Developmental science is a fragmented field underpinned by fragmented methods and fragmented data. Quantitative and qualitative approaches advance siloed theories based on siloed methods and data. We argue that analysing longitudinal big qualitative data can provide a platform for theoretical integration through methodological integration. We illustrate this with research on naturally occurring diaries spanning decades and comprising millions of words. These rich textual data can be quantified to identify changes over time and qualitized to reveal the underlying semiotic processes occurring moment to moment within a single diary entry. This enables multi-resolution research, namely, zooming-out by quantifying the data to see macro patterns of development and zooming-in by qualitizing the data to identify the underlying micro-processes. We illustrate how this multi-resolution approach, which uses qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse the same data, can be used to deepen established developmental phenomena, integrate contradictory findings, and explore new theoretical insights about multi-decade developmental dynamics. Our contribution is to show how integrating methods, through rich longitudinal big qualitative data, can become a platform for theoretical integration.

This paper contributes to social and cultural psychology by means of a systematic reflection on the notion of time in its togetherness with space as revealed by films. It presents a new theorisation of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the 'chronotope' by distinguishing created, creating, and creative types which exist in dynamic relations of mutual presupposition. This new theorisation is then used to guide the thematic decomposition of five films directed by Christopher Nolan (Tenet, Inception, Memento, The Prestige, and Oppenheimer). Each film, with its many minor chronotopes, offers its appreciator a distinctive meditation on the varied 'shapes' time can take, including the ways it can become problematic in people's lives. But taken together the films express a distinctive major chronotope which, we argue, characterises Nolan's genre more generally. We describe this as a chronotope of permanent liminality because characters and appreciators alike are confronted with paradoxes of constant transition involving multiple temporalities in which created, creating, and creative chrontopes are deliberately mixed. This opens new perspectives on the psychological value of aesthetic experiences, showing how art and life weave into one another thanks to being woven out of one another. Films do not merely entertain us but allow us to entertain the complexity proper to reality viewed, not as a static underlying materiality (about which we form representations) but as a real process of transition composed out of a rich multiplicity of temporal happenings.

A recent challenge is how to mix qualitative interpretation with computational techniques to analyze big qualitative data. To this end, we propose “multi-resolution design” for mixed method analysis of the same data: qualitative analysis zooms-in to provide in-depth contextual insight and quantitative analysis zooms-out to provide measures, associations, and statistical models. The raw qualitative data is transformed between excerpts, counts, and measures; with each having unique gains and losses. Multi-resolution designs entail transforming the data back-and-forth between these data types, recursively quantitizing and qualitizing the data. Two empirical studies illustrate how multi-resolution design can support abductive inference and increase validity. This contributes to mixed methods literature a conceptualization of how mixed analysis of the same big qualitative dataset can create tightly integrated synergies.

Despite rising life expectancies and growing attention to the increasing proportion of older persons in rich democracies, we still know surprisingly little about how people develop after 60. This book proposes an integrative approach to development in older age that expands sociocultural psychology across the life course. It shows that people develop into older age while acting, feeling, remembering, imagining, and moving in the spaces where they live and interact with others. The diversity and singularity of ageing trajectories is also studied, highlighting how deeply the environment can guide and support as well as expand upon or offer resources to older persons. The author demonstrates the role of carefully designed social and institutional settings and well-planned ageing policies in fostering 'ageing in place'. By exploring housing, formal and informal care networks, and everyday arrangements that help older persons live meaningful lives, this volume speaks to anyone concerned with ageing.

Moving in older age is a critical experience in the person’s life trajectory as it may require an important reorganization of their relation to the social and material environment. In order to better understand this experience, we propose to address it drawing on the concepts of rupture and transition as developed in the frame of sociocultural lifecourse psychology. We complete this theoretical framework with the distinction between frame and space and with literature on bodies and embodiment. We present a case study conducted in a building of so-called flats with referee, a type of flats developed in the frame of a political reform addressing demographic ageing, in a Swiss canton. We focus in particular on interviews with inhabitants before and after they moved to these flats. In the analysis, we discuss two aspects of this rupture/transition which, we argue, play an important role in the persons’ experiences: firstly, the embodied dimension of the experience of rupture, which is notably related to the experience of a new physical environment; secondly, the social relations in these buildings designed especially to favor relationships among neighbors. Through this analysis, we aim at contributing to the understanding of development in older age from a sociocultural psychological perspective and to the literature on ruptures and transitions as we highlight theoretical and methodological implications.

