine further that, along the expectableway toward your own intellectual maturity, youcame to the more enlightened view that fingerprints and pencil lead are hardly the right stuff outof which an identity worth having can be made,leaving you, perhaps, feeling somehow vaguelyembarrassed about, your own earlier and morechildish thoughts.

Inside this familiar scenario, two prospects,two roads not yet taken, now potentially stretchout before you. You could, and evidently mostyoung people do, rush through such an awkwardtransition moment and quickly adopt somedifferent and formally more adequate way ofthinking about selves in time, some moredevelopmentally advanced and age-appropriateway of preserving your sense of personalpersistence. Alternatively, you might becomestymied—caught between stays—by rejectingolder solution strategies before alternatives are yetcomfortably in hand. There you sit, dismissive ofyour own earlier and now seemingly inadequateself-continuity solution strategies, all without aserious clue about an effective way of linking upyour own past, present, and future. Thesedoldrums, which potentially occur in theneighborhood of every developmental transitionzone, tend, we have suggested (Noam et al., 1995),to be particularly dangerous places to languish in,especially when jobs like keeping track of one’sself in time will not wait.

Now, if you are stuck in such a place and areotherwise lucky—that is, if nothing else badhappens during such awkward transitionalmoments—then, in due course, you will, in alllikelihood, simply go on with the serious businessof coming to the next way in what will likelyprove to be a whole series of alternative andhopefully more adequate ways of thinking aboutyour life in time. If, by chance, you prove to beunlucky (e.g. if your best friend deserts you, or


you are bullied, or get grounded, or fail one morepop-quiz—and if, “for the life of you,” you don’tfeel a stake in, or can’t otherwise find some bondof kinship with, the person you were until recentlyen route to becoming) then, bereft of the usualidentity-preserving connections that keep all of uscentered in moments of despair, you suddenly findyourself at risk of throwing everything away, ofputting yourself out of your current misery, allover events that, should you live to tell the tale,may later seem of little consequence.

If you remember ever having had suchthoughts, it turns out that you are not alone.Available research (e.g., Rubenstein, Heeren,Housman, Rubin, & Stechler, 1988; Ross, 1985)suggests that, at one time or another, most youngpeople harbor such thoughts of personalestrangement. According to some (e.g., Linehan,Goodstein, Nielsen, & Chiles, 1983), as many as 1in 6 adults go on to report actually having takenmatters still one step further by actively attemptingsuicide at some point in their formative years.Something of the same point is made by availablemortality figures that show, for example, thatadolescents are heavily over-represented amongthe ranks of those who actually succeed in takingtheir own life (Burd, 1994). In Canada, where theresearch to be reported here was carried out,young people not only attempt to kill themselvesat rates variously reported to range from 20 to 200times higher than those characteristic of other agegroups (BC Vital Statistics, 2001), but the age-standardized mortality rate (ASMR) for completedyouth suicide is regularly found to be as much as 5to 20 times higher than comparable rates for adults(Burd, 1994). Even these alarming rates are said tobe misleadingly low (Cohen, Davis, Miller, &Sheppard, 2002). Suicide is, for example,commonly said to run a close second behindautomobile and other accidents as a killer of youngpeople, but many of these so-called “accidents”are themselves often known or suspected to besuicides. The problem is more dramatic still invarious “ special populations.” To get ahead ofourselves somewhat by anticipating evidence morecentral to the work reported in Chapter V,comparable statistics concerning youth suiciderates among the province of British Columbia’sStatus Indians (e.g., BC Vital Statistics, 2001) alsoshow that the ASMR for suicide amongAboriginal youth is a startling 8.3 times higher formales, and 20 times higher for females, than thealready alarming suicide rate for Aboriginals as a

whole (Cooper, Corrado, Karlberg, & PelletierAdams, 1992). The present point is to lay specialstress on the increasingly obvious fact that theincidence of suicidal behaviors spikes dramaticallyduring adolescence and early adulthood, and soconstitutes one of those problems that literallycries out for a genuinely developmentalexplanation.

We are, of course, not alone in suggesting thatsuicide is somehow related to problems in dealingwith time and futurity. Baumeister (1990), forexample, in reviewing much of the earlierliterature, reports that persons who exhibit self-destructive tendencies also commonly demonstratea kind of temporal tunnel vision (Schneidman,1985), or foreshortening of their sense ofconnectedness in time—a sense that leaves thempoorly prepared to plan for, or even contemplate,the future. Suicidal individuals also commonlyexhibit serious distortions in their perceptions ofelapsed time (Brockopp & Lester, 1970), oftenexperiencing time as moving extremely slowly(Neuringer & Harris, 1974). As such, suicidalpersons are frequently unable to envision a futurethat is different from their present (Yufit &Benzies, 1973), and whatever little of the futurethey can foresee they ordinarily experience asbleak and blocked (Melges & Weisz, 1971).

Baumeister (1990), among others, reads all ofthis evidence and more as grist for a kind ofpsychodynamic interpretation according to whichdisruptions to one’s sense of futurity are read asthe effect, rather than the cause, of suicidalbehaviors. Those contemplating suicide,Baumeister concludes, are literally trying to stoptime. However true this may be, it leaves usinterpretively empty-handed in two importantways. First, it simply puts off to another day, thecentral question of why one might be committed to“stopping time” in the first place. One mystery issimply exchanged for another, without any evidentresidual gain in our understanding. Second, and incontrast to our own more developmentallyoriented account, Baumeister’s emphasis uponunnamed subterranean causes offers nointerpretive means of understanding thedramatically elevated suicide rate observed in theadolescent years. As several investigators havepointed out (e.g., Ennis, Barnes, & Spenser, 1985;Maris, 1981), while young people do kill orattempt to kill themselves in large anddisproportionate numbers, those who surviverarely go on to become suicidal adults. Chronic


suicidal tendencies are rare at any age, and if yousurvive your adolescence and young adulthood,then, everything else being equal, the chances thatyou will undertake to end your own life in thefuture actually drops precipitously. Given all ofthis, one might ask where all of the suicidal youthsuddenly come from, and where they go, and whythey come and go as quickly as they do? Whatseems needed, then, at the very least, is some sortof “process”, rather than a frozen “trait” account;or, at least, that is what we would argue is neededif there is to be any hope of explaining youthsuicide.

Among the candidate explanations fielded in aneffort to account for the apparent spiking ofsuicidal behaviors in the teenage and early adultyears are situational accounts that point to thespecial “storms and stresses” of adolescence (e.g.,Campbell, 1981; Holden, 1986), as well as morebiochemical accounts that draw attention to theupwelling of adolescent hormones (Pfeffer, 1986)and the associated distortions of mood andperceptions that often accompany these events(Shaffer, 1985). Although there is no reason toseriously doubt that such internal and externalfactors play some role, they nevertheless fallimportantly short of adequate explanations. Stress,for example, is hardly the exclusive province ofthe young, and while depression is common,suicide remains rare at any age. What seems calledfor in addition to, if not in the place of, suchlimited accounts is an explanation that allocatesserious attention to the signature psychologicalproblems of this age period. Clearly, as Erikson(1968) has famously demonstrated, one of these isthe problem of constructing a coherent andcontinuous sense of personal identity.

In contrast then, to these other candidatepossibilities, our own alternative explanation ofthe ups and downs of youth suicide is rooted in aself-consciously developmental account that putsspecial emphasis upon the ordinarily changingways in which young people draw upon theirchanging problem-solving resources in an effort tore-solve the problem of their own personalpersistence in time. They do this, as our researchhas shown, by moving, as their conceptualresources allow, through a sequence of as many asfive alternative problem solving strategies, each ofwhich work to solve the sameness plus differenceequation in its own distinctive way. The problem,as we see it, arises from the fact that, in theordinary course of working through this critical

aspect of identity development, young peoplenaturally encounter as many as four transitionalmoments during which few resources may beavailable for solving the perennial problem ofsameness within change. That is, during suchbetwixt and between moments—moments whenthey have each of their feet on different rungs oftheir own developmental ladder, and just whenthey are most unsure of how to best commit theirdecision making weight—neither their old northeir oncoming self-continuity warrantingstrategies may prove especially effective. As aconsequence, their past and future prospects bothrisk collapsing back onto the same speciouspresent where nothing matters except themomentary pain. It is at these dislocated,transitional moments, we have proposed(Chandler, 1994; Noam, et al., 1995), that theusual barriers against self-harm are lowered, andthe threat of suicide looms especially large.

Such an account is consistent with the familiardevelopmental claim (e.g. Nannis & Cowan, 1988;Piaget, 1970) that “stage” transitions are markedby awkward moments of disequilibrium, butavoids the “developmental reductionism” (Rogers& Kegan, 1990, p. 103) associated withmistakenly equating psychological disturbancewith developmental delay. As Rogers and Keganpoint out, “because the histories of manyadolescents and adults who have psychiatricepisodes are without prior psychopathologicalincident, if we hypothesize that the current episodeis due to developmental failure in early childhood,we are left having to account for a longintervening period of quite normal or adaptivefunctioning” (p. 104). Similarly, locating specialvulnerabilities to suicide in the transitionalmoments between workable self-continuitywarranting strategies also strategically avoids theotherwise puzzling fact that, despite theastonishing frequency of suicidal ideation or actualattempts, chronic suicidal tendencies areapparently so rare (Ennis, Barnes, & Spenser,1985; Maris, 1981).

On this account, then, what is most in need ofexplanation is not why some people seriouslycontemplate suicide, or even act out such thoughts,but why the rest of us do not. The answer wepropose is that for most of us, most of the time,there is a “rub”—some future possibility that deathwould put an end to, or some future prospect thatwe are not prepared to forego. For these reasons,then, adolescents, for whom transformations of


identity often come thick and fast, are, wepropose, at special risk of at least temporarilylosing the continuity preserving thread thatguarantees them a sufficient personal stake in thefuture, a stake capable of insulating them againstself-harm.

The still open question, of course, is just howwe ought to undertake a real test of the merits ofthis otherwise unexamined explanation ofadolescent suicide. Our group has so farundertaken to find answers to this question byproceeding along two different research fronts.One of these looks at the problem of youth suicideat the level of whole communities (in this case,Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities).These epidemiological efforts will be the businessof the following chapter. The other research front,which makes up the balance of the present chapter,retains our present individual focus, and concernsour earlier attempts to directly contrast the self-continuity warranting practices of groups ofsuicidal and non-suicidal adolescents (Ball &Chandler, 1989; Chandler & Ball, 1990).Study Three: Attempted Suicide and Self-Continuity

Our working hypotheses in taking up what welist out here as Study Three was, as suggestedabove, that suicidal behaviors, especially amongyoung persons, can be at least partially understoodby viewing them as the unwanted byproduct offailed attempts to secure some identity preservingbridge linking one’s past, present and future.Because adolescents are living through a period ofdramatic developmental changes, and becausetheir age-graded ways of accounting for their ownpersonal persistence in the face of such changesare also in almost continuous transition, we havesuggested that they are at heightened risk oftemporarily losing their grip on precisely thoseself-continuity warranting practices that allowthem to sustain a commitment to their own futurewell-being. On this account it was hypothesizedthat young people who are actively suicidal arejust those who have stumbled at one or another ofthese transitional moments and are, consequently,at least temporarily bereft of any serviceable self-continuity warranting strategy in ways that theirnon-suicidal counterparts are not. The balance ofthe present chapter is meant to provide backing forthis working hypothesis.

As matters lay in our program of research at thetime the studies to be re-visited here (Ball &

Chandler, 1989; Chandler & Ball, 1990) wereactually undertaken, the easy half of theproceeding joint propositional statement describedabove was already well in hand. That is, we hadalready interviewed more than 80 adolescents,none of whom were suicidal, and all of whom,without exception, had successfully mounted somemore or less sophisticated argument as to why theyand others went right on being one and the sameperson despite radical personal changes. Thatobviously left the really difficult-to-assemblesecond half of the argument regarding the testingof actively suicidal youth still missing. Given sucha sample, what we expected to find was a new lineof evidence that, in its simplest form could bearrayed in a 2 by 2 contingency table that sortedmore or less equal numbers of suicidal and non-suicidal youth into those that did or did not havesome (any) personally satisfactory way ofwarranting their persistence in time. In a perfectworld, and to the extent that our guidingassumptions were in the running for truth, theneveryone in this idealized picture would occupyonly 2 of the diagonal cells of this matrix. That is,all of our non-suicidal respondents would becoded as having some (i.e., any one of the 5serviceable Essentialist “Levels” detailed earlier)way of counting themselves as personallypersistent, and all of the suicidal participantswould fail utterly, by finding themselves unable tooffer any personally acceptable means ofunderstanding why the person they once were, orare en route to becoming qualifies as numericallyidentical with the person they currently takethemselves to be.

As we will shortly show, this idealized, picture-perfect set of theoretically expected values, andthe real world picture produced by testing whateventually became a total of 82 young persons, areremarkably alike.Participants

The demographics of any group of suicidaladolescents, and that of the young volunteers whoparticipated in the earlier studies already reportedin Chapter III, tend to be quite different.Therefore, any thought of pointing to alreadycollected data as a proof that non-suicidalteenagers always do have some more or lessadequate way of reasoning about personalpersistence had to be abandoned in favor of themore labor intensive, but reality-oriented job ofmatching each member of our eventual suicidal


sample with a non-suicidal counterpart of the samesex, age and socio-economic-status. The usualadolescent in-patients of public psychiatric wardsare simply less advantaged than the typical publicschool children we had already tested.

Our sample of suicidal adolescents, a sub-set ofwhich was previously described by Ball andChandler (1989) and Chandler and Ball (1990),was drawn from the Psychological ServicesDepartment of an in-patient psychiatric unitlocated within a general services hospital—ashort-term diagnostic facility that typically housedyoung patients for up to one month. For a periodof almost a year, all consecutive admissions to thisfacility between the ages of 12 and 18 werescreened and enrolled in our study if, in addition tothe required permissions, they were judged to beof at least normal intelligence and free ofsignificant brain damage. Thirty such youngpeople, the bulk of whom were from lower middleclass families, formed the hospitalized sampleinitially reported in Ball and Chandler (1989).Subsequently, an additional 13 hospitalized and 13non-hospitalized participants were added to thissample.

Following an elaborate sorting procedure basedon reviews of hospital records, and with thedetailed assistance of the professional staff, all ofthese participants were assigned to either a high orlow suicide risk group. Interestingly, the plannedexistence of a hospitalized and entirely non-suicidal sample proved to be a fiction. The clinicalrecord of only 1 of these 41 patients was found tobe entirely free of any reference to possiblesuicidal thoughts, impulses or actions.Nevertheless, 23 of the patients eventuallyenrolled in our study had made no known“serious” suicide attempts and were confidentlyjudged to be “low risk.” The remaining 18 had allmade serious suicide attempts in the last 3 months,and had been placed on “active suicideprecautions” (i.e., no “sharps,” belts, or laces;carefully timed nursing observations; etc.). Eachof these 41 in-patients was then matched to acounterpart public school student of comparableage and SES.

Taken together, these participant selectionpractices not only gave us our small but carefullychosen suicidal and non-hospitalized controlparticipants, but a highly comparable sample of“low risk” or non-suicidal hospitalized controls,whose presence in the study served as a guard

against confusion concerning what it means to beboth hospitalized and suicidal with merely beinghospitalized for all and sundry other reasons.Method

All of these hospitalized and non-hospitalizedparticipants were administered a three-partinterview procedure involving the presentation ofcomic book versions of Les Miserables and AChristmas Carol, followed by a version of ourPersonal Persistence Interview that was more orless identical to that described earlier in ChapterII. As a check upon the possible relations betweennotions of personal persistence, suicidality anddepression, the hospitalized group also completedBeck’s Hopelessness Scale (Beck, Weissman,Lester, & Trexler, 1974). School officials judgedthe administration of the Hopelessness Scaleinappropriate for use with this “normal” sample.Following scoring procedures also outlined inStudy Two, the transcripts of the interviews of allof our participants were scored and ultimatelyassigned a summary classification of: a)Essentialist; b) Simple Inclusion; or c) None.

Importantly, this third coding category was notused as a simple wastebasket for the protocols ofparticipants who were unwilling or unable torespond. In the end, only one of the hospitalizedparticipants failed to make a serious attempt torespond to our interview procedure and was codedas “un-scoreable.” Rather, all of the troubledyoung people coded as having failed to providepersonally acceptable solutions to the problem ofpersonal persistence found the matter of their ownand others’ continuity in time a matter worthy ofdiscussion, but ended by throwing up their hands,having failed to find what they judged to be anacceptable solution to the problem of persistencein the face of change. Their records were generallyno less elaborate, and contained as many words asdid those coded in other categories. Some of theseparticipants responded by detailing what they hadpreviously thought and had since come to reject asacceptable problem solutions (i.e., “I used to thinkthat it was just because my name is the same”). Inshort, they tried, but came up empty handed.Results

Table 4 sets these findings in a 3 by 3contingency table that cross-classifies suicide riskstatus by personal persistence warrantingstrategies.


