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Family Legacies
2003, p. 220). In this study, we asked participants “to tell a story that you remember being told
by a family member that reflects or characterizes your family.” Due to the importance of context
in the storytelling process, participants were also asked who tells the story and when the story is
told (cf. Bylund, 2003; Martin, Hagestad, & Diedrick, 1988). Next, we explained the notion of
family legacy and encouraged participants to list as many family legacies as they could think of,
both positive and/or negative. After participants listed their family legacies, we asked them to tell
stories which helped to illustrate each legacy on their list. Finally, in order to discover how third
generation family members sustain or modify their family legacies, we asked how participants
tell stories which illustrated how they have embraced, rejected, and extended their legacies.
Data analysis
Following the interviews, the audio-tapes were transcribed furnishing 144 single-spaced
pages of data. We used analytic induction (Bulmer, 1979; Riessman, 1993) to analyze the
content of family legacies and stories for themes; we followed the same procedure for analyzing
narratives about the ways in which the legacies were embraced, rejected, and/or extended (see
also Koenig Kellas & Trees, 2006 for a similar method). We first separately read the transcripts
in their entirety to create a general sense of the data. In the initial stories, we focused on the
storytelling process by analyzing which family member typically told the story and when the
story is told. We also analyzed the specific situation and context of the storytelling during the
interviews themselves, to emphasize the importance of context and culture in our analysis. This
helped us to better address under what conditions the storytelling process occurred. We also
analyzed the data to identify patterns among both positive and negative legacies. After individual
assessment of the data in which we noted emergent themes, we met to compare our analyses and
collapse and categorize responses into recurring patterns according to the individual research
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