Retirement is rarely conceptualised in terms of learning and development. However, as the end of professional activity approaches, many people begin to reflect deeply on the past, present, and future of their lives. This potentially profound reflection involves a complex process of learning and development to which research has paid too little attention. This article places the voice of a retiree at the centre of the study and provides a nuanced understanding of retirement, sensitive to the changes and difficulties of narrative sense-making activity in this transition, with all its ambiguities and complexities. The article analyses the 24-year diary of a man who goes through retirement, exploring the narrative sense-making dynamics by which this diarist interprets his retirement: initially it is mentioned with a combination of desire, idealisation, fear, and insecurity; then it is experienced as a deep personal crisis with depression; and afterward it is reinterpreted in a nuanced, positive, and constructive way. The analysis reveals the intertwining of cultural and personal dimensions in narrative sense-making. Sense-making around retirement is not passive or merely descriptive of the event, but instead is an integral part of what the process of retirement itself can become.

Although it is well established that human development is a lifecourse process, little is still known about development in the adult years. Few attempts have been made to develop integrative understandings of what people learn across various domains, such as work, hobbies and family. Also, adult life is addressed theoretically and empirically usually only on short life periods or through retrospective interviews. In this paper we propose a theoretical model that draws on a sociocultural tradition and that provides us with a series of concepts that enable us to describe and understand developmental dynamics in the course of lives of people, as these unfold in changing sociocultural environments. We put them at work on an only set of data, diaries written over more than twenty years. The article first introduces a theoretical framework for development across domains, and then puts it at work on two contrasting diaries. Altogether, the paper proposes a complex, longitudinal, multidimensional, dynamic, and situated model of human development in the lifecourse, contributing both to developmental literature and to methodological advancement.

What is the relationship between our theories of rupture (which view it as a basis for learning and development) and narratives of rupture (myths, novels, films, etc.)? On the one hand there are striking convergences. Both entail a variant of the following sequence: steady state, breach, crisis, and resolution or transformation. But, on the other hand, there are important differences. Narratives are multi-functional: they allow us to approach our fears, be entertained, pre-imagine crises, and they can become symbolic resources within crises, helping us to navigate ruptures. We argue that, rather than being mirrors of rupture, narratives of rupture are help us to navigate ruptures. This is formalized in model that shows how narratives enable us to pre-imagine ruptures, identify the early warning signs of a rupture, support our problem-solving, and subsequently narrate our rupture experiences. The model emphasizes the limits of narratives as symbolic resources within ruptures. Narrative guidance can fail, canalizing and constraining semiotic mediation in unhelpful ways. Due to inherent limitations of narratives as resources for ruptures, we propose that narratives also often provide meta-cultural guidance to ignore cultural guidance.

A powerful voice in our community faded out on December 1st, 2024. It is with deep sadness that we acknowledge the death of Professor Ivana Marková, aged 86. Ivana Marková developed an unique, inspiring, dialogical perspective in social and cultural psychology; she saw dialogism as an ontology, an epistemology and ethics. She also lived dialogism: a life of rich long-term dialogues with so many friends and colleagues all over the world. Ivana Marková was an Associate Editor of Culture & Psychology. She was a visiting professor in many universities, gave keynote addresses in numerous countries, and was a mentor to generations of social psychologists. Ivana Marková will be missed by many academic and professional communities around the world. We have lost a unique personality, a paradigm-challenger, a mentor, and a friend.