Several notable findings are evident from aninspection of this table. First, like other rank-and-file young people, the 41 adolescents whoeventually formed our non-hospitalized controlgroup responded in diverse (and, as it was, age-graded) ways to our Personal PersistenceInterview. Importantly, all of these participants(like their predecessors in the previous pilotstudies) found some coherent way of linking uptheir own and others’ past, present, and futurelives. Second, in every case save two, all of ourhospitalized, but non-suicidal participants alsosucceeded in finding serviceable (albeit usuallyless complex) reasons as to why the person theyhad been, were now, and presumably wouldbecome, all amounted to one and the samenumerically identical individual. In tellingcontrast, 83 percent of our actively suicidalparticipants failed to find any way ofunderstanding themselves and others ascontinuous in time. They sometimes remembered,but went on to actively discount, earlier thoughtsthey had had on the matter. They were not,however, as might be anticipated, more depressedon Beck’s Hopelessness measure (r = -0.31, p >

0.06). Rather, as far as we were able to determinewith the information at our disposal, they simplydistinguished themselves by being no longer ableto find anything that they took to be acceptablegrounds for imagining themselves as continuous intime.

All of this, is significant. Not just statisticallysignificant, but significant in larger clinical andtheoretical ways. From a clinical perspective, it isnot without diagnostic relevance that, while bymost available psychometric measures, suicidaland non-suicidal patients are typically found to beindistinguishable, here better than 4 out of 5 of ourhospitalized sample who failed to countthemselves as personally persistent were alsoactively suicidal, while only 2 out of 23 non-suicidal patients would have been misclassified byapplying these criteria. At a more theoretical level,our own earlier claim that “owning some sense ofone’s self as personally persistent in time isfoundational to any conception of self worthhaving” is importantly bolstered by the fact that allthose who lose the continuous thread of their livesalso no longer wish to live them.

Chapter V: From Self- to Cultural Continuity—Aboriginal Youth Suicide

Adolescence, as we have just demonstrated inChapter IV, is a time of heightened risk to suicidebecause, we suggest, it is characterized by a stringof transitional moments during whichdevelopmentally earlier strategies for preserving asense of personal persistence are repeatedlydiscounted, sometimes before other more adequatealternatives are comfortably in place. It is at justsuch stymied developmental moments, wepropose, that the usual slings and arrows ofoutrageous fortune common to adolescent life canend up temporarily costing a subset of youngpeople any reason to soldier on for the sake of apersonal future they no longer count as their own.Although such an explanation may still fallimportantly short of accounting for why certain

young people end up losing the continuous threadof their lives and others do not, it does go somedistance toward making more understandable whythe incidence of suicidal behaviors is so otherwiseinexplicably high during the adolescent years––atime that, at least when viewed in retrospect, isoften seen to be especially alive with promise.What it also fails to provide, at least as ouraccount has been developed so far, is anyexplanation for the fact that suicide rates also varyso dramatically from one setting or community orculture to another. As we now mean to show,youth suicide is largely unknown in certaincommunities while epidemic in others, and anysatisfactory account of this fact must somehow

Table 4: Type of Personal Persistence Warrant by Suicidal Status

Continuity Warrant

Suicide Risk None Less Complex (Levels 1 &2)

More Complex (Levels 3+)

High 15 (83%) 1 ( 6%) 2 (11%)

Low 2 (9%) 18 (78%) 3 (13%)Control 0 (0%) 15 (37%) 26 (63%)

Note. N= 82, c2(4) = 71.71, p <0.0005, Cramer’s V = 0.661


make interpretable sense of this dramaticsituational variability.

The obvious difficulty in attempting to fashionsuch an account is that doing so would requirebuilding an explanatory bridge of which one end isrooted in methodological individualism and theother anchored in concepts and methods bettersuited to a different, more culturally based level ofanalysis. Although few social science conceptsappear to have sufficient currency to permit theirbeing cashed out in both of these interpretivecontexts, we will argue that “continuity” or“persistence” is one that does. That is, taking ourlead from the work of Bandura (1986) oncollective and personal efficacy, and that of Smye(1990) and others (e.g., Rodin, 1986) on personaland collective measures of “control,” we mean toargue that the concept of “continuity” possesses asufficient core of common meaning at both theindividual and cultural levels of analysis to allowfor a measure of conceptual movement back andforth across traditional disciplinary lines. At leastit was thoughts such as these that motivated ourefforts to explore possible ways in which thenotion of “self-continuity” (which has alreadyshown so much promise as a way of understandingthe problem of youth suicide at the individuallevel) might also be made to work at thecommunity or collective level. Here, it wasanticipated that communities that have workedsuccessfully to promote a measure of “culturalcontinuity” linking their own traditional past andbuilding collective future might also enjoyespecially low levels of suicide among their youth.The present chapter is meant as a test of thisproposition.

Before further unpacking this argument it willprove useful to first take stock of what has so farbeen shown. Across the last three chapters wehave been working to establish what amounts tothree main points. First, in Chapters I and II, weundertook to make the case that, on pain ofotherwise lapsing into incoherence, all persons areobliged to find some conceptual means of solvingthe paradox of personal persistence. Second, inChapter III, we laid out a series of different waysin which this might be done in principle, and thenmarshaled evidence to make the case thatculturally mainstream adolescents really doemploy more or less complex versions of at leastsome of these alternative argumentativestrategies—and that they employ them in waysthat form an expectable developmental sequence.

Third, and in our just completed Chapter IV, wehave presented evidence that danger—life-threatening danger—abides in those failedtransitional moments when one has alreadyawkwardly abandoned as immature his or her ownearlier self-continuity warranting strategies inadvance of having yet come to some new andmore adequate alternative. For such young people,caught as they are between stays, the future reallyis suspended, and death really does become a liveoption. Having hopefully shown evidence insupport of all of this, we now mean to turnattention to the possibility that some part of anexplanation for the alarmingly high rate of suicideknown to characterize whole communities (in thiscase whole Aboriginal communities, in NorthAmerica and elsewhere) may be traced tocounterpart continuity problems that operate notexclusively at the individual level, but also at thecultural or community level.

Of course, alternative explanations for thedramatically elevated suicide rates known to occurfor Aboriginal peoples as a whole are alsoavailable, and because no simple and sovereignsolution will likely do (Carsten, 2000), whatfollows is not meant as exclusionary. Still, most ofthese alternatives either imagine that the real truthof the matter is somehow inherent to intra-psychicprocesses, or involve arguing that familiar sorts ofacquired socio-economic and psychological riskfactors (inadequate income, education, housing,health care, etc.) that often cluster especiallytightly around Native persons and Nativecommunities are the real causes. By these lights,simply being Native is enough to put one atspecial risk to suicide. But, of course, splitalternatives concerning inherent versus acquiredrisk, simply will not do. Such explanations eitherremain mute about a whole chorus of culturalmatters that, at least since Durkheim (1897/1951),have been known to importantly influence theincidence of suicide viewed on an internationalscale, or, leaving the person entirely behind, theytell us something about how living well asopposed to badly is to be recommended, but saynext to nothing about why it is, for example, thatyoung Aboriginal people, or those who live hererather than there, are at especially elevated risk.

Our own study agenda included an explicit planto avoid, as much as possible, being drawn intoone or the other of these split positions (Overton,1998). Rather, the research that we undertook, andthe evidence we now mean to present, was all


undertaken as a test of the views: a) that continuityproblems that work to undermine commitments tothe future at all of these levels are jointly at work,not just in the lives of individual young persons,but at the level of whole cultures; and b) that thoseforces which promote or threaten culturalcontinuity are strongly associated with suicide riskacross whole communities. Consequently, and inactive pursuit of this plan, we now move from ourindividual level of analysis to an elevatedepidemiological undertaking that has involved firstcollecting and now presenting evidence to test theview that strategies meant to preserve a sense ofcontinuity in time—efforts that we have alreadyshown to be related to youth suicides consideredone at a time—also function at a higher level ofabstraction, at the level of whole communities. Inparticular, we mean to press and test this point bycalling attention to community level factors thatare associated with suicide risk within whole sub-cultures, or even entire populations.

To succeed, we need to accomplish severalthings. First, we need to establish, as we havehopefully done in the case of self-continuity, thatwe have some workable measures of culturalcontinuity that can be usefully applied to what turnout to be the 196 separate First Nationscommunities (bands), 29 tribal councils, and 16distinct language groups that together characterizethe Native cultures on the west coast of Canada,and that collectively formed the focus of ourstudies. Second, we need to not only describesome study window and some practicable meansof counting up all of the Aboriginal suicides thathave occurred within it, but, more importantly, weneed to detail those sorting procedures that werefollowed in what proved to be a first-time-evereffort to examine suicide rates at the communitylevel of individual Aboriginal bands or bandcouncils. Finally, we need to articulate thoseanalytic procedures by means of which weundertook to relate variability in our morelocalized measures of cultural continuity tovariable rates of youth suicide within particularAboriginal communities, all in an effort to test thestrength of the association we propose also existsbetween cultural continuity and suicide risk.

Before coming to the particulars of the livesand deaths we have studied, it is worth quicklyrehearsing why matters of cultural continuitymight be of special importance for many of NorthAmerica’s Aboriginal peoples, and why it hasseemed to us that such population based issues

might be relevant in coming to a betterunderstanding of Aboriginal youth suicide. As away of making this perhaps obvious case, wemean to have already added to the chorus ofvoices that understand youth suicide to beintimately bound up with problems at theindividual-level of identity development, ingeneral, and problems of personal persistence inparticular. Youth suicide, as we have shown, iswidely taken to be a kind of coal-miner’scanary—a relatively unambiguous outcomemeasure of potential use for all those concernedwith better understanding how and when processesof identity development go terribly wrong. Inaddition, no one, it seems, any longer has seriousdoubts that all of the familiar discourse, practices,concepts, means and modalities of the self aredeeply culturally contingent (Holland, 1997, p.163), and so cannot be usefully understoodwithout knowledge of their cultural diversity.Finally, as no one needs to be reminded,Aboriginal cultures throughout the Americas havesuffered through what are now centuries worth ofwhat Carsten (2000) calls programs of cultural“untraining” and spoliation that, for many, haveboth rendered their own traditional norms andvalues irrelevant (Clayer & Czechowicz, 1991),and severely truncated their notions of future“feasibility” (Cornell & Kalt, 2000), effectivelydissolving what Freeman (1984) calls the fabric ofthe self and culture. Given all of this, it hardlycomes as a surprise that in Canada, for example,where our own research has been conducted, FirstNations and other Aboriginal youth reportedlytake their own lives at rates higher than that of anyother culturally identifiable group in the world(Kirmayer, 1994).

If finding ways of achieving a sense ofpersonal persistence in the face of developmentalchange is a defining task of adolescent life, and if,as we have shown, failures to achieve a sense ofcontinuity are strongly associated with theoccurrence of suicidal behaviors, then, on thecommon assumption that cultural continuity issimilarly a defining problem of contemporaryAboriginal life, there are equally strong reasons toanticipate that First Nations communities that aremore successful in achieving a measure ofcontinuity with their own cultural past and likelyfuture will also manifest lower rates of youthsuicide than communities that are less successfulin their own efforts at cultural rehabilitation. This,


at least, was the line of reasoning that led to whatis reported here as “Study Four.”Study Four: Cultural continuity and theepidemiology of suicide among Aboriginalyouth

The data to which we now turn were gatheredas early steps in what has now become a series ofstill ongoing epidemiological studies. The fulldetails of the first wave of this enterprise, coveringsuicide rates for the whole of the province inwhich we have worked for the 6-year period 1987-1991 have been reported elsewhere (Chandler &Lalonde, 1998) and the interested reader isencouraged to seek the full details of ourprocedures from this previously publishedaccount. More recent lines of evidence coveringthe period ending in 2001 are reported here aswell. What needs to be made clear in advance ofsummarizing these findings is how we went aboutcharacterizing the level of cultural continuitydescriptive of each of the almost 200 Aboriginalbands that populate British Columbia.

If it were somehow possible to interview awhole culture, we could simply ask, in a fashionanalogous to the way we routinely ask adolescents,for a description of the culture at some point in thepast, then for a current description, and proceed toprobe for some accounting of the apparent changesthat have taken place over time. In the case of FirstNations cultures in Canada, at least, none of thishas the ring of likely success. Whatever is knownabout Aboriginal cultures prior to contact withEuropeans, little of what once was remains. Aspart of a history that is shared with Aboriginalpeoples across the Americas, Native communitiesin Pacific Canada were forcibly relocated,resources and lands appropriated, and traditionalways of living effectively outlawed and turnedinto a laughing stock. In British Columbia, thisincluded the criminalization of religious practicesand local forms of government, as well as thesystematic removal of children from their parents’care to be “educated” in residential schools. In anofficial recounting of some of this shamefulhistory, the Government of Canada has admittedthat these policies were “intended to removeAboriginal people from their homelands, suppressAboriginal nations and their governments,undermine Aboriginal cultures, [and] stifleAboriginal identity” (Report of the RoyalCommission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996). By allaccounts, these official policies were remarkably

effective. Not surprisingly, then, the starkdifferences between past and currentmanifestations of Aboriginal culture make simple‘then and now’ comparisons meant to point upcommonalties across time rather beside the pointof contemporary First Nations life. What doesmatter—and matters deeply to First Nationspeople—are efforts (both backwards referring andforwards anticipating) to not only preserve,restore, and rehabilitate the remnants of theircollective past, but to struggle to regain control oftheir own future and destiny. It was to theserebuilding efforts that we turned in our search forsome measure of cultural continuity.

The kernel idea that we have been pursuing isthat much of what it means to preserve andpromote Native culture will be reflected in thedegree to which First Nations have beenattempting (and sometimes succeeding) to wrestlecontrol of their communities from governmentsupervision. This focus on the devolution ofvarious forms of government control intocommunity hands may seem an overly politicizedapproach. Why not concentrate on things that aresomehow more “cultural”—the prevalence ofAboriginal languages, or traditional methods offood provision, or rituals, or spiritual practices?First Nations are, of course, engaging in all ofthose practices as well, and are succeeding inpassing on traditional ways to youth—but not inways that easily lend themselves toepidemiological analysis. What we needed was notsome measure of what strands of traditionalpractice or knowledge had survived, but rathersome set of marker variables that would reliablyindicate how each of 196 distinct communities inBritish Columbia had fared in their struggle toresist the sustained history of acculturativepractices that threaten their very cultural existence.Politicized or not, this reality is hardly of our ownmaking. It is, however, the reality of themeasurable things at our disposal.

What we finally settled upon were a set of justsix marker variables. Two of these are meant toindex efforts on the part of communities to directlychallenge federal and provincial governments fortitle to traditional lands and the right to self-governance by measuring the length of theirhistory, and degree of success, in litigation andpolitical action. Here we make a prima facie casethat having been engaged in a long legal strugglefor dominion over one’s own place and person isas good a measure of efforts to regain control over


cultural and communal life as one could want.Three other variables concern matters of controlover provision of services that have been morerecently begun slowly passing from government tolocal Bands and Band Councils. These includeresponsibility for education, health care, andpolice and fire services. Our final marker variablerepresents an attempt to more directly measuresome aspect of cultural life. Without an effectivemeans to compare the importance of variouscultural practices across these diverse nations, weopted instead to simply determine whether or notthe communities in question had constructed abuilding devoted to cultural activities. In somecommunities, cultural activities take place in thelocal school gymnasium, or in the basement of thelocal church. Without meaning to discount thesemake-do local solutions, we took it as a measureof collective cultural strength if a community hadsuccessfully managed to erect some permanentstructure specifically designated for thepreservation and promotion of culture.

What these marker variables may appear tolack in ‘cultural currency’ when set againsttraditional language use or spirituality, they morethan make up for in the breadth of theirapplication. That is, even if we are unable toassess specific cultural practices within eachcommunity, we can count court documents and thenumber of Native-administered schools. Aided bymountains of government documentation, we didjust that and were able to determine exactly whereeach of 196 communities stood on each of ourchosen marker variables.

If these proxy measures of cultural continuitycan tell us something about the will and the effortsof individual communities to regain control ofthese aspects of their cultural life, and if culturalcontinuity functions in the same manner at acommunity level as self continuity does at theindividual level, then suicide rates should vary as afunction of their presence or absence. That at least,was our hypothesis: that in the case of each of ourmeasures, suicide rates would be lower incommunities where the marker was present than incommunities where it was absent. Given thatsuicide is a low incidence behavior, what we thenneeded was a population large enough and awindow of time long enough to produce a datasetadequate to the task of testing our hypothesis. Wechose the whole of British Columbia and, in thefirst instance, a 6-year time window. The details of

our initial data collection methods are outlinedbelow.Method

Suicide Data

We initially proceeded by first obtaining dataon every recorded suicide in the province ofBritish Columbia during the years 1987-1992.This dataset included all of the informationsurrounding the death that the Office of the ChiefCoroner of British Columbia is obliged to collect:age, gender, place of death, date of death, causeand means of death, and associated factors(alcohol, drug involvement, etc.). It is entirelylikely, however, and so must be acknowledgedfrom the outset, that this total almost certainlyunderestimates, perhaps by a very wide margin,the full number of suicides within the population.The total does not, for example, include deathsruled as “accidental”—even when the driver in asingle-occupant motor vehicle accident wasknown to be suicidal at the time of “accident.”One federal government agency pegs the numberof accidental deaths that should be counted assuicides at one in four (Health Canada, 1991). Thisunderestimation may be particularly problematicwithin the First Nations population which isknown to experience substantially higher rates ofaccidental deaths.

