ABSTRACT
People create a sense of identity both in the stories that they choose to tell and especially in the way they tell their stories. Narratives, whether they are big life stories or small stories about an episode, always reveal the speaker’s identity. Narrative inquiry, self-making narratives, and identity construction have become well-established approaches of research in understanding the lives of adults. The assumption that narrative inquiry should only be used with those who can tell their stories coherently should be challenged. In recent years, there has been research exploring identity and biographical disruption when adults experience acquired communication disabilities. However, narrative approaches are less commonly used to explore the lives of young children with disabilities and in particular children with developmental speech and language disorders. In this chapter, we focus on a specific group of children with disabilities, namely children that grow up with developmental speech or language disorders. As is the case for individuals with acquired communication disorders such as aphasia, these children may present with deficits in their narrative abilities and their ability to create autobiographical narratives. There is some evidence to suggest that children with developmental speech and language disorders construct multiple identities, negotiate their identities with others, and are aware of the stigma associated with being different. In our contribution to the edited book, we will first provide a thorough review of the recent literature addressing identity and identity construction in children with developmental speech language disorders along with the methodological challenges when using narrative inquiry with these children. Following this, we will present and discuss concrete examples and findings from our own ongoing research on how young Irish and Danish children with developmental speech and language disorders construe their disabilities and how they construct their identity in relation to their developmental challenges. From a developmental perspective, we also suggest methodological recommendations that may be useful for other researchers who wish to investigate identity construction in young children with disabilities.
