Personal Documents as Data in Conceptualizing Adult Personality Development
Personal documents (i.e., diaries, collections of letters, autobiographies, memoirs) can provide the raw data that improve our knowledge base as we assess theories of personality development during adulthood. Yet, until recently, the "state of the art" regarding utilization of personal documents in psychological research had not advanced beyond that described in Gordon Allport's monograph almost 40 years ago. The present article reviews three differing conceptions of adult personality development—the lifescript approach of Eric Berne, stage theory conceptions of Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson, and a dialectic approach-and describes the knowledge base on which each theory has been evaluated. Various applications of data from personal documents are proposed or described. These include a dialectical reanalysis of Letters from Jenny, the use of presidents' autobiographies to look at expressed values, and the use of personal documents to generate social schemes.