The coroner’s records also indicated whether ornot the deceased was Native. This designation isnot, however, as straightforward as one wouldhope. In addition to personally declaring oneself tobe of aboriginal ancestry, the federal governmentmaintains a registry of “Status Indians” and eachFirst Nation maintains a Band membership list.Because these sources are occasionally at odds, indesignating deaths as “Native” the coroner’s officegathers further information from surviving familymembers, police and other government agencies.Additional data provided by the federalDepartment of Indian and Northern Affairsallowed us to confirm First Nations membershipand the location of the community to which thedeceased belonged.Population Estimates

Finding the appropriate populationdenominator to use in calculating yearly suiciderates for Native and non-Native groups alsoproved to be a challenge. Figures for the entireprovince were derived from federal census datathat were then adjusted (for non-census years)using provincial government population estimates.


Because some First Nations do not participate inthe national census, routinely available populationfigures for First Nations communities are difficultto verify. Fortunately, the timing of our studyallowed us to take advantage of a multi-jurisdictional government effort to chart the healthstatus of Aboriginal people that produced what areconsidered the most accurate estimates to date ofthe First Nations population of British Columbia(Burd, 1994).Political Affiliations and Language Groups

As noted above, suicides are rare. Whensummed over too brief a span of time or across toosmall a population anomalously high or lowsuicide rates can result. This statistical possibilitywas of special concern to us, given that manyNative communities are small in size and remotein location. As a corrective, we chose threemethods of categorizing communities into largergroupings. First, each band belongs to one of 29Tribal Councils—cultural/political alliances that,in most cases, reflect a common history orlanguage, but in others are more political oreconomic. Suicide rates were calculated for eachof these tribal councils. A second effort to avoidstatistical anomalies involved grouping bands bytraditional language. A total of 16 distinctlinguistic families have been identified in BritishColumbia and (with expert advice) we were ableto classify bands according to this metric. Suiciderates were again calculated for each languagegroup. Finally, because of the size and geographicdiversity of British Columbia, we also calculatedrates separately for urban, rural, and remotecommunities.Results

What we found, as has anyone else who hasexamined rates of suicide among aboriginal people(e.g., Kirmayer, 1994), is that the rate for Nativepeople is much higher—in this case more than 3times higher—than it is for the total population.And, once again, we found that the suicide rate ishigher for young persons than any other age group(1.6 times higher). What is still surprising,however, is the fact that the rate for Native youthis nearly 5 times that of youth in general. As thedata in Figure 1 clearly illustrate, words like“epidemic” seem apt.

Given that the Native population isdisproportionately young in comparison to theprovince as a whole, a set of “age standardizedmortality rates” were calculated to compensate for

differences in the age distribution of the twogroups. These calculations estimate what thecomparative rates would be if the two populationsshared the same standard age distribution. In thiscase, the rates (now arrayed over the 6 years of thestudy) are statistically clearer, but yield a similarpicture (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Suicide Rates in British Columbia (1987-1992)

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Figure 2: Native and non-Native Youth Suicide Rates (ASMR, 1987-1992)

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Variability in Suicide Rates

Our purpose was not simply to once againdemonstrate that suicide is more frequent withinthe First Nations population. Rather, we wereinterested in variability in suicide rates acrossdifferent First Nations communities. The logicalnext step, then, would be to display the suicidesrates for all 196 communities studied. Althoughrates calculated at that level are misleading, withthe numbers ranging from 0 to over 3,600 per100,000, they do strongly suggest that simplybeing First Nations is not, in itself, a risk factor.Such data show, for example, that over half of thebands studied (111 of 196) had no youth suicidesduring the study period. More telling are ratesderived when communities are aggregated invarious ways to produce more stable estimates ofrisk. When communities are grouped together intotribal councils, variability remains, but at a muchreduced level. Six of the 29 tribal councils


experienced no suicides during the study window.Among the 23 remaining councils, rates rangedfrom below the provincial average to as high as633 per 100,000. These rates are displayed (withthe names of the tribal councils removed) inFigure 3.

A similar picture emerges when rates arecalculated for the 16 linguistic groups in theprovince. Five of these groups had youth suiciderates of zero, while the others ranged upward to ahigh of over 200 per 100,000 (see Figure 4).

As a check against two factors traditionallyassociated with variability in suicide rates, we alsoexamined the effects of population density andgeographic location. Density was measured bydividing the community population by the numberof separate dwelling places. The correlationbetween youth suicide and this measure ofcrowding was essentially zero (r=-0.05). Similarly,categorizing bands by geographic locationrevealed a steady (but not significant) increase inrates from remote, to rural, to urban centers.

Figure 3: Native Youth Suicide Rate by Tribal Council

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Measures of Cultural Continuity

What the data reported thus far indicate, is notonly that rates are higher in the Native than non-Native population, but that wide variability existsin suicide rates observed within this collection ofNative communities. Most have no recordedsuicides, others have many. Dramatic variabilitywould be expected given nearly 200 smallcommunities scattered across the province. Whenexamined by tribal council and by language group,however, where the population denominator issubstantially larger, variability remains. We takethis to mean that such variability is not juststatistical noise, but rather an invitation to searchfor some method of parsing variance that makesroom for some of the different approaches tocultural and communal life that characterize thegroups under study. The set of cultural continuitymarker variables described above would, wehypothesized, form just such a measure.

The final steps in our analysis of this datasetinvolved gathering information about each of thecommunities and constructing a matrix in whicheach marker was judged to be either present orabsent in the community such that suicide ratescould be calculated for the set of communities thatshared the same value on each marker. By way ofreminder, our hypothesis was that the presence ofeach marker would be associated with a decreasein the youth suicide rate. Before reporting on theresults, however, something more needs to be saidabout how each of these variables was measured.

Land Claims: In the early 1990’s, a process forconducting treaty negotiations was instituted thatwas designed to include all First Nations as well asrepresentatives of the federal and provincialgovernment. Because not all First Nations havecontinued to participate in this process (at the timeof this writing, 125 of 197 bands remain at thetreaty tables), and because participation does notnecessarily reflect a history of struggle to securetitle to traditional lands, we made use of bothcurrent and past efforts to divide bands with a longhistory of land claims actions from those whoseefforts were initiated more recently.

Self-Government: Bands differ not only in thelength of their history of land claims, but also inthe degree of success they have achieved in theirlegal dealings with federal and provincialgovernments. One measure of this success is theestablishment of recognized institutions of self-government that endow bands with a substantial


degree of economic and political independence.Although more commonplace in the US, sucharrangements are relatively rare in westernCanada.

Education: The funding of education in Nativecommunities is an often complex set ofarrangements between federal and provincialagencies and local school boards. The details aretypically negotiated through “local educationagreements” and vary widely from place to place.Although there are several ways of categorizinghow children are educated in differentcommunities, we elected to classify bandsaccording to whether or not a majority of thestudents in the community attended a band-administered school.

Police & Fire Protection Services:Responsibility for police services outside of majorurban centers is held by the Royal CanadianMounted Police. Native communities, however,have (to varying degrees) been active indeveloping community-based programs for lawenforcement on reserve lands. Similarly, fireprotection services are often provided byneighboring non-Native communities in moreurban areas, and in remote areas by a volunteerfire department. In addition to contracting out forsuch services, many bands also maintainownership of fire-fighting equipment. Ourmeasure indexed the extent to which thecommunity owned or controlled these services.

Health Services: As with many services toNative communities, control of health careprovision is moving (at varying rates) into thehands of band and tribal councils. Some bandshave very little control over the delivery of healthservices—relying entirely on providers locatedoutside the community, or on temporary ‘fly-in’clinics; others have managed to secure permanenthealth care providers within the community.Because some communities are especially smalland isolated, we chose to measure the level ofcontrol over the service rather than the type orlocation of the service itself.

Cultural Facilities: Using both informationcontained in government records and bycontacting the band office in each of thecommunities, we obtained descriptions of allcommunal facilities located within eachcommunity. These same sources were used todetermine whether or not one or more of these

buildings was specifically designated or reservedfor cultural activities.

When suicides are parsed by the presence orabsence of these six marker variables, and suiciderates recalculated, a consistent pattern appears. Ineach and every case, the youth suicide rate islower in communities that share markers ofcultural continuity (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Youth Suicide Rates by Cultural Continuity Factors

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One measure of the “protective” effects ofthese markers is found in the fact that even theleast dramatic difference in rates (Police/Fire)amounts to 24.7 fewer suicides per 100,000. Weshould stress that these rates are calculated overthe entire provincial population, and, therefore,constitute exact population parameters rather thansample estimates of suicide rates—inferentialtechniques to assess the strength of these findingsare simply unnecessary. As a consequence, thereduction in relative risk associated with thepresence of these markers can be listed withoutneed of trailing statistics: Self-Government–85%,Land Claims–41%, Education–52%, Health–29%,Cultural Facilities–23%, Police/Fire–20%.

Though each of these markers are effective intheir own right, we also examined their strength incombination. To do so, we merely summed thescores of each community and assigned eachcommunity a score ranging from 0-6 according tothe total number of these markers that werepresent in the community. When suicide rateswere calculated for each score, the range extendsfrom a high of 137.5 for the group of communitiesin which none of the markers were found, to a lowof zero for communities containing all six markers(see Figure 6). The staircase pattern evident in thisfigure is borne out statistically in a strong linear


relation between suicide risk and the number offactors present (c2[6] = 10.042, p < 0.002,Cramer’s V = 0.075).

Figure 6: Youth Suicide Rates by Number of Factors Present in the Community (1987-

1992)

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The point we take from all of these analyses isjust this: that the cases of youth suicides weobserved were not randomly distributed across thenearly 200 separate communities that make up theFirst Nations population. Rather, variability inyouth suicide rates can be better understood whenviewed in light of the efforts that thesecommunities have made to preserve and promotetheir Native culture and to regain control over keyaspects of their communal lives. If any doubtabout this conclusion remained, the results fromour recently completed second wave of datacollection, this time covering the years 1993-2000,exhibit precisely this same step-wise function:rates for communities with none of these markersfar exceed the provincial average, whilecommunities in which all markers are presentcontinue to enjoy a complete absence of youthsuicide (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Suicide Rates by Number of Factors Present in the Community (1993-

2000)

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Our motivation for carrying out theseepidemiological studies was to demonstrate thatthe concept of continuity may count as one ofthose rare social science concepts that provesuseful at more than one level of analysis. Just ascontinuity at a personal level can provide abackstop to those moments when life mightotherwise seem not worth living, and promotes thecare and concern that we feel for our ownindividual futures, cultural continuity represents acounterpart barometer of communal care andconcern for a shared past and a collective future.Such care is reflected in efforts to preserve andpromote cultural practices and to control andmanage available resources in ways that conservecultural identity in the face of acculturative forces.To the extent that all that is true—that efforts to“carry that ideal or conceptual future back into thepresent to create the sociocultural environment ofthe newcomer” (Cole, 1999, p. 88) really do forma cornerstone of psychological continuity—thencommunity level efforts to promote culturalcontinuity ought to be reflected in the ability ofyoung people to weather the storms of their ownidentity formation processes. Our data support thisview: high scoring communities have low tovanishing youth suicide rates.

Of course, we don’t mean to scare up ghostsfrom an intellectual past by suggesting thatcultures can be rank ordered from least to most“continuous” in the same way that it was oncebelieved that they could be classified from less tomore “developed” (Tylor, 1874). We cannot resistthe temptation, however, to note that Boas (1911),whose seminal work put the lie to this notion ofcultural evolution, actually collected data from thesame Rural Native community in which wegathered the self-continuity data reported inChapter VI. What distinguishes communities withlittle control over education is, for example, not alack of will or want of effort. Current resourcesand barriers to progress vary widely across thesecommunities. In much the same way, the historicalharms visited upon Native people were notexperienced by every First Nation in equalmeasure. Understanding the relation betweenmeasures of cultural continuity and indexes ofindividual continuity will obviously involve morethan measuring these six marker variables andcounting only the most tragic of failures inpersonal permanence. To that end, we arecurrently broadening our inquiry in two ways.


First, under the guidance of First Nationscommunity members, we are developing a set ofmore locally relevant measures of culturalcontinuity that catalogue the particular responsesof communities to their own unique conditions.Second, we are examining the impact ofcommunity efforts on the very young people theyare meant to protect and foster. Here, we mean notonly to gather reports from young persons

concerning their perception of, or participation in,such efforts, but also to collect data on outcomemeasures other than suicide that (to our minds)ought to similarly reflect the protective value ofcultural continuity—school completion rates andacademic achievement on the up-side, and injuryand accident rates on the down-side. Allindications are that both new avenues of researchwill prove productive.

Chapter VI: Culture as a set-point in the choice between Narrativist and EssentialistSelf-Continuity warranting practices

Chapter V concerned whole Aboriginalcommunities and the ways in which their sharedefforts to collectively navigate matters of culturalcontinuity are related to the frequency of suicidesamong their own youth, just as Chapter IV wasalso, in its own way, singular in its concern issuesof identity and suicide—this time, in a different,although equally homogeneous, sample ofculturally mainstream adolescents. When ChapterIII, which is no less about a largely seamlesssample of rank-and-file public school children, isalso thrown into the mix, it threatens to appear asthough our version of cross-cultural research risksturning into the procedural equivalent of serialmonogamy, oddly devoted, it would seem, topicking off different populations one culture at atime. The present chapter is not like that, andinstead represents our best attempt at a directcomparison of the self-continuity warrantingpractices of various Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal samples.Study Five: Personal Persistence in thelives of Aboriginal and non-AboriginalYouth

This study is also different in other importantways from what has come before. First, althoughnot involving whole populations, as did ChapterV, it is larger than usual direct assessment studies.That is, it involves lengthy, one-on-one interviewswith more than 200 Native and non-Native youthdrawn from three distinctcommunities—communities that differ one fromthe other in being more or less urban, or remote. Itis also distinct from our other studies in that,unlike Chapters III-V (which summarize findingsthat, while re- analyzed or otherwise augmentedwith new data, have already been detailedelsewhere), it reports long strings of results, theparticulars of which have so far been unpublished.

A third distinctive feature of the present studyinvolves scoring. Although Chapter III, in whichwe worked to frame and elaborate a distinctionbetween Essentialist and Narrative approaches tothe paradox of sameness and change, gave equalpride of place to both of these distinctive problemsolving strategies, two chapters and three studieshave now gone by with almost no mention ofNarrative approaches to the dilemma of personalpersistence. Responsibility for the lopsidedemphasis on Essentialist solution strategies doesnot rest, we want to insist, on any conviction ofour own that such entity based accounts aresomehow inherently “better” or more adequate tothe task of warranting continuity claims, but to thecultural complexion of the Euro-American youthwho participated in our initial studies. At least thiswas our orienting hypothesis at the beginning ofthe new work to be reported here, and, toanticipate our results, essentially the conclusion towhich our cross-cultural research has led. That is,in Chapters I and II we went to some lengths toargue the case that Western European culture—theculture from which the large bulk of the youngpersons who served as respondents in Studies Onethrough Three were drawn—is committed first andforemost to an Essentialist view dedicated tounearthing enduring and more genotypic partslurking behind the phenotypic surface structures ofwhat are taken to be largely ephemeral change.Things, or at least things of a natural kind, we areled to assume, almost always harbor some more orless abiding, or more or less abstract orinteriorized core of essential sameness (a hiddenname or personality structure or immortal soul)that survives the ravages of time and can bepointed to when change threatens to cost us ourcontinuity. To the degree that there is an elementof truth in such common stereotypes, it need comeas no great surprise that we could interview three


studies worth of culturally mainstream adolescentswithout encountering a substantial number ofyoung persons who could not be made to fitcomfortably within that particular half of ourscoring typology orchestrated to capture more orless sophisticated ways of being Essentialistic. Inshort, by capitalizing on samples of conveniencedrawn predominantly from the culturalmainstream we looked for and found apredominance of Essentialist thinking at everyturn.

Notwithstanding the fact that such a situationalexplanation will largely do, some of theresponsibility for having gotten this far with solittle having yet been said about Narrativesolutions to the problem of personal persistence isalso owed to the fact that, having spent so muchtime looking where the light is brightest, we as aresearch team, were no doubt initially slow torecognize instances of more Narrative approachesto the problem of personal persistence when theydid occasionally arise. This is in part the reason, aswe earlier attempted to make clear, that the morebalanced descriptive typology (i.e., 2 “Tracks”[Narrative and Essentialist]—each with 5“Levels”) was the scoring scheme to which weeventually came, rather than the one with whichwe began. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, andwith the advantage of access to samples of youngpersons removed from the center of the culturalmainstream, the opportunity to observe and recordthe broad range of alternative solutions to theproblem of personal persistence presents itself.

