family legacies - Wisconsin School of Business - University of ...

Family Legacies
My grandfather was like the worst gambler ever, that is actually why he and my
grandmother eventually divorced. He would just like leave the kids at home and
go off to Vegas, and gamble and come back with a lot less than he left with. It’s
kinda bad, which is why no one else in our family gambles, because of what it’s
done to him.
In this case, it appears as if the negative legacy worked as an instructional tool to assist in
overcoming the struggles it caused individual and immediate family members. Many family
members overcame the constraint associated with negative family legacies by explaining how the
negative legacy could help make the family even stronger. This finding emerged within the
interviews, as participants put a positive spin on their negative legacies in the process of telling
stories which represented them. Participants’ responses indicated that family members did not
want to characterize their family negatively, therefore they reframed their negative legacies in
order to provide advice for the family.
Beyond the interview context, two contextual factors became particularly important to the
legacies identified. First, the cultural background of the participants became highly meaningful.
All participants came from a Midwest background (as did a majority of the interviewers), which
influenced the themes in the legacies they reported (as mentioned above). The Midwestern
context represented the conditions of the storytelling itself, as both the culture and economics of
the Midwest influenced the family legacy and the stories told within the family.
Second, the fact that participants were emerging adults attending college was a relevant
contextual factor in the storytelling process. All emerging adults, except one, were living away
from their biological families and had not yet started their own families through marriage and
childbearing, factors which played a key role in the family legacies they reported and how these
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