I Get Scared All the Time: Passivity and Disaffiliation in Children’s Personal Narratives

A corpus of children’s personal narratives was analyzed for themes of passivity and disaffiliation, the polar opposites of agency and communion, respectively. The subjects were 96 working class children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. In their personal narratives, children cited themes of passivity more than themes of disaffiliation, with weakness being the most frequently cited individual theme of passivity. With age, children increasingly described weakness in others. Correlations across the agency-passivity and communion-disaffiliation modalities revealed theoretically unpredicted, but empirically interpretable, results.