Belatedly armed with the emerging set ofconceptual distinctions reflected in the scoringcriteria elaborated in Chapter II, gifted with theopportunity to interview substantial numbers ofyoung persons reasonably representative of bothAboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures, andinformed by our earlier results based on interviewswith rank-and-file adolescents of Euro-Americandescent, we approached the cross-cultural studynow on report with the following set ofhypotheses. First, because we had already found itto be true in the past, we anticipated that any newset of culturally mainstream adolescents wouldonce again fall back onto what Polkinghorne(1988) has called a “metaphysics of substance,”and respond to questions about their own andothers’ personal persistence by adopting, as adefault strategy, an Essentialist solution thatfollowed one of the 5 “Levels” detailed in ourscoring typology. Our expectations for First

Nations youth, on the other hand, were verydifferent. Although essentialist talk of “spirits”and more can certainly be heard in Native cultures,contemporary anthropologists (e.g., for a recentreview of this literature see: Bierwert, 1999)maintain that such references to essencescommonly rest on a different metaphysicalstructure—one that does not regard such “spirits”as inhering to individuals (as does the Christiannotion of a soul), but, instead, accords them alargely independent and autonomous existence(Bierwert, 1999, p. 176). In contrast, then, to anymetaphysics of substances or essences oftenargued to dominate Western, Euro-Americanintellectual traditions, Native culture is broadlyunderstood to adopt more of a metaphysics of“potentiality and actuality” (Polkinghorne, 1988;see also Deloria, 1979), that privileges becomingover being. All of this led us to hypothesize thatFirst Nations youth, in contrast to their non-Nativecounterparts, would favor variations upon what wehave termed Narrative solutions to the problem ofpersonal persistence.Method

Participants

A total of 220 young persons participated.Respondents were drawn from three differentcommunities: Rural Native (N=92), Urban Native(N=91), and non-Native (N=37). Details of thenumbers in each group appear below.

Rural Native sample. Participants from theRural Native community—an island communitylocated 30 miles off Canada’s westcoast—participated in two waves of datacollection held 18-24 months apart. At Time 1, atotal of 55 young persons were tested (32 females,23 males; mean age=15.25 years, range=12 to 20years). All participants completed the PersonalPersistence Interview which always began withone or more stories about persistence in the livesof others, and always ended with an interviewsegment on self-continuity. Interview materialswere presented in either print or film format.Those in the Print Condition (N=29) read andheard a tape recorded version of a Native story(Bear Woman) and a non-Native story (Valjean).Those in the Film Condition (N=26) watched aNative film (Frank’s Journey) and a non-Nativefilm (Scrooge). (These story materials aredescribed in detail in the Materials and Proceduressection below.) At Time 2, a total of 67 youngpersons were tested (35 females, 32 males, range=


12-22 years mean age= 16.78 years). Forty-two ofthese young persons completed the PersonalPersistence Interview. For reasons detailed in theResults section, the story materials used with thisfollow-up group were presented in print formatonly, with one Native story (Bear Woman) andone non-Native story (Valjean). These 42participants, along with an additional sample of 25available volunteers, also completed a 4-partQuestionnaire Battery (described in the Materialssection).

Urban Native sample. The young persons whomade up this sample are members of a band whosetraditional lands are located on the apron of amajor west coast Canadian city. A total of 91young persons from this community (51 females,40 males; mean age=15.31 years, age range=13-18years) either completed the Personal PersistenceInterview (N=65), the Questionnaire Battery(N=26), or both (N=2). Those who completed thePersonal Persistence Interview received stories ineither print (N=32, Bear Woman, Valjean) or filmformat (N=35; Frank’s Journey, Scrooge).

Non-Native sample. Beyond choosing youngpersons of similar ages, there is no obviouscollection of non-Native youth that constitutes anideal study group against which to compare theresponses of our Native samples. Direct SEScomparisons between persons who do and do notlive on federal reserves are, for example, naturallysuspect, as would be any attempt to draw parallelswith other minority groups. The closest thing to atheory relevant prospect was judged to be a sampleof adolescents whose cultural roots run as deep aspossible into traditional Euro-American culture––apossibility not easily realized in the multiculturalcontext of an urban, Pacific rim city. The sampleeventually settled upon was one drawn from asuburban, lower middle class parochial schoolmaintained by the descendents of what, a centuryago, was a Dutch Reform immigrant group. A totalof 37 youth (18 females, 19 males; meanage=15.73 years, range=13 to 18 years) wererecruited from this school and completed thePersonal Persistence Interview using storymaterials in either print (N=18, Bear Woman,Valjean) or film (N=19, Frank’s Journey,Scrooge) format.Materials and Procedures

All interviews were conducted in theparticipants’ home communities. Questionnairedata, where obtained, were collected during the

same session in which interviews were held.Within the Native communities, permission toenter traditional territories and to make use ofcommunity facilities was obtained from the Chiefand Band council. For the non-Native sample,permission was obtained from the school principaland from classroom teachers.

Personal Persistence Interview. As describedin Chapter III, the interview was designed togather participants’ thoughts concerning continuityin their own life (Self-portion) and in the lives ofthe protagonists in Native and non-Native filmsand stories. Four different stories were used: twodrawn from the Western literary tradition (VictorHugo’s Les Misérables, and Charles Dickens’ AChristmas Carol). as well as two selected for theirNative content: The Girl Who Lived with the Bears(a traditional Haida story published in the form ofa children’s book by Diamond Goldin & Plewes,1997), and Jan Ah Dah – It Hurts (a film producedby Northern Native Broadcasting, a First Nationscompany in the Yukon Territory, concerning aNative adolescent’s struggle following the death ofa friend). These stories were then rendered intoeither picture book or video format forpresentation to our young participants. The printstories were modeled on Classic ComicBooks—minimal text accompanied by colorillustrations. A Classic Comic version of LesMisérables was adapted for use in the procedureby eliminating certain sections of the story toproduce a 24-page color booklet we referred to asValjean. The Native story The Girl Who Livedwith the Bears was similarly shortened andreferred to as Bear Woman. The text of bothcomics was then recorded on audio cassette andplayed aloud as the participant read the story.These recordings were approximately 10-minutesin length. The 1951 film version of A ChristmasCarol (Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim) was editedto produce a 10-minute video tape. The Nativefilm Jan Ah Dah – It Hurts was similarly edited toproduce a 10-minute video tape we referred to asFrank’s Journey.

Participants read/heard (or watched) the storyand were then asked to provide descriptions of themain character as s/he appeared at the beginningand then at the end of the story (see Appendix Afor the standardized text and probe questions usedin these interviews). The thrust of the interviewprotocol was to draw attention to the differences inthese earlier and later portions of these accounts,and to urge the participant to explain why or how


it was that these two very different descriptionscould apply to one and the same person (e.g.,“What was Valjean like at the beginning of thestory?” “What was Monsieur Madeleine like at theend of the story?” “Why, despite of the verydifferent ways that you describe them, why do youbelieve that Valjean and Monsieur Madeleine areone and the same person?”). Where necessary,standard probe questions were used to urge theparticipants to expand upon their explanations.Thoughts concerning continuity in theparticipants’ own life were obtained in similarfashion by asking young persons to describethemselves at some point in the past (5 to10 yearsearlier, depending on their current age) and thenfor a current self-description (see Appendix A).Differences in these descriptions were thenunderscored and the participant was asked howthese could apply to one and the same person.Again, standardized probe questions were used ifthe explanations were judged to be too brief.Individual interviews were completed in a single60-90 minute session and recorded on audio tapefor later transcription.

Questionnaire Battery. Our four-part paper-and-pencil questionnaire battery was constructedusing items from several existing measures. Part 1of the battery contained Kuhn & McPartland’s(1954) Twenty Statements Test (TST, also knownas the “Who am I?” test). The TST consists of alist of 20 sentence stems, all beginning with thephrase: “I am...” Participants are asked tocomplete the phrases in whatever ways they deemfit. Part 2 included Singelis’ (1994) Self-ConstrualScale—a 24-item questionnaire for assessingindividuals’ Independent and Interdependent self-construals. Part 3 was Dweck’s (2000) ImplicitTheories of Personality Scale—a set of sixstatements concerning personality and personalitychange that respondent’s rate according to a 5 stepagree-disagree scale. Part 4 was a 130-item EthnicIdentification Scale constructed from four othermeasures: 1) the Vancouver Index of Acculturation(VIA; Ryder, Alden & Paulhus, 2000)––a self-report instrument that assesses several domainsrelevant to acculturation, including values, socialrelationships, and adherence to traditions; 2) Wardand Rana-Deuba’s (1999) Acculturation Index thatassesses two dimensions (host and co-nationalidentification) and four modes (integration,separation, marginalization, and assimilation) ofacculturation; 3) Phinney’s (1992) MultigroupEthnic Identity Measure (MEIM), a questionnaire

measure designed for use across diverse ethnicgroups; and, 4) Zygmuntowiscz, Burack, Evans,Klaiman, Mandour, Randolph, & Iarocci’s (2000,June) Values Orientation Scale, a version of anearlier measure by Szapocznik, Scopetta, Kurtines,& Aranalde (1978) that has been specificallyadapted for use with Canadian Aboriginal youth.Questionnaires were completed either immediatelypreceding or following the Personal PersistenceInterview (for those who attended an interview), orduring a single session for those who were notinterviewed.Results

Before turning to the central business ofsearching out possible differences in theperformance of our Native and non-Native groups,we first needed to be convinced that ourassessment procedures were comfortably withinthe competence range of our participants, and thatnone of the various experimental conditions ortesting materials we had employed worked toespecially handicap any relevant subset of theyoung persons tested. For that reason, we begin byreporting the results from a series of backgroundstatistical analyses meant to shore up our trust thatthe data are appropriate for answering the largerquestions for which our studies were designed.First, we searched for potential differences in theages and gender distributions of the varioussubgroups of participants, and then examinedparticipant attrition and response rates as indexesof task difficulty. This is followed by analyses ofthe variance that arises from the use of differentstory materials and display media employed indifferent iterations of our interview procedure.Having satisfied ourselves that the data could berelied upon to pass these necessary qualityassurance tests, we turn, in the analyses thatfollow, to issues of inter-rater reliability in thescoring of the interview transcripts, all beforecoming to the real heart of the matter bycomparing the types of reasoning used by ourresearch participants, and the various factors thatmight influence those judgments.Demographic characteristics of the sample: Ageand gender

A total of 179 young persons (81 Male, 98Female) completed the Personal PersistenceInterview (either at Time 1 [N=160], Time 2[N=42], or both [N=23]). Of these, 142 were FirstNations (77 Rural Native, 65 Urban Native) and37 were non-Native. The mean ages of these


groups at the time of their first interview areshown in Table 5. No reliable age differences wereintended or found across the groups, nor betweenthe genders with the exception that within theRural Native group, female participants who tookpart in the follow-up interview (Time 2) werereliably older than their male counterparts (F=17.1years; M=15.2 years; F(1,49)=6.254 p=.02)—afact due, in all likelihood, to the tendency for olderFirst Nation males to leave reserve communities insearch of employment.

Although slightly more females than maleswere interviewed, the distribution of gender acrossgroups does not otherwise deviate from whatwould be expected by chance (see Table 6). Thisholds true across the 3 communities (c2

[2]=.985,p=.611), as well as for the combined Native vs.non-Native groups (c2

[1]=.701, p=.460).Indexes of Task Difficulty: Subject attrition anddata integrity

Our assessment procedures included materialsdrawn from two cultural sources (Native and non-Native) and presented in two formats (print andvideo). Given the differences in the culturalbackgrounds of our participants, there were, weanticipated, grounds for possible concern thatsome of them might find some of the materialsmore interesting or more difficult thanothers—perhaps in systematic ways that couldwork to bias our findings. Consequently, weneeded assurances that the procedures were nottoo “foreign” or technically demanding, orotherwise inappropriate in ways that might havedifferentially affected performance or participantattrition within our cultural groups, causing those

who survived to be unrepresentative of the age orcultural groups from which they were drawn. A setof analyses was conducted to inspect thesepossibilities, beginning with an examination ofthose relatively rare cases in which our interviewdata proved unusable.

A total of 202 interview transcripts were scored(23 participants interviewed at both Time 1 andTime 2, 137 interviewed only at T1, and 19 only atT2). Each participant’s transcript contained dataderived from the discussion of either 2 or 3stimulus stories. Of the resulting total pool of 554story transcripts, 41 (7.4%) were judged to containtoo little data to be reliably coded, and wereclassified as “unscorable.” For the most part, thesestories (not participants) were excluded because ofrecording equipment failure, or because theinterview was interrupted or otherwise incomplete.In several cases, however, two raters concludedthat, despite our best efforts, the young personsinvolved had provided too little information inresponse to questioning on that particular story toallow a confident rating of their reasoning.

Of the 41 story transcripts judged unscorable,13 were provided by just five participants whosecomplete interview protocols contained noscorable data whatsoever. With these 5participants removed from the dataset, the rates ofunscorable stories were: 3 of 110 (2.7%) storiesfrom our non-Native participants, and 25 of 431(5.8%) from Native participants. As such, noremarkable or statistically significant differencewas observed between groups in terms of thefrequency of unscorable stories (c2

[1]=1.69, p=.19),nor were any sex differences found: Males = 15 of

Table 5: Participant Mean Age (and Standard Deviations) by Group and Gender

Overall Male Female

Group N Age N Age N Age

Native 142 15.30 (2.16) 62 15.21 (2.13) 80 15.37 (2.20)

Rural Native 77 15.26 (2.47) 34 14.76 (2.37) 43 15.65 (2.51)Urban Native 65 15.35 (1.74) 28 15.75 (1.67) 37 15.75 (1.67)

Non-Native 37 15.73 (1.50) 19 16.11 (1.66) 18 15.33 (1.24)

Total 179 15.39 (2.05) 81 15.42 (2.05) 98 15.37 (2.05)

Table 6: Ratio of Male to Female participants by Group

Group Male : Female

Native .77:1Rural Native .79:1

Urban Native .76:1Non-Native 1.05:1

Total .83:1


249, Females = 13 of 289 (c2[1]=1.06, p=.30).

Content and Media Effects

Our scoring procedures were designed toproduce a Track (I or II) and Level (1-5)classification for each story. Because lateranalyses center on overall summary scores derivedfor each participant across stories that differed incontent (Native, non-Native, Self) andpresentation media (book, video), it is important torule out the possibility that subsequentclassifications might have been differentiallyinfluenced by these factors.

Story Content. There is some question aboutthe wisdom of comparing “Level” across

“Tracks.” That is, because these are categoricalrather than continuous data, it is not clear that thedesignation “Level 2” on both Track I and Track IIcarries the same meaning. Nevertheless, simplyassuming a rough equivalence by treating thesedata points as though they constitute an ordinalscale (regardless of Track), a total of 127participants produced scorable data on all 3 storytypes (Native, non-Native, Self). These werecollapsed across Tracks, and the mean Levelscores assigned appear in Table 7. No significantdifferences were found across story types in termsof the Level classifications (F(2, 250)= 0.435, ns).

An analysis that compared the Level scores

separately for each Track across story types forthose participants who were consistently given thesame Track assignment (N=89) was alsoundertaken. Again, there were no significantdifferences in mean Level scores based on thecontent of the stories (F(2,54)= 0.400, p= 0.672 forEssentialists, F(2,116)= 0.690, p= 0.504 forNarrativists; see Table 8).

In testing these Group by Story differences, thebetween-group factor Native vs. non-Native wasincluded to search for possible interactionsbetween the cultural content of the story and thecultural background of the participants. None ofthese interactions were found to be statistically

significant.What these analyses tell us is that our

participants’ Level scores were not, as we werecautiously concerned they might be, substantiallyinfluenced by the particular content of the stories,nor by the extent to which that content could beconsidered “consistent” with the participants’cultural background. Consequently, it was judgedappropriate to collapse across such story contentdifferences in subsequent analyses.

Media Effects. A series of analyses was thenconducted in an effort to test whether anyindividual story, or presentation medium (print

Table 7: Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores by Story Type

Story Type Mean Level Score (SD)

Native 2.665 (1.161)

Non-native 2.719 (1.195)Self 2.622 (1.127)

Note. N=127

Table 8: Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores by Story Type and Track

Story Type Essentialist Track (SD) Narrative Track (SD)

Native 2.547 (1.395) 2.691 (1.518)Non-native 2.726 (1.449) 2.845 (1.658)

Self 2.597 (1.244) 2.600 (1.588)

Note. N=89

Table 9: Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores (and Standard Deviations) by Story Content and PresentationMedium

Presentation Medium

Story Content Video Comic

Native 2.526 (1.147) 2.366 (1.146)

Non-Native 2.421 (1.184) 2.537 (1.178)

Note. N=79


versus video) was differentially related toparticipants’ responses. To compare the possibleeffects of presentational media, a 2 (BetweenGroups) x 2 (Within Stories) ANOVA wascomputed using only the data from the non-Nativeand Rural Native participants tested at Time 1.The analysis was limited to data from theseparticipants for whom media constituted a betweenfactor in the design (individual participantsreceived all stories in the same media—video orcomic), while story content was a within factor (allsubjects received one Native and one non-Nativestory, with the order counter-balanced). The meanLevel scores by content and media type are shownin Table 9. Despite our initial concern that some ofour participant groups might be adversely effectedby the challenges of print media, no such effect formedia was found: F(1, 77)=.008, p=.927, nor wasthere a difference by story content (Native, non-Native, F(1, 77)=.122, p=.728), nor any interaction

among these factors: F(1, 77)=2.167, p=.145.Because no differences based on media or

content were found in this large subset of our data,subsequent interviews conducted with urbanNative participants, and interviews at Time 2,were not blocked on this factor.

