Chapter 4: Discussion
6. Conclusions and Limitations
6.1. Limitations
One of the limitations is that it would have been important to get demographic information about the extent to which the Indian or the US families identified with the
individualistic-collectivistic values and the kind of value systems that were endorsed in their own families. This is important because some of the cultural schemas that exist in India might not be prevalent in the families that participated in our study. Since we selected people who were fluent speakers of English, we might have also picked a subgroup of India who aligned more with the values of an individualistic culture due to their high SES status. Therefore, since all Indian children and adults were of high socioeconomic status, the findings of this study perhaps cannot be generalized to all Indian children who come from other sub-sections of the country, especially the rural regions.
Another limitation, which is also a future direction, is to examine the Hindi narratives from the same Indian speakers and see how these linguistic differences connect with our current findings. A comparison of Hindi and English narratives from the same speakers would further
delineate the influence of language and culture on narratives. For example, if performance between Hindi and English narratives are similar, then that would suggest the powerful influence of culture over language on narratives since all speakers live in India. On the other hand, if Hindi narratives are much different from English narratives and align more with the values of an interdependent culture, then that would indicate the powerful influence of language over culture on narratives because even though they live in India, differences emerge from using two
different languages.
Moreover, adults might have found it odd to narrate stories to another adult (i.e., the experimenter), which could have influenced their storytelling. In the future, there should be a greater consideration of the audience and perhaps, next time ask the adults to narrate stories as if to a child.
In conclusion, our research teased apart language and cultural influences on narrative development. Our findings suggest that many cultural differences do not remain when language is held constant. However, a few differences were found which indicates that culture
differentially impacts the development of orientation in personal narratives. Also, culture
differentially influences narrative structure and content. Culture seems to have minimal influence on narrative structure and more influence on narrative content because more cultural differences were found in that respect. These cultural differences emerge as early as five years of age.
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Appendix A Prompts for Children
1. I was peeling an apple yesterday. I slipped and cut my hand and had to go to the doctor’s office. Did anything like that ever happen to you?
2. When I was at the doctor’s office, there were these twin boys there. They were about five years old, and one of them was looking at a magazine and the other wanted to read the same magazine, so they fought over it and the mother ended up taking it away from both of them. They fought over every magazine either of them picked up. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Do you ever fight with __ like that?
3. Once I knocked a glass off the table and it broke. Have you ever broken anything?
4. Last week I lost my favorite pair of socks! I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I found them under my bed! Have you ever lost anything?
5. I usually get a shot when I go to the doctor’s office. Did you ever get an injection/shot? 6. When my glass fell off the table, the juice spilled all over the place. Have you ever spilled
anything?
Prompts for Adults
1. Yesterday I got jabbed by a needle. Have you ever gotten jabbed with anything? 2. The other day I lost my keys. I couldn’t drive my car or get into my house. Then I found
them on the ground! Have you ever lost anything? 3. Have you ever been locked out?
4. One time I was on a trip with my family, and we were driving along and all of a sudden our tire blew up and we went jerking off the road and we crashed into the rail. Have you ever seen a car wreck? What happened at the accident you saw?
Appendix B 1. Personal Narratives: Three Narratives
In this section, we investigated cross-cultural differences using the three longest personal narratives, indicated by the total number of utterances. We did not provide the developmental age effects for the three longest narratives as the findings were very similar to the developmental findings for the six stories. Therefore, we just report the cross-cultural group and age effects. In previous literature, researchers have typically analyzed the three longest personal narratives from each child because it is a good indicator of the best performance that children and adults are capable of since length of the story is correlated with the complexity of the narrative (McCabe & Peterson, 1983). This analysis will give a good estimate of competent performance.
1.1. Cross-cultural comparisons of personal narratives (three stories).
1.1.1. Cross-cultural comparison of temporality and lexical measures.
Five-year-olds. In order to establish that Indian English and American English were