MainLife – Life Story Development (quantitative Part)

The study MainLife - Development of Life History (quantitative part) was conducted by the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. During the survey period from November 2002 to May 2020, individuals in different age cohorts were interviewed in a total of five waves (I-V) about their life stories, motives, and well-being. The first wave was designed to examine the development of the ability to construct and tell coherent life stories. Wave II added the new age cohorts. Wave III was used to examine longitudinal life story development, Wave IV to examine life story and motives, and Wave V to examine life story and well-being.

The dataset deposited at GESIS includes quantitative data based on questionnaires and, in a later follow-up publication, coding and ratings based on narratives. It includes almost all participants. The dataset deposited at Qualiservice (qualitative data) contains the seven most important recollections with dates, life narratives, duration and word count of life narratives, additional narratives from Wave IV, age, gender, migration background (self or one parent), and level of highest educational attainment.<br>Life Story Development: MainLife Questionnaires

Biographical:
Change in personal life circumstances; change in personality; feeling of self-discontinuity; satisfaction with personal development; attempts to change personality and life;
Biographical knowledge: Age norms (negative values) - mean deviation in years; biographical salience (negative values) – Percent of wrong choices; self continuity (Sedikidis);
Functions of autobiographical remembering (Thinking about life experiences scale (TALE-revised): frequency of thinking and talking about personal past, frequency of directive uses, frequency of self-continuity uses and frequency of social uses;

Frequencies of biographical practices (writing poems, writing diary, writing essays, drawing, reading old letters, looking at old photographs, reading biographies, conversations with boyfriend, girlfriend, father, mother, partner, child); starting with wave IV items regarding the internet were added (Homepage / Internet profile, pictures, well-being, social interaction);

Confiding in father, mother, male and female friend (from wave III onward also partner): self-disclosure to mother, father, male friend, female friend; frequency of five biographical practices and internet items.

IQ + Personality:
Fluid and crystalline intelligence: In the first three waves, the WAISC-subtests vocabulary and number-symbol tests were used as measures for crystalline and fluid memory. (WAISC / HAWIE vocabulary, WAISC / HAWIE number symbol test)

NEO Short Form, Big Five dimensions of personality (conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness);

Identity status – Utrecht Management of Identity Commitments Scale (UMICS): best friend in depth exploration, best fried reconsideration of commitment; education or job in depth exploration; education or job reconsideration of commitment;
Self clarity; Loyola Generativity scale; emotions regulation (ERQ Emotion regulation Questionnaire: reappraisal, suppression; dispositional resilience (RS-13); self-efficacy; Webster balanced Time Perspective Scale (future and past)

Symptoms:
Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis); Depression of children and adolecents: Depressions Inventar für Kinder und Jugendliche (DIKJ); Wave II: only cohorts 1-2; Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI); Wave: II: only cohorts 3-6; Trait depression and anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety-Depression Inventory (STADI);
Response Style Questionnaire, subscales Rumination and self-reflection;
Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ); Subscale Reflection of Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire

Well-being:
Well-being Ryff scales; self-acceptance, positive relations, autonomy, environmental mastery, life goals, personal growth; Satisfaction with Life Scales (SWLS): well-being present, future and past; Well-being (Berner Fragebogen zum Wohlbefinden; only cohorts 1-4; Scale of Positive and Negative Affectivity (SPANE).

Demography: sex; age at each survey time (Wave I to Wave 5);

Additonally coded were: respondent ID; treatment group; information on life narrative at each survey time: number of life narrative, duration in minutes; number of words; number of propsitions; number of thematic segments;
information on single event narrative (onlye Wave 5): duration in minutes and word count: value formative experience, personality formative experience, intergenerational narrative mother, intergenerational narrative father; number of propositions; Intelligence (Wechsler): digit symbol coding: raw score, transformed score Wertepunkte; vocabulary: raw score, transformed score Wertepunkte; Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI): positive symptom total; global severity index; positive symptom distress index; biographical practices: single items for biographical practices, single items for confiding in others; correction of outliers.