Human Growth and Development / Unit 14 HGD 1959 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
McAdams's Three Levels
The idea
Dan McAdams proposed that personality has three levels. Dispositional traits, such as the five factors, are broad and stable. Characteristic adaptations, goals, values and strategies, are specific to a person's life and circumstances. The life narrative is the internalized story a person tells about how he or she came to be, giving life unity and purpose. The second and third levels can change even when traits stay steady.
In practice
A shy fifty-year-old, as shy as ever, who has new goals after her children leave home and now tells her life as a story of late-blooming courage.
Where people slip
The misconception is that personality is either fixed or endlessly changeable. Traits are stable, while adaptations and life stories change. Exam items describe a change and ask which level it belongs to: a new goal is a characteristic adaptation; a reinterpreted life story is the narrative level.
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