Identity development in the cultural context: Master narratives of Iran

Master Narratives are shared, sociocultural stories that contain common concepts within a specific culture and could be elicited from the personal narratives. These massive societal structures are originally the context of personal narratives as they offer appropriate material for personal narratives. The cultural narratives are not frozen and fixed in time; they modify and transform through history. Cultural meanings have been altered down the generations and the dominant narratives have inspired individuals in making their life narrative accounts. This study aims to reach the repetitive themes and the common contents of individuals’ personal narratives by analyzing them with quantitative and qualitative methods. To do so we conducted an open interview to collect the life narratives of 30 adults around the potentially conflictual identity issue of religious and sexual development. Participants also answered the HEXACO personality inventory and the Circumplex Religious Orientation Inventory (CROI). In the quantitative part, we analyzed the narratives conducting McAdams’ (1999) reliable coding schemes. In the qualitative part, the master narrative model proposed by Syed and McLean (2015) was used for the analysis. Results illustrated common repetitive themes in life narrative accounts which are considered as common societal stories. Within the massive sociocultural context, the Religious Traditional Master Narrative is in contrast with the Modern Alternative Narrative and this enormous conflict has been reflected in individuals’ identity structure. Individuals internalize this conflict while internalizing the religious traditional master narrative and negotiating with the modern alternative one. In addition, Tradition has been identified as an autonomous factor which functions independently from the religion within the cultural context of Iran.