December 28, 2007

I know that it has been very quiet around here for the last year and a half. It has been an extremely busy time for me and I have simply not had the free time to devote to this resource as I had previously. I would note that the APA Council of Representatives WILL be weighing whether to authorize a two-year candidacy period for a new Division for Qualitative Inquiry at its February, 2008 meeting. More than 850 Members and Fellows of APA signed a petition asking to establish such a division.

I am also working on a book on the Narrative Perspective in Psychology which I hope will appear sometime in late 2009. In the meantime, I am also hoping to convert this resource at some point into a more easily postable format.

Finally, I am redesigning my entire Le Moyne web page and will be gathering all the materials for Narrative Psychology into a new folder. So, there will be a need to re-enter old links. I will post a generic re-direct page to alert browsers to this change.

August, 2006

APA Members: Help Establish a Division for Qualitative Inquiry

If you are a member (Fellow, Member, Associate, Student, or Foreign Affiliate) of the American Psychological Association, please consider helping us establish a new Division for Qualitative Inquiry by clicking on this link (will open in a new browser page). It will display a page describing how you can help and let you download a copy of the signature card necessary to petition APA to establish such a division. Thank you for considering this opportunity.

Link for Establishing a Division for Qualitative Inquiry

September 3, 2005

Note: Following Ted Sarbin's death, his family and colleagues issued a set of obituary notes that provide a good overview of his personal and professional life. These notes along with notice of other published obituaries are available online here.

Asimov, N. (2005, September 3). Theodore Sarbin -- 'don't ask, don't tell' Figure. San Francisco Chronicle. [Link]

Parsons, L. (2005, September 2, 2005). Social psychology pioneer dies at 94. (Online). Monterey County Herald. [Link]

August 31, 2005

         

Ted Sarbin, one of the principal founders of narrative psychology, died early on the morning of August 31, 2005. At his death, Ted was 94 years old and had participated less than two weeks earlier in the meeting of the American Psychological Assocation in Washington, DC. There he presented the first Theodore R. Sarbin Award for Narrative Psychology to Prof. Jefferson Singer (Connecticut College) on behalf of Division 24, Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, of the APA. He also participated as a discussant in a two-hour symposium on "Narrative Psychology: The State of the Art" with Dan McAdams, Michael Bamberg, Ruthellen Josselson, and Mary and Ken Gergen with Donald Polkinghorne serving as a co-discussant (see photo below). The photo above on the right was taken at APA on August 18, 2005 and the photo on the left at APA in 1996. R.I.P.

June 7, 2005

Regular visitors may have noticed that additions to the site have slowed in the last year and a half. This has been due mostly to an overwhelming set of other obligations which have demanded my attention in recent years. For example, in the past two years, my teaching schedule at Le Moyne has included four new course preparations. I have also been involved heavily in promoting electronic forms of scholarship via the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Division 2 of APA. We have completed online publication of five volumes relating to teaching and two more are in the editorial pipeline for publication by the Fall, 2005. I have served as an editor for all these publications. One of my multiple course preparations has been an online graduate offering called The Narrative Perspective which Michael Bamberg (Clark University) and I have put together and are now teaching for the second year. It forms one element of an innovative online educational effort organized by Prof. Andy Lock at Massey University, New Zealand, leading to a post-graduate diploma in the "discursive therapies." During the coming academic year (2005-2006), I will be on sabbatical leave from Le Moyne to work at Clark University on a book relating to that graduate course. Further, I've been appointed as an associate editor of a new electronic venture, the International Journal for Dialogical Science, under the general editorship of Hubert Hermans (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands). We expect to publish our first issue in the late Fall, 2005. All of these factors suggest that visitors will continue to see relatively few changes or additions here over the next year or so. However, as important works relating to narrative come across my desk, I will add them to this site.

At the conclusion of my sabbatical and my return to Le Moyne, I may move to refashion this site from an html/webpage format to one employing wiki technology -- one which I believe may be far easier to edit. If you have any suggestions or comments about such a plan, please share them with me.

