Bringing the (disabled) body to personality psychology: A case study of Samantha

Abstract

As an initial effort at integrating personality psychology and disability studies, this article sought to approach this task by privileging ethical representation over generalizability.

Identity integration in people with acquired disabilities: A qualitative study

“…While we did not collect socioeconomic data in this sample, we are aware of the ways in which their stories are filtered through this lens. In addition, we generated insights related to participants' engagement with social master narratives of ability (e.g., Goggin & Newell, 2004), the dynamic, reciprocal interaction between individual experience and familial and social context (e.g., Dirth & Branscombe, 2018), the role of adaptive technologies in shaping identity development (e.g., Feldner, 2019), and a more explicitly developmental reading of our participants' life stories (e.g., Adler, 2018) than we were able to present in this paper.…”

“…This effort is never simple, often fails to satisfy purists in each tradition, and necessarily involves compromises that warrant criticism. However, as I have argued (Adler, 2018, 2019), I believe it is possible and valuable to embrace the subjectivity, provisionality, and contextualized awareness of social constructionist approaches in the service of accumulating a foundation for scientific, positivist scholarship. Qualitative methods can do much more than serve this end (Levitt et al, 2018)—this is only one role among many for qualitative inquiry in the study of personality change—but this is the approach we have adopted in the present study.…”

“…A recent systematic review of the literature identified only 41 empirical articles on the topic published between 1980 and 2017 (Forber‐Pratt, Lyew, Mueller, & Samples, 2017). Of those, only a handful appear in the personality literature (Adler, 2018). Considering that one in five Americans lives with a disability (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015; Houtenville, Brucker, & Lauer, 2016)—making disability the largest minority group in the United States—this is a striking disparity compared to empirical research on identity among other minority groups.…”

“…Furthermore, it is an approach that prioritizes the perspectives of people with disabilities as insiders and experts who have historically been marginalized. Concurrently with Dirth and Branscombe's work, I (Adler, 2018)3 also offered recommendations for bringing together disability studies and personality science through narrative research grounded in the voices of people with disabilities, seeking to build theory inductively as a foundation for future scholarship. While there are some tensions between the details of Dirth and Branscombe's recommendations and my own (derived from their social psychological vs. personality psychological lineages), we see these approaches as fundamentally consonant and cumulative.…”

A Conceptual Review of Identity Integration Across Adulthood

“…A rich literature thoroughly documents identity development processes in adolescence and emerging adulthood (e.g., McLean & Syed, 2015;Schwartz, Zamboanga, Luyckx, Meca, & Ritchie, 2013), but there is remarkably little work on identity development in adulthood, especially midlife and later life (Kroger, 2015). Instead, a number of disparate literatures address change and stability in identity across adulthood, including lifespan theories of development (e.g., Aldwin, 2011;Atchley, 1989;Baltes & Baltes, 1990;Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999;Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995), the narrative identity literature (e.g., Adler et al, 2015;Bauer & McAdams, 2004;Carlsson, Wängqvist, & Frisén, 2015;McAdams, 2006), and a multitude of literatures on specific life events and transitions that may trigger identity renegotiation (e.g., Adler, 2018;Benish-Weisman, 2009;Dunlop, Walker, Hanley, & Harake, 2017;Feldman & Beehr, 2011;Kim, Kiervik, Belyea, & Choi, 2011). Such bodies of work remain largely disconnected, despite dealing with similar themes of how the self adapts in the context of aging and lifespan growth.…”