The Good Life: Exploring Master,Alternative,and Personal Narratives of East Asian American Christians

Abstract

The good life is broadly understood to mean a life worth living, characterized by positive human functioning and well-being. Psychologists have primarily focused on aspects of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being at the individual level. While this continues to be important, the narrative scripts that influence individuals’ concepts of the good life are underexplored. Scripts about “the good life” circulate in every culture and for Asian American Christians, they potentially come from three sources—Asian cultures experienced prior to or during diaspora, Christian culture, and the individual’s personal meaning-making. This exploratory study focuses on perspectives of the good life, told by 31 East-Asian American Christians in the Seattle area. Through interviews, researchers captured participants’ conceptualizations of the good life at societal, communal, and personal levels and thematically coded these stories for motivational themes. For the East-Asian American Christians in our study, master narratives of the good life constellate around achievement and security, and dominant narratives of the perpetual foreigner and model minority persist. Furthermore, alternative narratives of the good life informed by the Christian tradition constellate around relatedness, purpose, and competence. These themes also emerge for personal narratives of the good life, with an amplified emphasis on relatedness.

Keywords

cross-cultural research psychology and the church or ministry narrative qualitative methodology

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