Social Mobility and Identity Formation Among First-Generation College Students
Narrative psychology is the studying of whole persons in context and in time through the narratives of their experience. This approach to psychology is enjoying a renaissance and is intrinsically interesting. The research discussed here illustrates a narrative psychology approach and issues of class which have also been neglected in psychology.
Even in the absence of dramatic external events, people construe and reconstrue their experiences to point to (or to foreclose) possibility in the future. Living involves continually constructing and reconstructing stories of our lives, without knowing the outcome, revising the plot as new events are added.
Take for example, the life transition of first generation college students starting college. All students are apt to experience significant changes in family relations on entering higher education; the physical and emotional separation that this move usually entails alters relationships between the two groups regardless of class background. First generation students, however, pursuing higher education means entering a formative world that their parents have never inhabited. This move has important consequences for relationships with parents. Value clashes and communication problems frequently occur as students move from one class to another.
For example, many students in this study noted that their parents had "no clue" about how college worked or what they did there, that "they don't ask a lot about it. . . [and] don't even know what to ask about it."
Discussing an experience so foreign to one's parents can prove frustrating, as in the case of Lisa. A recent graduate of a selective state university, Lisa said that her parents were very supportive of the idea of higher education and at her graduation ceremony told her "thousands of times" how proud they were of her. Indeed, like many other respondents in this study, she felt her parents enjoyed a vicarious sense of achievement through her higher education. Yet despite their praise, Lisa found it hard to relate the specifics of her college experience with them.
	"My mom is very supportive. But I don't know if she is necessarily interested. I was doing an oral history project, and I was so into it that whole semester; it was a graduate class. That was just my life, and I think she thought it was cool that I was in a graduate class [and] that I loved it, but when I would try to tell her what I was doing, she would start talking about something else, or she would get this kind of glazed look in her eyes."
Lisa worried that her father was even more thoroughly dismissive of her "impractical" studies. He has often forgotten Lisa's major and has reportedly questioned the wisdom of her course selection, with his "big question" being "Are you learning anything that's going to help you in the real world?" Lisa has not felt comfortable sharing her classroom experiences with him.
	"It's just so hard to explain to them what you're doing . . . Here's my dad who's just gotten off working ten-hour days, six days straight. To tell him that in Medieval History I'm learning about the Goths and the architecture--even though he didn't try to make me feel guilty, or make me feel that things were irrelevant--just looking at him, I'm like, it's interesting to me, but it won't be interesting to him. "
References
Josselson, R., Lieblich, A., & McAdams, D. P. (2003). Up close and Personal: The Teaching and Learning of Narrative Research. American Psychological Association.
McAdams, D. P., Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (2001). Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition. American Psychological Association.