A comparison across all participants similarlyshowed that scores did not differ on the Nativevideo versus the Native comic (mean scores 2.606and 2.348, respectively): t (158)=-1.563, p=.12;nor for the non-Native video and non-Nativecomic (mean scores 2.610 and 2.438,respectively): Welch’s t (139.48)=.994, p=.32.Finally, no sex differences were found in scoresexamined by media or story content.Inter-rater reliability

Our procedures involved the testing of 179young people. As described above, 5 wereexcluded from analysis due to concerns about the

Table 12: Inter-rater agreement with respect to Personal Persistence Level assignments

Level Assignment Number of cases (percent)

Agreed 239 (85.6)Disagreed by 1 level 31 (11.1)

Disagreed by 2 levels 7 (2.5)Disagreed by 3 levels 2 (0.7)

Disagreed by 4 levels 0 (0)

Table 13: Inter-rater agreement with respect to Personal Persistence Level Assignments by Story Type

Story Type Agreement Rate Kappa

Native 83 of 96 (86.5%) .778*Non-Native 70 of 85 (82.4%) .750*Self 86 of 98 (87.6%) .820*

Total 239 of 279 (85.7%) .786*Note. * p<.0005

Table 10: Inter-rater agreement with respect to Personal Persistence Track Assignment

Story Type Agreement Rate Kappa

Native 96 of 112 (85.7%) .673*

Non-Native 85 of 103 (82.5%) .631*Self 98 of 114 (85.6%) .714*

Total 279 of 329 (84.8%) .675*Note. * p<.0005

Table 11: Cross-rater classification of Personal Persistence Track assignments

Rater 1Essentialist Narrative Unscorable Total

Essentialist 70 29 0 99

Rater 2 Narrative 9 199 3 211

Unscorable 4 5 10 19

Total 83 233 13 329


quality of the data, and 23 were interviewed atboth Time 1 and Time 2. In total, then (countingthose who were tested on more than one occasion),we have 197 interview transcripts containing 541separate stories. To assess inter-rater reliability, asubset of 115 of the 197 transcripts (58.4%)chosen at random, were scored independently bytwo raters. These transcripts contained a total of329 stories. Each story was twice classifiedaccording to Track (Track I = Essentialist, Track II= Narrative), and within each Track the storieswere assigned one of five Levels. The analysesreported below were meant to determine howoften our raters assigned the same Track or Levelclassification across the assessment opportunitiesthat were afforded (2-3 stimulus stories, and 1-2testing sessions). Rates of inter-rater agreementare reported separately for Track and Levelassignments.

Agreement on Track ratings. Our raters agreedin their assessment of Track in 285 of the 335stories (84.8%, Cohen’s Kappa =.68, p<.0005).Rates of agreement were uniformly high across thethree types of stories (see Table 10 below). Table11 displays these same ratings cross tabulated withcases of agreement appearing on the diagonal.

Agreement on Level ratings. As noted above, itmakes questionable sense to count as cases ofinter-rater agreement those instances in whichparticipants were given the same Level butdifferent Track assignments. Therefore, attentionwas restricted to that subset of 279 stories wherethe two raters agreed in their Track classifications.Of these, raters agreed in their Level classificationon 239 of 279 stories that they jointly considered(85.7%, Cohen’s Kappa =.786, p<.0005). Theextent of disagreement was also minimal: in96.8% of all cases, the raters either agreed or werewithin 1 Level of agreement (see Table 12 below).Table 13 shows the inter-rater agreement by StoryType.Within-subject consistency and summary ratings

Our interpretative framework does not requirethat participants be consistent across occasions.Rather, we assumed that all of our participantswere, in fact, capable of responding in either anEssentialist or Narrative fashion, or otherwise had“access” to these two distinct ways of proceeding,but, that, for various reasons—including possiblecultural reasons of the sort featured in thismonograph—they ordinarily employ one or theother of these continuity preserving warranting

strategies as a default option. As such, it was ourstrong expectation that, although not obligated todo so, most participants would ordinarily respondin ways coded as being representative of the sameTrack across the several story problems theyundertook. If this were not so, that is, ifresponding in either a Narrative or Essentialistfashion on one occasion had no bearing on thelikelihood of being coded in a similar fashion onsubsequent occasions, then there would be nopoint of going on to speculate about how culture,or anything else might systematically influenceTrack assignment. Consequently, it was judgedimportant to determine whether the participants inthe present study sequence would respond in thesame or different ways when required to respondto interview questions about discontinuities intheir own life and the lives of other Native andnon-Native story characters. This same analysisacquires additional importance because of ourinitial intention and eventual practice, of derivinga single Track and Level classification for eachparticipant—a global classification that summedacross these various data sources, and thatpresupposed a reasonable degree of consistence ofthe sort just described. The “within-subjectconsistency” analyses reported below work to helpjustify this summary rating.

A total of 149 of 197 (75.6%) participants werefound to be totally consistent in their Trackassignments across all stories. In other words, 3out of 4 participants displayed the same Track onall of the stories (mean of 2.75 stories perparticipant, standard deviation of 0.50). Theremaining 48 participants were assigned the Trackassociated with their most sophisticated level ofreasoning. Clearly, while “access” to both sorts ofwarranting strategies is frequently demonstrated,most participants do have a default strategy that isregularly exercised.

For Level of reasoning, about which ourtheoretical expectations are less strong, 115 of 197participants (58.4%) consistently used the sameTrack and Level of reasoning across all of thestories. For the remaining 82 participants, theirhighest Level was used for the overall rating.Table 14 displays the degree to which participantswere consistent in their reasoning. Obviously,more often than not, a participant’s use of a givenresponse strategy scored at a given coding Level isthe best available predictor of how he or she willrespond on subsequent occasions.


Taken together, these analyses went someimportant distance in assuring us that theresponses of our participants could be consistentlylocated within our two-track, five-level codingscheme.Factors Associated with Track and LevelAssignments

As described above, for each interview,participants were given a Track and Levelassignment for each of the stories presented and aTrack and Level assignment for their discussion ofcontinuity in their own life. A series of analysesare reported below that search for factors that areassociated with these assignments. These analysesfocus on four factors (age, gender, cultural group,and community) and are reported separately forTrack and Level classifications.

Track. As anticipated on theoretical grounds,the groups did differ dramatically, in that Nativeparticipants were much more likely to be classifiedas Track II (Narrative), and the non-Nativeparticipants were particularly likely to beclassified as Track I (Essentialist): c2

[1]=56.448,p<.005, Cramer’s V = 0.570 (see Table 15). TheNative communities themselves did not, however,differ from one another in the frequency ofNarrative or Essentialist ratings (c2

[1]=0, p<.994).Track assignments were not associated with agedifferences: F[1,172]=.495, p=.483. (Track 1: 15.6;Track 2: 15.4), nor with gender (c2

[1]=1.576,p<.209).

Level. Two methods of calculating an overallLevel score were used: an Average Level score(the mean of Level scores across stories that wereassigned the same Track) and a Highest Levelscore.

Highest Level: Because of the unequal numbersof participants within our groups, separateanalyses of each respondent’s Highest Level scorewere conducted for the Narrative and Essentialistgroups. Each of these analyses examined therelation of cultural background (Native vs. non-Native) and gender to Level scores. In eachanalysis, participants were randomly removedfrom the dataset to achieve proportionality acrossthe groups. With age partialled out, reliabledifferences emerged only within the Narrativegroup: on average, non-Native Narrativists hadhigher Level ratings than Native Narrativists(adjusted means: 3.204 vs. 2.634) and FemaleNarrativists had higher Level ratings than MaleNarrativists (adjusted means: 3.103 vs. 2.735). Nodifferences were found within the Essentialistgroup. In subsequent analyses, special care wastaken to control for these ancillary effects.

To determine whether differences existedbetween the Narrative and Essentialist groups, afinal ANCOVA was computed in which gender,age and cultural group were partialled out. Noreliable differences in highest level score wereobserved between the Narrative and Essentialists.

Analyzing the data by community, a reliable

Table 14: Participant consistency with respect to Personal Persistence Level Assignments(1-5)

Level Assignment Number of cases (percent)

Consistent 115 (58.4)

Varied by 1 level 46 (23.3)Varied by 2 levels 32 (16.2)

Varied by 3 levels 4 (2.0)Varied by 4 levels 0 (0)

Table 15: Personal Persistence Track assignments by Gender, Group, and Community

Essentialist Narrative

Gender

Male 25 (31.6%) 54 (68.3%)Female 22 (23.2%) 73 (76.8%)

GroupNative 19 (13.9%) 118 (86.1%)

Non-Native 28 (75.7%) 9 (24.3%)Community

Rural Native 10 (13.9%) 62 (86.1%)Urban Native 9 (13.8%) 56 (86.2%)

Non-Native 28 (75.7%) 9 (24.3%)


difference for level scores emerged: the RuralNative community had lower scores than did theUrban Native and Urban non-Native groups whodid not differ from one another(F[2,171]=11.304.,p<.0005, partial h2 = 0.117,Tukey’s HSD; see Tables 16 and 17).

Mean Level: When overall Level is calculatedby averaging individual Level scores within theparticipants’ overall Track assignment, no reliabledifferences were observed by Gender or Groupand no reliable interaction between these factors(see Table 18). Again, a reliable difference bycommunity emerged with the Rural Nativecommunity scoring lower than the others(F[2,171]=7.199,p<.001, partial h2 = 0.078, Tukey’sHSD; see Table 19).

Age. Significant positive correlations betweenage and Level score were (as expected) observedfor both highest Level (r=.32, p<.0005, r2=.10)and average Level (r=.27, p<.0005, r2=.07).

Stability and temporal consistency of reasoning(longitudinal data)

If, as hypothesized, culture is a primarydeterminant of whether one’s default strategy insolving problems of personal persistence isprincipally Narrative or Essentialist, then, short ofsome cultural overhaul, a respondent’s Trackassignment ought not to be variable, but rathergenerally enduring across substantial intervals oftime. As a preliminary test of this hypothesis, asmall longitudinal study was carried out. Eighteento twenty-four months following our initialinterviews, 23 of the young participants from theRural Native community were re-located and re-interviewed. Because analysis of the data fromTime 1 indicated no differences between groupsaccording to the media of presentation or storycontent, the testing materials at Time 2 wererepresented only in comic book format. Again, thestories contained both Native and non-Native

Table 16: Highest Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores (and Standard Deviations) by Track and Gender

Group Essentialist Narrative Total

Male 2.840 (1.344) 2.444 (0.904) 2.570 (1.070)

Female 3.318 (1.359) 2.836 (0.727) 2.947 (0.926)Native 2.579 (1.305) 2.661 (0.808) 2.650 (0.888)

Non-Native 3.393 (1.315) 2.778 (1.093) 3.243 (1.278)

Total 3.063 (1.358) 2.669 (0.827) 2.776 (1.009)

Table 17: Highest Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores (and Standard Deviations) by Community

Group Rural Native Urban Native Non-Native Total

Male 2.000 (1.016) 2.821 (0.670) 3.158 (1.214) 2.570 (1.070)

Female 2.700 (0.853) 3.027 (0.645) 3.333 (1.372) 2.947 (0.926)Essentialist 2.300 (1.142) 2.889 (1.167) 3.393 (1.315) 3.063 (1.358)

Narrative 2.403 (0.913) 2.946 (0.553) 2.778 (1.093) 2.669 (0.827)

Total 2.389 (0.987) 2.939 (0.659) 3.243 (1.278) 2.776 (1.009)

Table 18: Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores (and Standard Deviations) by Track and Group

Group Essentialist Narrative Total

Male 2.467 (1.175) 2.244 (0.855) 2.314 (0.965)Female 2.902 (1.220) 2.573 (0.664) 2.649 (0.831)

Native 2.421 (1.267) 2.421 (0.754) 2.421 (0.837)Non-Native 2.839 (1.151) 2.593 (0.943) 2.779 (1.096)

Total 2.670 (1.203) 2.433 (0.766) 2.497 (0.907)

Table 19: Mean Personal Persistence Level Scores (and Standard Deviations) by Community

Group Rural Native Urban Native Non-Native Total

Male 1.885 (0.938) 2.530 (0.722) 2.719 (1.080) 2.314 (0.965)Female 2.454 (0.804) 2.766 (0.641) 2.843 (1.141) 2.649 (0.831)Essentialist 2.100 (1.296) 2.778 (1.202) 2.839 (1.151) 2.670 (1.203)

Narrative 2.218 (0.840) 2.646 (0.573) 2.593 (0.943) 2.433 (0.766)

Total 2.201 (0.906) 2.664 (0.682) 2.779 (1.096) 2.497 (0.907)


characters and were followed by a discussion ofcontinuity in the participant’s own life. Theanalyses reported below concern the consistencyof the participants reasoning across this two-yeartime window.Consistency with respect to Track

The proportion of participants using Narrativereasoning in this all-Native sample increased from67% at Time 1 to 87% at Time 2. At the time ofthe initial interview, 20 of 23 respondentsconsistently employed one Type of reasoning(either Essentialist or Narrative) with reference tothe personal persistence of the various storycharacters and in discussing their own lives.During the follow-up interview, 22 of 23respondents were consistent in the Type ofreasoning used. Overall, 16 of 23 (70%) employedthe same Type of general self-continuitywarranting strategy across both testing sessions.Consistency with respect to Level

Fourteen of 23 participants exhibited the sameLevel of reasoning throughout the first interview(i.e., across all the stories within that interview).Fifteen of 23 did so at the second interview.Across both testing sessions, just under half ofthese young persons (11 of 23) employed the sameLevel of reasoning on each and every story duringboth interviews.Changes in Reasoning Level from Time 1 to Time2

If, as predicted, adolescents ordinarily becomeincreasingly sophisticated in their solutions to theproblem of sameness in the face of personalchange, then at least some of those tested could beexpected to shift the Level of their explanationsduring the two-year interval covered by this study.Of the 16 respondents whose consistent use of thesame type of continuity argument allowed suchchange scores to be calculated, exactly halfshowed this hypothesized pattern of improvement.Of the remaining 8 respondents, 2 showed ameasurable, but trivial decline, and the remainderstayed the same. Those whose Level did notchange were either already at ceiling on the scaleat Time 1 (four participants), or at floor (two ofour youngest subjects) and were rated at Level 1during both interviews. Even within this restrictedsample of 16 participants, we observed a strongstatistical trend toward increasingly higher scoringLevels over time (t(30)= 2.092 (one-tailed),p=.054, Cohen’s ∆ = 0.424).

Although these numbers are too small towarrant elaborate statistical analyses, it is obviousby inspection that, as anticipated, real change didtake place for an important number of these youngparticipants, and when it did, it was most often inthe direction of greater complexity.Measures of Linguistic Sophistication

In the arguments presented above, we haveendeavored to make what is hopefully aconvincing case that there really are at least twofundamentally different strategies that youngpeople (sometimes even the same people) utilizein coming to grips with the paradox of samenessand change, and this contention is stronglysupported by our data. Young Native participantsdisproportionately employed Narrative self-continuity warranting strategies, whereas theirnon-Native counterparts most often displayed adefault strategy that is Essentialist in character.Although it is our intention to lay this difference atthe door of the different cultures of which theseyoung people are a part, it remains possible thatthey are instead the coincidental byproduct ofsome more mundane set of factors at work behindthe scene. Because of such possibilities, it isnecessary to strengthen our case by also exploringand, where possible, discounting other typicallymore reductive explanations for the pattern ofresults that we obtained. In other words, we wantto rule out unnecessarily reductive readings ofNarrative or Essentialist self-continuity arguments,or, more pointedly, we wanted, if possible, to ruleout the prospect that Narrative responses aresimply Essentialist answers offered by thosewithout a gift for abstraction, or that Essentialistresponses are simply Narrative answers putforward by those without a sense of plot.

We first examined the possibility that ourcoding of Narrativism versus Essentialism mightnot, as imagined, indicate deeply different ways ofthinking about personal persistence, but ratherrepresent some artifact of something like differentlinguistic styles or abilities. Such an argumentassumes (in contrast to our own claims) that one ofthese strategies is simply better than the other, andthat our coding of these young people as eitherNarrativists or Essentialists is merely an indicationof some more or less mature understanding of theself-continuity paradox. Given the predictableEuro-American bias in favor of Essentialist formsof reasoning, the canonical version of such adismissive argument is that Narrativity is simply a


“problem” that will go away with sufficientWesternization. To put this argument to the test,each of the transcripts of the Personal PersistenceInterview were first stripped of interviewercomments and meticulously combed to properlymark and discard non-fluencies (e.g., “um”) andfillers (e.g., “ya know”) in the text that mightotherwise mislead our analysis. These sanitizedtranscripts were then analyzed using Pennebaker’sLinguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) textanalysis program. The LIWC analyzes a total of74 predetermined linguistic variables for any givensample of text (Pennebaker & King, 1999). TheLIWC was chosen because of its proven successwith such analyses in general (Pennebaker &Graybeal, 2001) and because of its demonstratedutility in assessing cognitive and linguisticcomplexity (Pennebaker & Stone, in press;Pennebaker & Lay, 2002). This earlier researchalso served to guide our choice of 10 particularmarker variables selected as a measure ofcognitive and linguistic sophistication: wordcount, number of words per sentence, number ofwords larger than 6 letters, words related tocognitive processes (e.g., cause, know), causationwords (e.g., because, effect), words commentingon insight (e.g., think, consider), words connotinga discrepancy (e.g., should, could), inhibitionwords (e.g., block, constrain), tentative words(e.g., maybe, perhaps), and certainty words (e.g.,always, never).

All Western biases in favor of Essentialismnotwithstanding, no remarkable differences wereobserved between the Narrativists andEssentialists on 9 of these 10 cognitive andlinguistic complexity measures (Table 20).Perhaps ironically, our Essentialists were (on

average) somewhat more wordy, but otherwise nomore complex, than their Narrativist counterparts.

