The study of narrative identity—the ongoing process of authoring our life stories and being shaped by them—has provided a rich conceptualization of adult personality, yielding important insights about the storied nature of meaning making in personality, particularly for young and midlife adults. However, little research has been done to investigate narrative identity in older adulthood, potentially resulting in a constrained understanding of narrative identity across the life span. I propose that much-needed research on narrative identity in late life could substantiate or undermine a hypothesized shift in emphasis from authoring to reading life stories (McAdams, 2015), complicate and refine the master narrative framework (McLean & Syed, 2015), and offer new targets for narrative identity questions across the entire life span.

中文翻译：

---

生命的最后几章：研究老年人叙事身份的拟议研究议程

对叙事身份的研究——创作我们的生活故事并被它们塑造的持续过程——为成人人格提供了丰富的概念化，产生了关于人格中意义创造的故事本质的重要见解，特别是对于年轻人和中年成年人。然而，很少有研究调查老年时期的叙事身份，这可能导致对整个生命周期的叙事身份的理解受到限制。我认为，关于晚年叙事身份的急需研究可以证实或破坏从写作到阅读的假设转变 生活故事（麦克亚当斯，2015 年），复杂化和完善了主要叙事框架（麦克莱恩和赛义德，2015 年），并为整个生命周期的叙事身份问题提供了新的目标。