May 6, 2004

I've decided to remove the icon & link to my weblog, Storied Conduct, from this page. I have not had the time to contribute to it regularly and, when I do post there, my comments tend to be more personal or political rather than scholarly.

In mid-April, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Narrative Consortium in Worcester, MA. Convened by Michael Bamberg of Clark University and Mark Freeman of the College of the Holy Cross, this consortium will be comprised of graduate and undergraduate schools which have faculty whose scholarly interests meet at the intersection of narrative and the social sciences, particularly psychology. Jerry Bruner and his wife and colleague at NYU, Carol Feldman, gave a lecture and conducted a seminar for guests at the Worcester gathering. Over the coming year, participants at the consortium's initial meeting will fashion a more formal organization and implement plans to advance a number of both pedagogical and scholarly objectives agreed upon in Worcester. For the foreseeable future, I'll serve as a webmaster for the Consortium's online site.

March 3, 2004

More and more online sites are archiving video clips of interest to narrative psychologists. These will be noted by use of the following TV icon among the resources:

July 12, 2003

The section providing an Introduction and General Overiew has been expanded to incorporate new data on the publication of narrative-related research during the period 1960-2001. This substantially expands upon the earlier (1996) report for the period 1979-1995 which first established the turn to narrative research in the 1980s. These new data confirm an accelerting interest within the research community of psychology and the other social sciences in the period since 1985.

June 6, 2003

I have reorganized the Theorists & Key Figures materials extensively. This subpage now serves as an index of names with links to specific entries for each theorist or key figure. These have been spread across six subpages which separate the names alphabetically ( A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z). It was becoming clear to me that this guide needed far more than a single page if I were to fashion short bio-bibliographical entries for each of 100 or more individuals. I expect to work on these pages for at least the next six to 12 months in order to complete entries about each figure.

May 29, 2003

The subpage on Management, Business, Public Administration, and Advertising has been dropped.

The URL <http://www.NarrativePsychology.com> is working and will bring browsers to this page. In most browsers, simply typing the phrase NarrativePsychology (without the space between words) will effectively summon this page.

May 28, 2003

The rights to the domain name, NarrativePsychology.Com, came available today and I secured that name for use by this site. I've set up a forwarding notice at my ISP and, beginning tomorrow, users should be able to type that name in their web browser to arrive here. Beginning in 2003, I began to use NarrativePsych.Com as the overall name for this site and will continue to do so for now. Technically, either domain name (NarrativePsychology or NarrativePsych) can also be used with the extensions .org or .info in order to arrive here as well.

May 20, 2003

As I continue to assemble materials for the Documentary Studies, Journalism, and Non-Fiction subpage, I will be adding selected annotated documentary resources to other sections of this guide. These will include various forms of personal narrative writing and documentary constructions. Two icons will signal these additions:

     Online diary or weblog            Radio-based documentary or sound resources

May 12, 2003

Having added a small section on journalism in March, 2003, I've refocused and expanded that subpage to include documentary studies. The entire section is now entitled Documentary Studies, Journalism, and Non-Fiction. Part of the motivation for this change relates to extensive work I did over the past week in identifying the growing number of documentary audio sites across the Internet. I've also decided to consolidate the resources I had been assembling on my Personal Documentary site to this locale and to discontinue any further development of that site. I expect to add some type of subpage here devoted to the presentation of self via documentary sources on the Internet but have not yet thought out the parameters of that effort sufficiently to do so now.

April 30, 2003

I have previously considered my weblog, Storied Conduct, as a sometime companion to this site. In doing so, I have tended to limit the topics there to issues with some relationship to the scholarly theme of narrative. However, as the months have passed by, I have become more interested in using Storied Conduct as a more personal weblog rather than one tied solely to this venue. So, I am announcing that the focus of Storied Conduct will now include interests and commentary beyond narrative per se.

March 21, 2003

A new section has been added to the Topics in Other Disciplines: Journalism & Non-Fiction. This section highlights what has been called "narrative journalism" or a focus upon storytelling within the context of newspapers and other media. The general thrust of this section accommodates the overall documentary tradition in both print and visual forms.

