Parent-Adolescent Storytelling in Canadian-Arabic Immigrant Families (Part 1): A Grounded Theory

This paper is the first of two papers describing a study that examined parents' and adolescents' experience of telling stories to each other in the context of day-to-day family life utilizing two complementary analytic perspectives. The study serves as a window on meaning-making and relationship processes, an illumination of the day-to-day verbal interactions that comprise family life, with specific attention to family life experience of immigrant parents and adolescents (Arabic families who have migrated to Canada during adolescent's lifetime). We interviewed parents and adolescents about the stories they tell each other. Using Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), we analysed transcripts of these interviews, contributing to the generation of substantive theory about intergenerational storytelling in families during adolescence. We used Narrative Analysis (NA) to further analyse parts of the adolescent interviews that incorporated a re-telling of typical stories previously shared with parents. NA provides evidence of the narratives and voices that are incorporated into the stories these adolescents tell their parents, with potential links to broader cultural narratives. In the current paper, we describe the GTM research focus, method, and analytic results in light of their contribution to substantive theory about intergenerational storytelling in families. We discuss the NA method and analytic results in a separate paper (Ashbourne & Baobaid, 2014). We take, as a starting point, a social constructionist view that meaning is negotiated, understood, and constructed in interaction. This is a sensitizing concept in the tradition of GTM, directing our gaze to interactions and the meaning that parents and adolescents make of their interactions with each other, but not imposing a priori assumptions in the area of inductive theory generation. Social constructionist views of meaning-making also premise that broader social discourses such as those associated with a family culture or dominant surrounding cultural context influence meaning-making (Ammerman, 2003; Few, 2009; Gergen, 1994; Hammack, 2008). We are, therefore, oriented to examining parent-adolescent relationships as potential sites of jointly constructed meaning about self, other, and broader questions of life that may be associated with adolescence, parenting, values and beliefs. As investigators of family life during adolescence, we are interested in considering the mundane everyday practices that constitute much of parent-adolescent interaction and everyday talk between family members during this time period. Thus, a further sensitizing concept we considered in designing this study was Bamberg and Georgakopoulou's (2008) suggestion of small stories as a valuable lens from which to view the stories shared in the context of daily family life. Georgakopoulou (2006) describes small stories as telling "mostly about very recent ('this morning,' 'last night') events" (p. 126), shared past events, and anticipated future events in a dynamic manner that participants consider to be storytelling. We are interested in what parents and adolescents talk about in the course of their day-to-day lives, as well as how and in what contexts these topics are discussed. Interviewing members of Arabic immigrant family members who currently reside in a predominately non-Arabic social context provided us with an opportunity to examine family storytelling in a group of families who share some cultural homogeneity (while also representing diverse countries of origin and non-shared cultural background), as well as the potential influences of broader dominant cultural discourses. The substantive theory generated through GTM analysis in this study, grounded as it is in the described experience of Canadian-Arabic immigrant families, is primarily reflective of this specific cultural group while suggesting areas for future exploration of family processes and interactions which may operate across cultures and context. …