Young adults’ personal and relationship memories: recollections of self, siblings, and family

ABSTRACT

We investigated the phenomenological and narrative characteristics of young adults’ self- and other-related memories within the context of significant relationships. We also examined whether participants’ gender and/or gender concordance between participants and their siblings was associated with autobiographical memory characteristics. We collected data from 108 college students who had only one sibling. All participants provided narratives in response to three memory prompts (i.e., self-related, sibling-related, and family-related) and rated their memories along dimensions such as significance, emotional valence, clarity etc. The narratives were coded on thematic content, transformativeness, mentions of others, and event type dimensions. Results revealed differences between self-related memories and sibling- and family-related memories across several dimensions. However, sibling-related and family-related memories were mostly similar to each other. No statistically significant gender or gender concordance differences were observed. Further exploratory analysis showed that memory narratives describing extended events were more transformative than single event narratives. The findings enhance our understanding about the self-in-relation to others through relationship memories.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationship memories
• Sibling relationships
• Personal memories
• Young adults
• Autobiographical memories

Acknowledgement

The authors thank research assistants for their help at data transcription and coding. They also extend a special note of appreciation to the college students who took part in this research. This publication is a part of the first author’s dissertation research.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author DK. The data are not publicly available due to containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Notes

1 We set a maximum of 4 years of age difference between siblings based on the average birth intervals in Turkey (Hacettepe Üniversitesi Nüfus Etütleri Enstitüsü, 1999).

2 All analyses were performed with and without interaction between gender and memory type. None of the interactions were significant. Thus, we here reported the models without interaction term.

Additional information

Funding

The first author thanks Turkish Fulbright Commission for providing Fulbright PhD Dissertation Research Grant for the current study.