Studying the life courses of older people: The McAdams life-story interview

Research among older people often focuses on the present. Nevertheless, life course research can help to understand how certain behavior and feelings take shape and evolve throughout the course of life, and how life events at a younger age can influence conditions, behaviors and feelings in later life. In this article, we focus on the McAdams life story interview method, which we applied in three different studies. We describe the different steps, reflect on the main pitfalls in the implementation of this approach and explain how we attempted to avoid them. The experiences and reflections of both the participants and the researchers are discussed.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open