The stability of life script and life story events of Nigerian young adults across religion and gender

ABSTRACT

The cultural life scripts are shared semantic knowledge of the expected life course in a given culture characterised by a bump for positive events in the second and third life decades, but none for negative events [Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2004). Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 32, 427-442. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195836]. We investigated the stability of Nigerian young adults' life scripts and life stories across religion and gender. One-hundred-and-seventy-four participants completed the life script and life story tasks, and the revised religious orientation scale. We found that the life scripts and life stories consisted of mainly positive events with a reminiscence bump located in the 10s and 20s; however, we also found a small bump for negative events. There was a high mention rate of religion-specific events in both the life scripts and life stories of participants across religion and gender. The level of religiosity had effects on the importance ratings of the life scripts and life stories. In sum, despite minor variations, the life scripts and life stories were consistent across religion and gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural life scripts
• autobiographical memory
• reminiscence bump
• gender
• religion, Non-WEIRD demographic

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ibrahim Jatau for help with data scoring; and Lois S. Jatau, Lawrence Idibia, Umar M. Umar and Musurat Abubakar for their help with recruitment and data collection. The authors would also like to thank Ali I. Tekcan and Shenel H. Raman for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data is available at https://osf.io/tuhz8/?view_only=9b8d5a2d7526422e918ce580d8ad3709.

Notes

1 A table for pairwise comparisons for life script events not shared across groups can be found in https://osf.io/cftwy/?view_only=25fa10e97fa24e09b17b38c58a9c423d

2 A table for pairwise comparisons for life story events not shared across groups can be found in https://osf.io/cftwy/?view_only=25fa10e97fa24e09b17b38c58a9c423d

3 Additional discussion regarding the individual event comparisons can be found in https://osf.io/cfqzb/?view_only=2a9a480136f645dba144856a01e0c658