Finding Meaning in Difficult Family Experiences: Sense-Making and Interaction Processes During Joint Family Storytelling

Narratives help individuals make sense of their experiences (Bochner, Ellis, " Tillmann-Healy, 1997; Weber, Harvey, " Stanley, 1987). This is particularly true for people trying to make sense of difficult or traumatic experiences. Joint storytelling, or collaborative narration, however, introduces elements not at work in individual tellings. In this study, we looked for evidence of sense-making in joint stories about difficult family experiences told by 12 families. Families' level of engagement, perspective-taking, turn-taking, and expressed interpretations all emerged as features relevant to the sense-making process. During the storytelling episode, families engaged in three forms of sense-making: (a) family-unit sense-making in which members actively engaged in the process of telling the story together and reached a shared conclusion concerning the meaning of the experience, (b) individual family member sense-making in which family members participated in the storytelling by sharing separate versions of the story and reached individual conclusions about the meaning of the story, and (c) incomplete sense-making in which one or more family members were not engaged in the storytelling and no clear understanding of the story's meaning emerged at either the family or the individual level. This study offers an approach to aid in identifying communication behaviors that accompany and help differentiate the sense-making process in jointly told family stories about difficult family experiences.