Although there is no simple way of knowingwith numerical certainty, this result is likely due tocultural differences in the ways in which Nativeand non-Native youth often express themselves.Our informal experience in interviewing more than300 young people suggests that Native youthtended to be much more circumspect with theirwords, at least when being formally interviewedby adult representatives of a different culture—animpression that was given some support by ourword-count data: t’(38.835)=2.733, p=0.009,Cohen’s ∆ = 0.524. This finding should not,however, be taken to imply that the differencesobserved between those scored as Essentialists andas Narrativist (whatever their culture of origin) canbe accounted for by simple verbal facility. Whenthe same linguistic analyses are conductedseparately for the two cultural groups, thisdifference disappears, leaving no significantdifferences between Narrativists and Essentialistson any of these 10 marker variables of linguisticsophistication. Such a pattern of results stronglysupports our contention that neither of thesewarranting strategies is merely a less sophisticatedor inferior version of the other, and that they areequal in complexity and only different inapplication.

Having said this, it comes as no surprise thatage is significantly related to many of these 10marker variables in the Pennebaker measure sinceit is reasonable to expect that older participantswould be more linguistically and cognitivelycomplex than their younger counterparts.Likewise, it is not surprising that our betteradvantaged non-Native sample did slightly betteron some of these variables than did our Native

Table 20: Means (and Standard Deviations) of Measures of Linguistic Complexity by Group

Group

Variable Essentialist Narrative

Word count * 1204.05 (944.01) 829.79 (655.22)

Words per sentence 11.75 (5.40) 10.86 (6.04)Words >6 letters 11.32 (2.01) 11.54 (2.22)Cognitive process words 8.45 (2.22) 8.45 (2.36)

Causation words 1.29 (0.76) 1.48 (0.71)Insight words 2.70 (0.95) 2.86 (1.38)

Discrepancy words 2.60 (1.05) 2.40 (1.16)Inhibition words 0.14 (0.17) 0.15 (0.24)

Tentative words 3.73 (1.77) 3.84 (1.67)Certainty words 1.11 (0.55) 0.99 (0.65)

Note. * significant Group difference, Cohen’s ∆ = 0.444 (a = 0.02)


sample. What is more interesting, however, is howthese markers of linguistic ability relate to ourlevel of reasoning classifications. That is, we wishto preemptively counter what amounts to theopposite criticism that we just defended againstconcerning warranting strategy or type. Morespecifically, it could be reductively argued thatwhat we see as more or less sophisticated ways ofjustifying continuity within each “Track” actuallyamounts to no more than trivial linguistic stylesthat do not reflect real differences in thecomplexity of the arguments on offer. It seemsimportant, then, to establish whether or not(irrespective of Track) each successive Level ofreasoning represents a more sophisticated way ofjustifying self-continuity by examining theassociation between Level and other measures ofcognitive and linguistic sophistication.

Because our Level classifications were alsohighly correlated with age (r = 0.361, p< 0.0005,r2=.130), effects of age were partialled out of therelations we observed between the Pennebakervariables and our Level classifications and, inview of the fact that there were 10 suchcorrelations, we evaluated them at a reduced alphalevel (a = 0.02). In these analyses, five of the 10variables show significant correlations betweenLevel and complexity, and three additionalvariables demonstrate strong trends (see Table 21).Interestingly, when age is correlated with these 10variables, and Level is partialled out, “words persentence” is the only variable that was also relatedto Level that is itself significantly related to age,and the only trend that still persists is the use of“words larger than six letters”. The number oftentative words (e.g., maybe, perhaps, guess),however, was significantly correlated with age,although it was not significantly correlated with

Level. In general, then, Level appears to be moreheavily correlated with these 10 markers oflinguistic sophistication than is chronological age.The implication of this finding is, as we hadhoped, that Level seems to be a better predictor ofcognitive and linguistic complexity than the roughproxy of age.

To further examine this association, and themean differences in cognitive complexity betweeneach of the Levels, a MANOVA with the 10marker variables as dependent variables and Levelclassification as the between factor was found tobe significant (Wilk’s L = 0.447, F(40,574.43) =3.398, p < 0.0005, partial h2 = 0.182). Follow-upANOVAs found significance for word count(F(4,160) = 26.313, p < 0.0005, partial h2 = 0.397),words per sentence (F(4,160) = 7.066, p < 0.0005,partial h2 = 0.150), words over six letters long(F(4,160) = 2.480, p = 0.046, partial h2 = 0.058),cognitive process words (F(4,160) = 5.358, p <0.0005, partial h2 = 0.118), and causation words(F(4,160) = 2.927, p = 0.023, partial h2 = 0.068).For the most part, results for the individual meansare what would be predicted: a steady increase onthese five significant variables as the Levelincreases. Table 22 lists these values by Level.

Taken all together, these findings also go someimportant distance towards demonstrating that theNarrative and Essentialism self-continuitywarranting strategies that so clearly set Native andnon-Native adolescents apart represent distinct butlinguistically equivalent forms of self-understanding, both of which show strongrelations with age and available measures ofcognitive and linguistic complexity.Measures of Cultural Commitment and forms ofSelf-Understanding

Table 21: Correlations between Measures of Linguistic Complexity and Level and Age

Variable Level (with Age partialled out) Age (with Level partialled out)

Word count r=.49, p<.001, r2=.24 * r=.15, p<.055

Words per sentence r=.30, p<.001, r2=.09 * r=.22, p<.005, r2=.05 *Words >6 letters r=.14, p<.078 r=.16, p<.041

Cognitive process words r=.26, p<.001, r2=.07 * r=.14, p<.096Causation words r=.13, p<.090 r=.12, p<.110

Insight words r=.16, p<.040 r=.03, p<.772Discrepancy words r=.19, p<.013, r2=.04 * r=.05, p<.513

Inhibition words r=.05, p<.560 r=.01, p<.899Tentative words r=.09, p<.239 r=.23, p<.003, r2=.05 *

Certainty words r=.18, p<.020, r2=.03 * r=.09, p<.228

Note. * significant correlation (a = 0.02)


In addition to warding off possible attempts toreductively re-interpret our data as some artifact ofcognitive or linguistic complexity, we were alsoconcerned to discount other possible patterns ofsuperficial differences that might be used toexplain away what we believe is a much deeper-seated understanding of the self. One suchpotential discounting possibility is the prospectthat Narrative and Essentialist strategies, as wehave measured them, are simply proxies of someother more tried-and-true, and so presumablybetter understood, measure of self-concept.Although we have argued (see Chapter III) thatour participants’ self-continuity warrantingstrategies demark more of a “process” variablethan anything they might be explicitly aware of orable to be self-evaluative toward, we werecompelled for conceptual reasons to put thisassumption to some sort of test. For this reason,and as a way of examining this discountingstrategy, a sub-sample of our First Nations youthwho completed our Personal Persistence Interview(N=48, Mean Age=16.4 years), as well as otherFirst Nations youth (N=94, Mean Age=16.3 years)from the same communities, were also asked tocomplete a battery of measures meant to assessdifferent and more explicit or objectivedimensions of their thinking about the self, andtheir relations to their culture. By comparingNarrativists and Essentialists on these variousscales, we intended to specifically counter thepossible criticisms that these ways of thinkingabout the self are either simply artifacts of certainidiosyncratic ways of characterizing one’s self-attributes, or some global difference in the abilityof these two groups to employ internal traitdescriptions or otherwise more subjectivelyoriented psychological terms that makesNarrativists and Essentialists only appear to be

different in their approach to problems of personalpersistence. As a means of pursuing thesepossibilities, sub-samples of our participants wereadministered the Twenty Statements Test (TST;Kuhn & McPartland, 1954), Singelis’ (1994)questionnaire for assessing individuals’Independent and Interdependent self-construals,and Dweck’s (2000) Implicit Theories ofPersonality Scale.Self-understanding: “The Twenty Statements Test”

To address the possibility that Narrativists werecategorized on the basis of some general absenceof the trait-concepts or subjective psychologicalterms so central to most Essentialist forms ofreasoning, we presented a sub-sample of FirstNations adolescents with the Twenty Statements or“Who Am I?” test.

The TST is an instrument meant to bring to thesurface participants’ most salient self-descriptions,and is generally considered a useful tool forexamining the potential differences in self-conceptamong men and women, or across cultures(Bochner, 1994; Dhawan, Roseman, Naidu,Thapa, & Rettek, 1995; Triandis, 1989;Verkuyten, 1989). The measure itself amounts tolittle more than a list of twenty sentence stems, allbeginning with the phrase: “I am...” Participantsare left with the job of finishing these incompletephrases in whatever ways they deem fit.

While there is some track record of using theTST in cross-cultural research (e.g., Bochner,1994; Ip & Bond, 1995; Kitayama & Marcus,1994; Watkins & Regmi, 1996; Watkins, Adair,Akande, Gerong, McInerney, Sunar, Watson,Wen, & Wondimu, 1998), little in the way ofagreement exists concerning the best method forscoring participants’ responses. There are severalscoring systems, allowing anywhere from just 2 to

Table 22: Mean Scores and Standard Deviations for Measures of Linguistic Complexity by Personal Persistence LevelAssignment

Mean Score (SD)

Variable Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5

Word count 423.90(243.41)

532.25(285.77)

867.24(554.91)

1619.9 (1009.03)

2877.50(442.95)

Words per sentence 6.92(3.22)

10.37(6.72)

11.58(6.11)

13.71(4.69)

16.79(3.29)

Words >6 letters 10.44(2.20)

12.05(2.46)

11.58(2.20)

11.99(1.58)

12.01(1.09)

Cognitive processwords

6.87(2.70)

8.12(3.30)

8.84(2.03)

8.77(1.62)

10.13(0.77)

Causation words 1.06(0.85)

1.51(0.92)

1.54(0.68)

1.36(0.53)

1.77(0.39)


59 possible response categories—a range thatsome regard as bounded only by whims of theresearcher (Wells & Marwell, 1976). Many haveused the traditional “A-B-C-D” method developedby Kuhn and McPartland (1954) and haveextended or re-tailored it for use with variousspecialized study populations. This framework forgrouping responses into categories of physical (A),social (B), attributive (C), and global (D)statements about the self, while popular, seemedill suited for our interests, in large part because ithas been criticized for its reliance onpredominantly “Western” categories, and becauseof the emphasis it places on “decontextualized”accounts of the self. In the face of these problems,the strategy we eventually adopted was that ofWatkins et al. (1998)—a scoring scheme recentlyconceived for use in a cross-cultural context, andthat seemed especially well suited for our presentpurpose.

Altogether then, the scoring categories weemployed were, after Watkins et al. (1998), asfollows:Idiocentric: Statements about personal qualities,

attitudes, beliefs, states, and traitsthat do not relate to other people(e.g., I am intelligent, I am happy).

Large group: Statements about large groupmemberships (where many peopleare involved), demographiccharacteristics, and large groupswith which people share a commonfate (e.g., I am a girl, I am abasketball player).

Small group: As above but for small groups,usually the family is involved (e.g.,I am a husband, I am a mother).

Allocentric: Statements about interdependence,friendship, responsiveness to others,or sensitivity to how others perceiveyou (e.g., I am sociable, I am aperson who helps others).

While nearly half (i.e., 45%) of the 91respondents who received the TST were able togenerate 15 or more sentence stems, many found itdifficult to attain the 20 requested. Previousresearch (Watkins, Yau, Dahlin, & Wondimu,1997) has addressed this problem, however, andfound that, when using the current scoringstrategy, differences in the proportions of the fourcoding categories for respondents are rare whenparticipants are able to complete at least 7sentences. Nearly 90% of our sample was able to

comply with this reduced production criterion. Themean number of responses, then, was 13.4(SD=5.52), and ranged from 3 to 20.

Although there were some differences in thescoring profiles for the two Native communitiestested, and for the males and females in oursample, there were no statistically significantdifferences in the TST scores for Narrativists andEssentialists (Wilk’s L = 0.963, F(4,43) = 0.411, p= 0.800). Most importantly, this suggests thatNarrativists and Essentialists generate roughly thesame sorts of descriptive statements aboutthemselves, even when it comes to moreidiocentric and allocentric claims having to dowith either subjective psychological traits or other-oriented characteristics. It hardly seems the case,then, as some might suggest, that Narrativists aresimply those more inclined to talk about others,while Essentialists speak primarily aboutthemselves and the details of their inter-psychiclives.Independent and Interdependent Self-Contruals

Finally, because the dimensions of idiocentrismand allocentrism, in particular, have beenmeasured in other and more explicit ways in theliterature (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991), andbecause we wanted to take still furtherconfirmatory steps toward our claim thatNarrativists and Essentialists aren’t simply usingsome different ‘me’ versus ‘them’ forms ofspeech, we borrowed Singelis’ (1994) widely usedquestionnaire for assessing individuals’Independent and Interdependent self-construals. Inmany ways, Singelis’ measure parallels thescoring dimensions we extracted from our sampleusing the TST. Unlike the TST, however,respondents to Singelis’ Self-Construal Scale(SCS) are not left to their own devices in comingup with statements about themselves, a taskdemand that has raised concerns about the TST’suse with younger participants and with individualsfrom non-Western cultures (Watkins et al., 1997),who are said to often be more reluctant tovolunteer personal information. Rather, the SCSconsists of 24 generic self-descriptions to whichrespondents either agree or disagree on a 7-pointscale. The items of the scale have been factor-analyzed into the two groups of statements:independent and inter-dependent descriptions. Thefirst of these (independent), much like theidiocentric dimension of the TST, has to do withan understanding of the self that is bounded,


unitary, and stable. Such a self-concept is thoughtto be reflected in statements that emphasizeinternal states, feelings, and traits, and that stressissues of uniqueness or standing out, as well aspromoting one’s personal goals. Examplesinclude: “I am comfortable being singled out forpraise or rewards” and “My personal identityindependent of others, is important to me.” Bycontrast, the interdependent category, much likethe allocentric dimension of the TST, deals withstatements that reflect a flexible and variable self.Here the emphasis is on external or public featuresof the self such as roles and relationships, as wellas on matters dealing with fitting in and findingone’s proper place in groups. Statements said toreflect this more interdependent factor include: “Itis important for me to maintain harmony withinmy group” and “My happiness depends on thehappiness of those around me” and “I respectpeople who are modest about themselves.”

What is of potential interest in our findingsfrom the SCS is that, just as with the TwentyStatements Test, no significant differences emergein our native sample. The Urban Native and RuralNative youth did not differ on either of Singelis’independent or interdependent scales (Wilk’s L =0.988, F(2,90) = 0.551, p = 0.579). In addition, allof the Native youth scored as highly on theindependent scale as they did on theinterdependent scale (F(1,91) = 1.861, p = 0.176).Even in a culture that is alleged to be morecollectivistic or relational or otherwise group-oriented, the Native adolescents we interviewedunderstood themselves in both independent andinterdependent terms, and did so to an extent thatrules out any live prospect that they thought ofthese categories as mutually exclusive. Moreimportantly—and this was the point of adoptingthe measure in the first place—Narrativists andEssentialists do not differ in their responses on theSCS, allowing us to say with justifiable confidencethat the real difference between them is not merelysome special readiness on the part of Narrativiststo see themselves in “collectivist” terms, whileEssentialists are more inclined to dwell on theirown individuality.Implicit theories of personality

So far, we have been happy to report a series ofnull results to our questions of how Narrativistsand Essentialists go about responding to more orless direct measures of their own personal self-concept. More specifically, our findings with the

TST and SCS have provided us greater license toconclude that differences in how Narrativists andEssentialists reason about matters of self-continuity really are distinct from, and irreducibleto, the more mundane matters of how they talkabout themselves or describe their own personalways of being in the world. Still, what theseresults do not allow us to conclude, at least notdirectly, is just how Narrativists and Essentialistsconceive of personality or character change insome more global or abstract sense apart fromtheir own particular self-concepts. The aim offinding some assessment tool that would tacklethis question of personality understanding head on,and that might co-vary with our own measure ofself-continuity, was the impetus behind our use ofDweck’s (2000) 6-item inventory for measuringindividuals’ “implicit theories” of personality.Dweck’s measure, much like our own, is argued toassess aspects of the self more akin to James’subjective or implicit “I”, than objective “Me”variables associated with self-concept measureslike the TST or SCS. Depending on how stronglyrespondents agreed or disagreed on a 7-point scaleto such statements as “your personality is a part ofyou that you can't change very much” or “nomatter who you are or how you act, you canalways change your ways,” our sample was scoredas either reflecting an altogether “process”orientation, and so a view of personality thatallowed for relatively easy change, or a more static“entity” orientation according to which personalityis seen as made up of enduring traits thatwithstand change. Dweck’s particularinterpretation of these two views, althoughconceived (and measured) in ways quite differentfrom our own, nevertheless provides a possibleparallel to our own strategies for differentiatingEssentialists’ and Narrativists’ responses toquestions of self-continuity.

