ISSEP-2024-03

GRANT ID#: ISSEP-2024-03

GRANT TITLE: The narrative “sweet spot”? Evaluating how repetition impacts the felt authenticity of telling and re-telling personal narratives

GRANTEE: The Ohio State University Medical Center

PRIMARY INVESTIGATOR: Joseph Maffly-Kipp

CO-PRIMARY INVESTIGATOR: Henry Cowan

GRANT AMOUNT: USD $3,000

DURATION OF GRANT PROJECT: April 15, 2024 – April 15, 2025

Description of the Project

 

Executive summary:

The goal of this project is to explore feelings of authenticity experienced during the telling of personal narratives, and how these feelings change as narratives are repeated across social contexts. Drawing on self-verification theory, we expect that authenticity will provide information about how successfully people feel that they have communicated the intended self-relevant information. Our secondary aim is to explore how this process differs in individuals prone to rumination. We predict that narrative authenticity will be quadratic (inverted U-shaped) across repetitions (H1), that this will be driven by feelings of successful self-expression at first (H2a), then increasing habituation to the narrative as an emotional stimulus (H2b), and that high ruminators will display a prolonged and dampened version of the same pattern (H3). We plan to have 300 participants tell the same personal narrative across seven consecutive days to seven imagined audiences. Our hypotheses will be tested using linear mixed modeling.

 

Itemized budget:

The projected expenses are detailed below:

To proceed with the budget conservatively, we will first operate under an assumption of zero attrition. Under this assumption:

  • $3000 to be paid to 250 workers from Amazon’s mechanical Turk at a rate of $12 per hour.

  • Survey length Survey 1: 12 minutes; Surveys 2-7: 8 minutes

  • 60 total minutes of surveys

  • $12/hr at 1 hr per participant = 250 participants paid $12 each

  • We will stop data collection after 250 participants have entered the study. Once all of these participants have either completed or attrited, we will use the remainder of the money to further increase our N as budget allows. Assuming a conservative attrition rate of 20%,23 we will be able to achieve a total N of at least 300 participants who have completed at least three surveys.

The total amount approved is USD $3,000.

Kenneth Vail