Crises are everywhere – from environmental collapses, wars, and skyrocketing inequalities to ageing populations and pandemics, yet there is no universal way that individuals respond to these. What can be said about these? This is an invitation for us, loosely defined as social, cultural and developmental psychologists, to stop and think: we emphasise the role crises play in human and cultural development. Our starting point is that, to consider the relevance of crises for human societies and individuals, one needs to address them in time, that is, developmentally; and that one cannot understand development without understanding of crises. Furthermore, a sociocultural psychological perspective is particularly suited for teasing out people’s diverse experiences and perspectives on similar events, and how crises emerge, develop, and resonate in unique ways across life courses. This article first retraces the etymology of the terms crises and development, and then reviews how crises and development have been articulated in the history of psychology. From there, we turn to the question of crises in development. We present three epistemological principles of our sociocultural stance for studying crises and developments: temporalities and spatialities matters; experiences are dialogical and perspectival; and an idiographic approach offers fertile ground for capturing their complexity.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented global health crisis, which caused a seismic disruption of people’s lives, their habitual practices, systems of meanings, and relationship to the past and the future. This contribution will explore how a group of 17 participants who wrote a collective diary during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Slovenia (March–May 2020) experienced the crisis as a personal and collective rupture, and what were the functions of the imagination in managing uncertainty, constructing new meanings, and ultimately adapting to the novel situation. Based on the diary data, we find that the global pandemic crisis was experienced as a rupture along four central dimensions: temporality, spatiality, sociality, and embodiment. Drawing on the conceptualisation of the imagination in sociocultural psychology, we have identified the functions of the imagination in different stages of adaptation to the rupture (e.g., experiencing the rupture, meaning-making, distanciation, symbolic mobility, temporal projection), and observed how people use symbolic resources to make sense of the situation, cope with the uncertainty, and construct new imaginings of the future. We thus posit that the imagination plays a central role in repairing ruptures, both in terms of semantic reconfiguration and guiding future-oriented action.

Crises have usually been considered temporary states of exception, but research is increasingly exploring slower, less visible, and more chronic crises, acknowledging that they differ in their characteristics and experiences. Echoing these shifts, we explore how crises and ruptures resonate through time. Using natural language processing and conventional qualitative methodologies to analyse diaries written over more than two decades, we noticed that events people reported as personal ruptures did not always correspond to societal crises. Instead, they often invoked other crises meaningful to them. The ruptures were also rarely experienced as isolated events but, at times, seemed to “resonate” with one another on different grounds. These resonances could either mitigate or amplify how crises and ruptures were experienced. Based on an analysis of one diary, written by a man in his seventies from the southern United States, we theorise three characteristics of resonances: temporal, embodied, and cumulative. We argue that resonance may also influence whether the crisis becomes a rupture, how it is made sense of, and acted upon – in other words, whether it contributes to the person’s development.

What is it that develops in adult life? Development through work and family life have been documented and theorised in detail, but much less is known about what is learned beyond these domains, through people's engagements in hobbies or when out of work (e.g., unemployed, retired). We argue that adult development can be addressed in general terms, beyond domain specificity; drawing on our sociocultural psychology framework, and assuming an open-system perspective, we highlight the two processes of progressive differentiation and psychological distancing in diverse domains of activity. To address development over time, we explore 20 years of people's lives through the longitudinal analysis of online diaries. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis enables us to identify people's experiences of rupture and transitions, the diversity of their domains of interests, and how these change over time. Based on a case-study, we show that, if the general direction of development does entail progressive differentiation and distanciation, these processes can also be hindered by the cumulation of vulnerabilising events. Finally, we show that some domains, such as the long-standing activity of diary writing, can itself be used as resource for adult development.

This interview is a slightly modified transcript from the second Psyche Talk, hosted at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, February 15, 2024. Psyche Talks are hosted as biannual events, where prominent psychological researchers are invited to discuss fundamental questions about the nature and subject matter of psychology through an interview-based format. The focus of this interview is on how people make sense of change on the personal, social and environmental level and the role of symbolic resources in making meaning of and transitioning through rupturing changes. In this interview, Professor of Sociocultural Psychology, Tania Zittoun, is interviewed by Associate Professor of Sociocultural Psychology, Sarah Awad.