As it turns out, and despite being hampered bya lack of power in our analyses, the anticipatedpattern of co-variation did emerge as a strongtrend (i.e., c2(1)= 3.59 p=.058). Specifically, of thesmall group of Essentialists in our subsample ofNative youths (N=8), six, or 75%, fell below themean on Dweck’s scale, indicating that they heldan entity-view of personality. Just the oppositewas true for the 39 Narrativists. That is, 62% wereabove Dweck’s mean score, indicating that theyheld a more process-view of personality. Whilesome caution must be shown in interpreting thesethin results, we take these findings as just another


step toward validating our Narrativist andEssentialist coding strategy, and demonstrating thedifferences between these two ways ofunderstanding personal persistence.Measuring Ethnic Identification

Having succeeded in ruling out the severalreductive possibilities discussed above, we are leftwith one last, but critical step. Our main finding,the one we have been defending against potentialcritiques by the more reductively inclined—thefinding that most Native youth are Narrativists andmost non-Native youth Essentialists—and ourrepeated assertion that the source of this differencecan be found in their respective culturalbackgrounds, has failed to directly address thatsmall rump group of participants who behaved in“counter-cultural” ways. That is, even though ourcategorical expectations need not be met in eachand every instance, at least we are under anobligation to offer some explanation for the factthat a non-trivial number of our observations fellinto the “wrong” cells. That is, some of our Nativerespondents did adopt Essentialist ways and someof our non-Native participants responded inNarrative ways. It is possible, therefore, that theyoung people in our Native sample who employedwarranting strategies that were more common inthe mainstream culture were, perhaps,proportionally less invested in their own culture oforigin. It seemed important, therefore, to takesome measure of the possibility that differences inthe depth or focus on their identification with FirstNations culture would predict Native participants’choice of warranting strategies. What wasobviously required was some measure of ethnicidentification appropriate for use with our Nativesample.

Without attempting anything that couldlegitimately pass for a real review, we mean onlyto point out for the benefit of those unfamiliar withthis literature, that the art of measuring (by way ofquestionnaires) the degree to which individualsvalue or practice the distinguishing details of whatthey take to be their “heritage culture” could bemost charitably thought of as being “still in itsinfancy.” The usual rough-hewn practice has beento simply ask, in some direct fashion, whetherrespondents actually participate, or otherwise likeor dislike, the usual details (i.e., food, music,dances, clothing, etc.) commonly associated withtheir own and other ethnic groups. What is easilylost in this perhaps unrealistically hopeful

approach is any serious prospect of distinguishingbetween what people will lay claim to and whatthey really think or do—a problem of specialsalience in First Nations communities, where thepolitical demands of the “pan-Indian” movement,and the special premium currently placed onanything “traditional,” requires taking every self-proclamation in favor of Native ways with a largegrain of salt. Still, there is a collection of usualways to go about measuring ethnic identity, and, inthe absence of better reasons to know, we more orless took them all. More precisely, we patchedtogether four of the most widely used andpsychometrically well-tutored measures of ethnicidentity currently available and gave them to oursamples of Urban and Rural Native youth. Bydesign, such measures of ethnic identificationwere judged inappropriate for use with our non-Native sample.

The questionnaire was presented to 48 of theNative participants who had previously completedthe Personal Persistence Interview. The variousmeasures that went into our initial 130 item EthnicIdentification questionnaire are:1. Vancouver Index of Acculturation (VIA;

Ryder, Alden & Paulhus, 2000): a self-reportinstrument that assesses several domainsrelevant to acculturation, including values,social relationships, and adherence totraditions.

2. Ward and Rana-Deuba’s (1999) AcculturationIndex that assesses two dimensions (host andco-national identification) and four modes(integration, separation, marginalization, andassimilation) of acculturation.

3. Phinney’s (1992) Multigroup Ethnic IdentityMeasure (MEIM), a questionnaire measuredesigned for use across diverse ethnic groups.

4. Zygmuntowiscz, Burack, Evans, Klaiman,Mandour, Randolph, & Iarocci’s (2000)“Values Orientation Scale”, a version of anearlier measure by Szapocnik et al. (1978) thathas been specifically adapted to assessacculturation in First Nations adolescents.

Pursued by concerns that, in our bid forinclusiveness we had ended up with more itemsthan subjects, two after-the-fact steps were takento somewhat whittle down, for the purposes ofanalyses, the length of this questionnaire. This wasdone in two ways. The first and easiest was tosimply adopt the Vancouver Index of


Acculturation (a recently normed measure that wasbuilt on the back of the other three measuresalready included) as the best of what is available.The other was to regard the full complement ofthese four published measures as one overlyambitious item pool, and to proceed to drop itemswith little variance, to weed out more or lesssemantically identical items, and to choose amongitems that were so highly correlated as to bestatistically redundant. The 30-item scale arrivedat in this way was then factor analyzed, resultingin two factors: one marked a preference for allthings native, the other indicated an affinity forthings non-native.

In the end, this attempt to understand whysome Native youth part company with the majorityof their fellows and choose Essentialism largelyfailed. In part, we were hampered from the start bya lack of statistical power brought on not just byour small sample size (48), but more so by the lownumber of Native youth classified as Essentialist.That problem we could have solved. What weshould (in hindsight) have been better prepared forwas the extent to which the Native youth(Narrative and Essentialist alike) effectivelypounced on many items from the “Native” side ofour scale. That is, in the response style, if not inthe minds of these Native participants, all thingsNative were clearly said to be better than almostanything imaginable. Programs to promote Nativepride clearly appear to be working—working sowell, in fact, that there was little if any realvariance in our measures of ethnic identification.Narrative or Essentialist, Native youth consistentlyclaim to prefer and value all things Native.Summary of Results

Whatever else might divide the young personswho made up our Native and non-Native groups,they are not different in terms of age or in the ratioof males to females. There is also no evidence tosuggest that our interview techniques were beyondthe ability of any but a fraction of our youngparticipants, or that our choice of interviewmaterials or the medium in which those materialswere presented, had any differential effect onparticipants from any one community or culturalgroup. There is strong evidence, however, that ourPersonal Persistence Interview yields data that canbe reliably coded to generate Track and Levelclassifications for each participant. Track (or type)of reasoning was not related to age or to gender,but was strongly associated with cultural

background: Native youth predominantly employNarrative arguments, while non-Native youthpredominantly employ Essentialist arguments. Thelevel of sophistication of such arguments is not,however, related to cultural background or gender,but is, as expected, related to age. Our longitudinaldata show that adopting either a Narrative orEssentialist approach to the problem of personalpersistence is stable across a two-year interval, but(predictably) Level is not—a finding indicatingthat the type of reasoning one employs is a moreor less persistent strategy of thought about mattersof self-continuity, while the complexity of suchthoughts can and does often grow over the courseof development.

Because of the special conceptual significancethat we attach to observed cultural differenceswith respect to Track, we wanted to be especiallycertain that this distinction was not the result ofbackground differences in linguistic or cognitivesophistication that might be imagined tocharacterize our groups, or simply be the productof differing but extracurricular ways of construingor understanding the concepts of self orpersonality change. In each case, our analysesprovided strong reassurance. Essentialists andNarrativists do not differ in the extent to whichthey endorse idiocentric and allocentricstatements, or “independent” and “interdependent”conceptions of identity. They do show a tendencyto differ, however, and in just the way one wouldpredict, in their implicit theories of personality,with Narrativists championing personality changeand Essentialists favoring enduring immutabletraits. It also might have been the case (but wasnot) that the roots of this cultural difference wereto be found in differing levels of commitment toone’s cultural group. That is, it might have beenthat a narrative or relational way of speaking wassomehow seen by our Native participants asparticularly “Indian” and, therefore, the “right”way of speaking to non-Native researchersregardless of one’s real thoughts about personalpersistence or anything else. If that were true, onewould expect to find Native Narrativists to bemore strongly committed to First Nations culturethan Native Essentialists. Our data are not likethat. Instead, though the Native youth in oursample were (on the whole) strongly committed tothe value of their cultural heritage, multiplemeasures of ethnic identification fail to distinguishNarrativists from Essentialists in this regard. Theclear conclusion supported by all of these analyses


is that culture is very strongly associated withwhether one adopts a Narrative and Essentialist

strategy for resolving the paradox of personalpersistence and change.

Chapter VI: Conclusion

Evidence of the sort that we have brought outin this monograph touches, not only on heartfeltmatters about which many people have strong andentrenched opinions, but also on prior researchclaims and hard won theoretical positions that arenot always consistent with our own. We recognizethat others have made serious personal andprofessional investments in alternative claims andthat it would profit them to assimilate our findingsto their own ends. As such, the opportunities for usto be misinterpreted or misunderstood are, as theysay, legion. We, of course, are just as eager to beunderstood as saying just what we mean, and toavoid having the square shape of our points dulledby being forced into too many round holes of asort for which they were not designed. Whatfollows, then, is our final effort to say bluntly whatwe mean, and to ward off, with the few words thatremain, at least some of the more obvious ways inwhich we might be most easily misunderstood.Although there is, perhaps somewhere, a stilllonger list of misleading leap-to-mind conclusionsto which our working distinction betweenNarrative and Essentialist self-continuitywarranting strategies might be misapplied, thefollowing Top Five list will do for a start.Number One: On why Narrativity is notthe logical opposite or negative co-relativeof Essentialism

First, at least as we intend them, Narrativityand Essentialism are not meant as candidates forbecoming merely the latest in a seemingly endlessseries of social science dichotomies intended toneatly pigeonhole people into one or the other oftwo watertight compartments. They are notintended as the two halves of anything, but,intended or not, it is easy enough to see how ourwork might promote such a reading. Throughoutthis monograph, we contrasted Essentialist andNarrative strategies at least a hundred or moretimes. Who wouldn’t feel well within their rightsin imagining that we were dichotomizers after all,plainly convicted out of our own mouths. Ourproblem––hopefully not entirely of our ownmaking––is that our research has uncovered justthese two (as opposed to three or six) self-continuity warranting strategies, and “two,” in the

individual differences game, is an unluckynumber, in large part because of the messy“residue of dichotomizing” (Oyserman, Coon, &Kemmelmeier, 2002) it regularly gives off.Particularly as they bear upon the task oftheorizing about whole cultures, and so are easilyimagined to serve as “pillars of human life”(Bakan, 1966), such broad bivalent taxonomies(e.g., agentic vs. communal; egocentric vs.sociocentric; rights-based vs. duty-based;individualistic vs. ensembled, or holistic, orcollectivistic), typically work to overlookcomplexities within cultures and within socialgroups (Overton, 1998), and, as Kagitcibasi (1996)has shown, regularly fail to capture much of whatis happening in the identity development ofpeople, especially Third World people. Worsestill, and perhaps because they traffic so heavily inmatters of shared beliefs and values, such bare-bones, either-or conjunctions become easilypropagandized, and have tended to serve asshorthand political slogans for all things modernand Western, as opposed to traditional and non-Western. Little wonder then that we worry muchover whether, by having identified Essentialist andNarrative self-continuity warranting practices asthe only apparent games in town, we may haveinadvertently played into the hands ofdichotomizers who automatically suppose thatevery matter of psychological import naturallyyields two (and only two) logically oppositionalalternatives.

Hopefully, and for reasons we have alreadyworked to make clear, Essentialist and Narrativepractices are not at all like that. Essentialism isdecidedly not, in our view, the negative co-relativeof Narrative approaches to personal persistence,nor is one of these practices the logical reciprocalor the inverse of the other, and both together donot somehow logically exhaust the set ofpotentially workable ways of thinking about self-continuity in time. Most familiar social sciencedichotomies (e.g., agentic vs. communal societies)reference what are meant to be “exclusive unions”and admit numerically distinct parts (Grene,1988)––parts that do not share the sameontological status, and stand instead in relationsthat are of an exclusively empirical nature (e.g.,


cause-effect; antecedent-consequent). Such partsare distinct and do not share the same ontologicalidentity. Narrative and Essentialist strategies,however—whether viewed at the individual orgroup level—are not like that. Instead, they form“inclusive unions,” in which the different so-called‘parts’ or facets are not “numerically distinctdifferences in existence, but rather differences inthe mode of manifestation of what is effectivelythe same existence” (Chandler, 1991, p. 13). Inthis sense, Narrative and Essentialist warrantingpractices, like the selves and cultures that hostthem, are not merely empirically related asdiscrete or separate entities might be. They are,instead, alternative manifestations of one and thesame thing. In short, not everything of which thereare only two available instances automaticallyamount to logical opposites or dichotomies,including Essentialist and Narrative solutions tothe problem of personal persistence.Number Two: Avoiding the Individualism-Collectivism Antinomy

Second, having hopefully made the case thatour distinction between Essentialist and Narrativeself-continuity warranting strategies is not simplyone more attempt to divide the world into twocontrary and logically opposite pictures withoutremainder, we feel compelled to go on to try tosimilarly ward off the prospect that these strategiesmight also be mistakenly viewed as somehowsubsumable under the seemingly horizonless andoversubscribed “individualism versuscollectivism” antinomy. The temptation tocollapse these two differently conceivedaccounting schemes is clearly strong. After all,couldn’t “essences” be easily read as just the sortof thing naturally assumed to hide out in the secrethearts of individuals, just as “narratives,” whichnecessarily imply listeners as well as narrators,would seem to automatically implicatecollectives? Why, given all of this, should we notsimply relax and allow our ideas to be assimilatedinto the ubiquitous distinction between all thingsIndividualistic as opposed to Collectivistic.Attractive though this might appear to some,giving into any such a temptation would, in ourown “collective” judgment, be a serious mistake.

Our aversion to the prospect of seeing anythingelse (including our own Essentialist/Narrativedistinction) reduced to the status of a merefootnote on the larger than lifeIndividualism/Collectivism page is not an aversion

particular to ourselves. Of late, critics of thispopular distinction appear to be winning newconverts on an almost daily basis, and winningthem in some of the most unlikely places (e.g.,Kitayama, 2002; Miller, 2002). Still, such fault-finding is rather new, and it would be unwise toprematurely discount the strength of thegravitational force that operates to draweverything in its path into the popularIndividualism/Collectivism orbit. As Triandis(1989) has pointed out, individualism-collectivismhas, for a very long time, been “the single mostimportant dimension of cultural differences insocial behavior”, so important, in fact, thatKagitcibasi (1996) has “identified the 1980s as thedecade of individualism-collectivism” (Hermans& Kempen, 1998, p. 1112). Nor, according toLonner and Adamopoulos (1997), does this trendshow any real signs of abating. In short, until veryrecently and with very few exceptions (Turiel,2002; Turiel & Wainryb, 1994), one dared speakonly in the most reverential terms about the so-called “I/C” distinction.

All of that, of course, was then. Now—where“now” refers to a specious present whose widthcan still be measured in months—enthusiasm forthe individualism-collectivism dichotomy isincreasingly seen to be fading, due, in no smallpart, to rather recent critiques by some of its mostardent former admirers (e.g., Kitayama, 2002;Miller, 2002; Oyserman et al., 2002 ).Increasingly, contributors to this literature (e.g.,Church, 2000; Kagitcibasi, 1996; Matsumoto,1999) have begun to view attempts to characterizewhole cultures or individuals in terms of broadcultural dichotomies (e.g., duty-based vs. rights-based, independent vs. interdependent; egocentricvs. sociocentric, individualistic vs. collectivistic)as both crude and misleading.

The list of reasons currently being given insupport of this new disaffection is both long andvaried. Highly ranked among the unflatteringthings currently being said behind the back of theI/C distinction is that, rather than working as abinary choice, these alternatives are increasinglyunderstood as common parts of a single controlsystem (Kitayama, 2002)––parts that “differprimarily in the likelihood that [they] will beactivated” in one cultural context or another(Oyserman et al., 2002, p. 115). In addition tobeing increasingly discounted as a false dichotomy(Miller, 2002), the I/C distinction is alsorepeatedly faulted: a) for focusing too exclusively


on attitudes and values at the expense of moredynamic practices and associated mental processes(D’Andrade, 2001; Kitayama, 2002); b) for itsdependency on survey methods that assess onlydeclarative self-knowledge, and inevitably fail tomake contact with the more tacit proceduralcompetencies that form the core of culture (Bond,2002; Fiske, 2002); and, c) for coming“dangerously close to minimizing individualagency in favor of cultural determinism” (Gjerde& Onishi, 2000, p. 219). Because theIndividualism and Collectivism dichotomy appearsto be in serious decline, and because efforts tobreathe new life back into it appear to involvemaking it look increasingly like our own more“inclusive,” and procedurally oriented distinctionbetween Narrative and Essentialist approaches tothe self, we respectfully decline the invitation tobe among the last aboard the sinking ship ofIndividualism-Collectivism.Number Three: On committing thePsychologist’s Fallacy and getting awaywith it

Although many would see it as missing thelarger point, few would dispute the right of socialscientists to set about studying the internaldynamics of individual selves. Nor would manyobject to an enterprise devoted to working out howwhole communities, or whole cultures, are bestimagined to differ from one another in theircollective ways of viewing selves in time. But areally serious mistake, it has generally beenalleged, would arise if the same person or researchteam were to seriously envision simultaneouslydoing both. One important part of what we hopeyou will be taking away from this monograph isthat the procedural means by which young personsundertake to warrant their own convictions aboutpersonal persistence do not lend themselves tobeing best understood in the recommended serialfashion had in mind by such critics.

