Do Men and Women Narrate Personal Regret Experiences Differently?

Abstract

Narrative is the principal means of encoding and conveying personal experiences. The current study aims to investigate the personal regret narratives of Turkish university students regarding their personal experiences and to evaluate these narratives from a gender-based perspective. To this end, 116 Turkish university students have participated in this study and the selected personal regret narratives are analyzed within the frame of Labovian narrative categories: abstract, orientation, complicating actions, coda, evaluation and result or resolution. In addition to the existence of these categories, their organizational patterns are also compared with respect to the gender of the participants. The evaluation of the narratives demonstrated that all the narrative components are employed by the Turkish university students; however, female students seem to be more inclined to connect their experiences to daily events or other events in their lives by applying coda more frequently than male students using language as independence symbol instead of employing it to develop intimacy as female students do. The results of this study might contribute to discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and social psychology as written regret narratives allow us to have a deeper understanding of how Turkish students organize their experiences which reflects social, discoursal and cognitive dimensions.

Keywords

• discourse analysis
• gender
• narrative structure
• personal experience