January 2003

Happy New Year!

With the coming of January 1, this site completes its 7th and enters its 8th year online. To the more than 100,000 past visitors to this site and those in the years ahead, welcome!

Past visitors may have noticed the recent appearance of the icon (shown on the left) and the name, Narrativepsych.Com. I secured this domain name some months ago in 2002 and have set the URL <www.narrativepsych.com> to point directly to this page on the Le Moyne College server. I hope that this shortened address may be helpful for those visitors who have found the full Le Moyne URL just a bit too daunting. I am slowly incorporating this icon on the subpages here as they are updated.

Though I announced the appearance of a weblog this past Fall (Storied Conduct), I have been having some difficulty with the page's design elements and have not been updating it very much. I hope to return to more regularly blogging in the Spring.

Finally, I should mention that I personally work almost exclusively in a Mac environment and sometimes fail to recognize that the perfection I find doing so does not always translate in the Wintel world. So, it was only during this past Christmas holiday that I found how poorly this page with its new icon was displaying on a PC. I corrected this today and beg your pardon for any difficulties you encountered here over past months.

August 2002

I've begun an occasional weblog called Storied Conduct. It will contain suggested online links and provide notices of interest regarding narrative in psychology.

This web reference as a whole:

Hevern, V. W. (2002, August). Narrative psychology: Internet and resource guide. Retrieved [enter date] from the Le Moyne College Web site: http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/narpsych.html

Subpage within this site:

Hevern, V. W. (2002, August). [Insert subpage name, e.g., Personality, Psychobiography, and Psychology of the Life Story.] Narrative psychology: Internet and resource guide. Retrieved [enter date] from the Le Moyne College Web site: [insert subpage URL. Do not end with a period.]

The date following the author name should be checked against the month of the last update of that subpage and adjusted accordingly.

July 2002

Renamed the "Psychobiography and Biographical Psychology" subpage as "Personality, Psychobiography, and Psychology of the Life Story" in order to emphasize the importance of contemporary narrative appraoches to the study of personality (e.g., the work of Dan McAdams).

October 2001

The Personal Documentary Center site link has been changed to this new URL: <http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/pdc/> from original site on a server at Earthlink.

September 1999

Having returned from Santa Clara University where I was on sabbatical during 1998-1999, I've placed a formal link above to the correlative site I worked on in the last half-year: The Personal Documentary Center. [Note: changed URL in 10/01; see above]. Here browsers may ind Internet-based personal documents (stories, diaries, essays, etc.) and explore what may be called a "documentary" as well as cyber- psychology (psychology of the Internet)

February, 1999

I am slowly working through the pages -- adding new resources and checking links which may no longer work or have changed. It is a laborious task.

January, 1999

This page has been incorporated as a related project within the activities of the Virtual Faculty (see links at the VF site maintained by Andrew Lock, Psychology Department at Massey University (New Zealand).

March 29, 1998

Data collection in the online survey of Narrative Psychology users has been completed after 14 months. The results of this survey will be reported at the August, 1998 convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. Copies of the results will not be available until that time.

Appreciation is expressed once again to the more than 1200 browsers of this resource who completed the online survey form.

February, 1998

Added WebSideStory HitBOX counter to site. WebCounter total hits stood at 16388 at time of installation.

December, 1997



Narrative Psychology: Internet and Resource Guide has been selected as one of the best sites on the Web by Lycos TOP 5%. The full review of this site by Lycos can be accessed at this link.

 

November, 1997

This site was first put online in late January, 1996 at the same time that the PSY 444 Narrative Psychology seminar was first offered at LeMoyne College. During its first twenty-two months of development, this site had been constructed along two separate lines -- one emphasizing Internet resources and the other comprising a set of printed bibliographical resources.

This site was reconfigured completely on November 21, 1997 when the current unified set of resources devoted to Narrative Psychology was initially uploaded. A separate bibliographical guide to narrative resources will no longer be maintained.