Our own data suggest, instead, that youngpeople’s temporally vectored conceptions ofthemselves and others are neither the exclusiveprovince of matters entirely internal to themselves,nor are they the exclusive consequence of sociallyconstructed (and so culturally variable) practicesalready in place in their communities. Rather, ourfindings would suggest, not only is it the case thatneither of these antinomous options seem true ontheir face, but that even the decision to put thematter in these split, either-or terms is itself a

mistake. Instead, it would appear from theevidence that we have brought forward that thetask of working out what it could possibly mean tohave or be a self needs to be viewed as existingwithin a problem space that occupies at least threedifferent levels of problem description (seeChandler, Lalonde, & Sokol, 2000; Chandler &Sokol, in press). At the most abstract of theselevels (what Marr, 1982, calls the “computational”or “design” level), every individual and everyculture must, on pain of otherwise failing to satisfythose minimal design requirements necessary forthe maintenance of any social or moral orderwhatsoever, include some computational means ofsolving the universal problem of sameness withindifference, and thus allowing both individuals andwhole communities to understand themselves assomehow continuous in the face of inevitablepersonal and cultural change. Importantly,however, nothing about such claims in favor of theexistence of trans-cultural commonalties needs orought to be seen as in any way impugning theevident fact that different cultural groups makeavailable to their members culturally contingentdefault strategies for constructing and preservingthe self in time. Nor is it, our data would suggest,ever the case that any two youngpeople—whatever their public and privatecircumstance—need actually end up instrumentingtheir developmental and cultural and even,perhaps, human obligations to persistence byactually proceeding in precisely the same way.Without careful attention to the different levels ofproblem description on which such claims operate,all of those (ourselves included) who aim toexamine issues of identity development at both theindividual and cultural level risk having theirclaims once again hijacked by those whose “split”polemic (Overton, 1998) threatens to return us tothat dichotomized place where the onlypermissible question is “which one?”Number Four: On why Essentialism &Narrativity are not simply code for theWest vs. Everyone Else

As Kagitcibasi points out, “individualism is[commonly] seen as akin to modernity and isassociated with modern values [while]collectivism is seen to embody traditional,conservative ideology” (1996, p. 63), all of whichworks to suspiciously align those who traffic insuch constructs with those less reputablechampions of persistent neo-colonialist practices


who seek to naturalize and legitimize their actionsby passing them off as well-intended efforts tobring the Third and Fourth Worlds into the 21st

century. What Third and Fourth World peoplesactually believed to be true about themselves priorto contact is, of course, largely speculation. Whatis not so much in doubt is that by portraying one’sown group as in good equilibrium it is oftenpossible to minimize state interference andmaximize local autonomy. Consequently, the jobof calculating the real extent to which indigenouspeoples have become socialized into actuallyimagining themselves to be somehow morecollectivist and harmonious than their colonizers,and sorting all of this out from the degree to whichsuch forms of self-presentation are truly heartfelt,as opposed to strategically political and counter-hegemonic, is a Solomon-like exercise for whichsocial-science training typically leaves one poorlyprepared. Wherever the cut is eventually made, itis already clear enough that simply accepting, onits face, continuing easy talk about individualismand collectivism demands a kind of innocence thatall but the most insular have long since lost. Thereare, by contrast, good reasons to suppose that thedistinction between Narrative and Essentialistapproaches to the problem of personal persistenceis not like that.

First, such category assignments are made, notby our respondents themselves, but by coders whowork behind the scenes carefully summing uprecords of earlier practices and procedures put touse by our respondents as they attempted tonegotiate problems about sameness in the face ofchange. As such, few if any of the youngparticipants in our studies have any declarative orwell semanticized knowledge of their own self-continuity warranting practices, and so couldn’tmake use of such information for the purposes ofimpression management if they tried.

Second, what our assessment procedures aremeant to measure is not some hidden competencethat occurs, or is better measured, in some morethan in others. We have every reason tobelieve—and some good empirical reasons toknow—that most (perhaps all) of the participantsin our research are “capable” of answering ineither a Narrative or Essentialist voice.Consequently, what we take ourselves to bemeasuring, and what we believe culture anddevelopment is shaping is not ‘ability’ but‘accessibility’ and the tendency for young personssocialized in different ways to employ different

default strategies to problems of personalpersistence.Number Five: On the Merits and Demeritsof Narrative and Essentialist Strategies

Fifth and finally, in this list of cautionary tales,is our concern that our work not be somehowswept into that evaluative framework ofunderstanding according to which it is imaginedpossible to determine whether “some cultures arelinked to higher stages of development than areothers” (Oyserman et al., 2002, p. 1110). It is in noway our point to attempt to argue that eitherNarrative or Essentialist practices are inherentlymore adequate than the other, or to imagine thatthere is some neutral scale of values on whichthese different strategies can be weighed. That is,although we take it that there is a universalobligation on us all to compute some workableself-continuity warranting strategy, there are noprincipled grounds for deciding, in the abstract,how the contrastive heuristics represented byNarrative and Essentialist solutions will fare in theface of whatever adversities blind circumstancemight throw into one’s personal or collective path.Durkheim (1897/1952), for example, made acompelling case that when “individuals sense thattheir own norms and values are no longer relevant,and...when people are forced to respond toconditions that they have little or no ability tocontrol” (Clayer, & Czechowicz, 1991, p. 685),then a sense of “anomie” and elevated suiciderates regularly follow. It is also equally possible toimagine that, especially during periods of rapidcultural change, Essentialism, while not withoutalienating consequences of its own, couldsometimes succeed in carrying one away from thesituationally troubled surface and toward somequieter, more subterranean pool of abstractionwhere the core of one’s self is alleged to be found.What seems impossible to imagine, however, isthat a Narrative strategy (or perhaps any strategy)could still be made to work if, after milenia ofsuccess, one’s cultural practices were criminalizedand systemically deconstructed throughgovernment sponsored programs of culturalassimilation, that there would still seem enough inthe way of future prospects and of a past to callone’s own to warrant much in the way of acommitment to go on living.Summary

Having discussed over the last several pages ahandful of ways in which our work might be


(perhaps even lends itself to being) misinterpreted,and having struggled to make ourselves betterunderstood, what remains to be said by way ofsimple summary can be wrapped up small, anddelivered as five succinct points.

First, in Chapters I and II, a conceptual casewas made that recourse to some form of self-understanding capable of preserving a sense ofpersonal and cultural persistence is an identityconferring obligation that must be satisfied if thereis to be any followable meaning to personal andsocial life, and so is presumably common to allhuman cultures.

Second, in Chapter III, we presented the detailsof a descriptive framework used in the forging ofmethods and procedures that could be, and were,used to mark the fact that young people ordinarilyexercise different understandings of the groundsfor their own personal persistence as they movethrough the usual weigh-stations that mark thecourse of their own conceptual and identitydevelopment. The upshot of these efforts was atypology, and associated scoring scheme, thatparsed what young people actually do say on thesubject of personal persistence into what we cameto call Narrative and Essentialist self-continuitywarranting strategies––age-graded, cognitivelysanctioned strategies available for exploitation inaccomplishing the performative task of justifyingself-sameness in the face of inevitable change.

Third, and in Chapter IV, we turned to a specialpopulation of seriously suicidal adolescents as away of testing, and then substantiating, thestrongly theory-driven expectation that those whofail to successfully sustain some self-continuitywarranting strategies suffer, as a naturalconsequence, a loss of connectedness to their ownfuture, and are thereby placed at special risk forsuicide.

Fourth, we went on in Chapter V to explore thehypothesis that individual and cultural continuityare strongly linked. We did this by mounting whatproved to be a strong demonstration that FirstNations communities that succeed in taking stepsto preserve their heritage culture and to recoversome measure of control over the institutionsgoverning their own collective future are alsodramatically more successful in insulating theirown children against the risks of suicide

Fifth and finally, Chapter VI was given over toa demonstration that different cultures (in this casethe Canadian cultural mainstream, and selected

First Nations communities) serve to promotedifferent approaches to the problem of personalpersistence, with essentialist strategies morefavored among those young persons who are thedirect inheritors of a “modern” Euro-Americantradition, whereas Aboriginal adolescents moreoften chose more narrative means of warrantingtheir own and others’ self-continuity.

Taken altogether, these new lines of evidencego some distance toward making the case that,though the young members of at least these severaldistinct communities all struggle to cope withcommon questions posed by the shared experienceof being a self awash in the flux of time, theanswers that they provide in attempting to countthemselves and others as personally persistent areclearly influenced by a synergistic mix of mattersthat are now known to include their current placein the course of their own development and thehistorical or cultural circumstances of their lives.Although perhaps interesting in its own right, thepotential importance of this line of evidence is lenta special significance by the fact that the mannerin which individual young persons, and evenwhole communities, manage hard questionsconcerning their own survival in time has beenshown here to contribute to their decision as towhether life is or is not worth living. Such hard toacquire data do not, of course, finally settle any ofthe classic controversies they are meant to address,but given the magnitude of the personal andcultural problems at which they are aimed, theyare perhaps a beginning.

Beginnings, of course, are first steps inundertakings that, so far, have been done only inthe least degree. Our own undertaking is naturallyof this beginning sort. What we claim to haveinitiated is a program of empirical research thatlays the groundwork for an interlacing network ofproven relations that, when closer to completion,will successfully link problems in personal orcultural persistence, and youth suicide. Some ofthese separate links are already forged. Our dataalready show, for example, that: a) young personswho lose the thread of their own personalpersistence are at special risk to suicide; b) thatcommunity level rates of suicide amongAboriginal youth are strongly associated withvarious markers of cultural continuity; and c) thatAboriginal youth typically undertake to solveproblems of personal persistence by relying onwhat we have termed Narrative strategies that are


markedly different from the Essentialist strategiestypically practiced by non-Aboriginal youth.

Although each of these empirical links adds tothe connectivity of our argument, other nodes andcords in this still loose explanatory network areprincipally held in place only by strong intuitionsand surmise. We argue, for example that theevident communalities between self-continuity andcultural continuity are more than simply semantic,and that the fact that each serves as a hedgeagainst suicide suggest an entanglement ofevidence that goes beyond the mere analogical.We say this, but we cannot yet prove it. Similarly,we have speculated that Narrative solutions to theproblem of personal persistence (the solutionstrategies preferred by 8 out of 10 of theAboriginal youth), while formally no better orworse than more Essentialist solutions, may beespecially vulnerable to organized attempts atcultural deconstruction of the sorts to whichAboriginal peoples, and other colonized groups,have commonly been subjected. Although somesupport for this hypothesis is provided by the factthat Aboriginal communities that have beenespecially successful in reclaiming their own past,and regaining control over their own future, enjoylower rates of youth suicide, stronger, lesscorrelational evidence is required to discount thepossibility that some alternative “further fact” mayalso “account” for these same findings. By way ofrepair, we are currently involved in a moreexperimental program of intervention/preventionresearch meant to better test the linkages betweencommunity control and harm reduction––an effortthat holds the potential of strengthening theexisting empirical links between such community-based initiatives and various health-relatedoutcome measures. Similarly, we have alreadybegun to collect evidence concerning suicide ratesin other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal agecohorts as a way of further testing some of ourtheory-driven claims about the relations betweenwatershed moments in the identity formationprocess, problems in personal persistence, andsuicidality. Finally, if our claims concerning theimportance of sustaining a workable sense ofpersonal persistence are in the running for truth,then those who drop the thread of their owncontinuity should not only suffer a loss ofcommitment to their own future well-being, butalso a counterpart sense of responsibility for theirown past. Evidence of the sort we are currentlyhard about collecting with anti-social youth will

hopefully turn this strong intuition into one morein a gathering of still needed empirical linkages.


Acknowledgements

The list of persons and organizations thatfacilitated the work reported here, and to whomwe are deeply indebted, is long and roughlydivides itself into five categories. First, there arethose who labored to help gather and organize thedata that we report. In this group we wish toexpress our thanks to our immediate workingcolleagues Ulrich Teucher and Jesse Phillips ofUBC’s Department of Psychology; to SamayaJardey and Florence Williams of the SquamishFirst Nation, and Marla Jack and Caroline Frankof the Ahousaht First Nation; to Julie Cruikshank,Lisa Maberly, Holly Pommier, Michelle Morgan,and David Paul of the University of BritishColumbia; to Aislin Martin and Catherine Horvathof the University of Victoria; and to Grace Iarocciand Christopher Jones of Simon Fraser University.We also wish to acknowledge the specialcontributions of Lorraine Ball, and of MichaelBoyes to the earliest stages of this work. A secondcategory includes those persons and organizationswho were particularly helpful in providing accessto young persons and to databases that werecritical to the completion of this project. We areparticularly indebted to both the Squamish andAhousaht First Nations for granting us permissionto work within their traditional territories to gatherthe data reported in Study Five, to utilize theirfacilities, and for the privilege of working inpartnership with members of their band and tribal

councils. We are especially grateful for theassistance of Marlene Atleo, Pam Jack, and LouisJoseph of the Ahousaht Holistic Centre, the bandcouncils of the Ahousaht and Squamish FirstNations, and to chiefs Bill Williams (Squamish)and Richard Atleo (Ahousaht). We are alsoappreciative of the cooperation offered by theteachers and administrators of the RichmondChristian High School. Staff at Indian andNorthern Affairs Canada and within the Office ofthe Chief Coroner of British Columbia and theProvincial Health Officer of British Columbiaprovided invaluable aid in our efforts to assemblethe epidemiological suicide data set. Group threein this list includes funding agencies: the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada, and the Universities of British Columbiaand Victoria, The Human Early LearningPartnership, the Canadian Institutes for HealthResearch, and the Michael Smith Foundation forHealth Research. Fourth, we owe our most sincerethanks to the young men and women of Ahousaht,Squamish, and Richmond who volunteered theirtime and energy to participate in this research.Fifth and finally, we want to express our specialappreciation to our three anonymous reviews, andespecially to our editor Willis Overton, whosewise council and generous advice contributed inindispensable ways to the shaping and quality ofthis monograph.

Contributors

Michael J. Chandler is DistinguishedCIHR/MSFHR Professor in DevelopmentalPsychology at the University of British Columbiain Vancouver, Canada. His research centers on thestudy of young people’s social-cognitivedevelopment, especially as such age-relatedchanges bear on matters of interest todevelopmental psychopathologists, and healthprofessionals. Most recently his work has come tofocus on cross-cultural comparisons of epistemicand identity development as these differentlyunfold in Canada’s Aboriginal and culturallymainstream youth.

Christopher E. Lalonde is an assistant professorin the Department of Psychology at the Universityof Victoria. His research interests include social-cognitive development in childhood and

adolescence, and the influence of culture onidentity development and determinants of health.

Bryan W. Sokol is an assistant professor in theDepartment of Psychology at Simon FraserUniversity. In addition to his interests in identitydevelopment, Bryan’s research includes the studyof children’s developing epistemic and moralreasoning.

Darcy Hallett is a Ph.D. candidate inDevelopmental Psychology at the University ofBritish Columbia. Aside from the subject matter ofthis monograph, and identity development ingeneral, Darcy’s research interests includeepistemological development and children’sunderstanding of mathematics.


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Appendix A: Sample questions from the Personal Persistence Interview

Jean ValjeanNow that you have heard/read the story of Jean

Valjean, I’d like to ask you some questions abouthim.

To start off, can you just tell me about the mainstory character Valjean. Describe him the way youwould to someone who hasn’t heard the story.

Could you say a bit more about what Valjean islike at the beginning of the story?

Now let’s skip over all the things that happenin the story and just tell me about what Valjean islike at the end of the story. How would youdescribe him then?

At the beginning of the story the centralcharacter is called Jean Valjean and at the end heis referred to as Monsieur Madeline. Is MonsieurMadeline really Jean Valjean? The names aredifferent, but are Monsieur Madeline and JeanValjean one and the same person?

At the beginning of the story the centralcharacter is called Jean Valjean and at the end heis referred to as Monsieur Madeline. I noticed thatthe way you describe Valjean is very different inimportant ways from the way that you describeMonsieur Madeline.

How was Valjean different at the end of thestory than he was at the beginning of the story?

What else might be different about him at theend of the story?

In summary, then, how would you say he haschanged?

Given all these important changes, how is itthat Valjean and Monsieur Madeline are still oneand the same person? Is Monsieur Madeline reallyJean Valjean? The names are different, but areMonsieur Madeline and Jean Valjean one and thesame person?

You have now told me a lot of things that havechanged about Valjean, and listed all the ways thathe differs at the end of the story and is unlike theman he was at the beginning. Given all of thesechanges, what is it that makes Valjean one and thesame person throughout the story?

Is Monsieur Madeline really Jean Valjean? Thenames are different, but are Monsieur Madelineand Jean Valjean one and the same person?

(Assuming that only a list of similarities isoffered) You are right – those are important ways

that Valjean is the same, but the other changes thatwe talked about still took place. Given all of theseimportant differences, what continues to makeValjean one and the same person? What do youthink makes him the same person?

What do you think about Valjean himself?Does Valjean think he is the same person—that is,when he remembers the person he was in thebeginning, does he feel that the things thathappened then actually happened to the person henow takes himself to be?

How might Valjean explain to someone elsethat one and the same person could act in all of thedifferent ways that he acted throughout the story?

SelfFirst, I would like you to describe what sort of

person you were five years ago.If someone didn’t know you, what could you

say to help them understand the sort of person youwere then?

Next, I would like you to describe the sort ofperson you see yourself as being right now.

It sounds like you have changed in someimportant ways from the sort of person you werefive years ago. What are some of the importantchanges that have taken place in your life in thelast five years or so?

What I now want you to explain—and this isthe most important part—is what are the reasonsthat you think of yourself as the self-same personthat you were five years ago. What makes you thesame person? Just explain your reasons.

How would you explain all the changes thathave taken place in your life? How might youexplain to someone else that one and the sameperson could act in all of the different ways thatyou have described?

How is it that you have become the person youare right now?

Documents

A Study of Native and Non-Native North American Adolescents