Abstract
Life experiences have been a topic of interest for researchers and clinicians for decades. Current knowledge is rooted in two distinct approaches, i.e., personality psychology and psychosomatics. Whereas the first is interested in ordinary life stories of nonclinical individuals, based on a more qualitative, in-depth, and person-driven approach, psychosomatics stresses negative events, mainly in clinical samples, and presents a more quantitative, general, and construct-driven approach. Consequently, available evidence is dispersed and unrelated and many basic questions remain unanswered. This study aimed to explore occurrence, developmental stage, valence, and impact of life experiences and to analyze critical answering patterns (i.e., “I don’t remember,” missingness). Through a cross-sectional retrospective design, 394 adults from the community answered the Lifetime Experiences Scale, which covers 75 life experiences organized in eight domains (i.e., school, job, health, leisure, living conditions, adverse experiences, achievements, and people and relationships). Occurrence of life experiences varied greatly, and the mean number of experiences reported was approximately 30. Regarding developmental stage, most experiences were reported in just one stage—mainly adulthood—however, some could be considered chronic. Globally, life experiences tended to be clearly rated as positive or as negative; additionally, assessed experiences were mainly appraised as positive. Moreover, participants presented their experiences as significant, rating them as high impact. Overall, critical answering patterns were not very expressive: “I don’t remember” and missing answers were below 2 and 5%, respectively, in the majority of experiences. These findings offer several important new insights, suggesting that life experiences are mainly an idiosyncratic topic.
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Notes
According to Grotpeter (2008, p. 120), cross-sectional research design is a “research that uses a cross-sectional design, but by use of retrospective recall methods, gathers longitudinal data. These data are designed to represent attitudes, behavior, and events in the respondents’ lives across time, despite the fact they are collected at a single point in time.”
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Funding
This manuscript is part of a doctoral dissertation, which had the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through the PhD grant with the reference SFRH/BD/76022/2011, funded by POPH-QREN-Typology 4.1-Advanced Training, reimbursed by the European Social Fund and national funds from State Budget. This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653).
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Azevedo, V., Martins, C. & Maia, Â. Life Experiences Throughout the Lifespan: What Do People Say (or Not) About Them?. J Adult Dev 25, 69–85 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-017-9277-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-017-9277-6