Conference Agenda

Though a critical task across the lifespan, the development of an identity is widely recognized to be most salient for the adolescent. If we want to study identity, it is vital to examine the socio-cultural conditions they draw on, resist and impose. These conditions are rapidly changing throughout the world (e.g., increasing urbanization, commercialization and technologization), and this has extensive psychological repercussions on the development of adolescents. In this presentation, we discuss two qualitative studies that employed the master narrative framework (Syed & McLean, 2015) to investigate adolescent identity within and throughout these socio-cultural conditions. First, 15 focus groups were conducted with Belgian adolescents and analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), revealing six contrasting socio-cultural imperatives. Second, we aimed to deepen our understanding of this person-culture link by conducting an idiographic, holistic narrative analysis (Hammack & Josselson, 2019) of in-depth individual interviews with 4 adolescents. Utilizing these different methodologies for data collection and data-analysis provided us with a nuanced and multi-facetted understanding of the content of master narratives today’s youth are engaging with, as well as individual differences in this engagement. Moreover, the presentation highlights the importance of considering the socio-cultural when investigating adolescent mental health.

Research on radicalization has increasingly emphasized the role of religiosity in shaping meaning, identity, and belonging, rather than functioning as a mere ideological pretext (Dawson, 2022). This dynamic was evident in our qualitative study (El-Omari et al., 2025), in which we conducted semi-structured life story interviews with Syria travelers. Our descriptive-interpretative analysis (Elliot & Timulak, 2021) highlighted the process of identity reconfiguration in participants’ narratives, confirming Awan’s (2007, 2023) concept of Transitional Religiosity Experiences (TREs). A notable pattern emerged in their shifts between the use of "we" and "I" in their speech, signaling transformations in how they articulated the role of religion in their identity formation. To deepen these findings, our follow-up study will employ a case study approach, allowing for in-depth exploration of individual experiences, which cannot be fully captured through generalized research alone (Willemsen, Della Rosa, & Kegerreis, 2017). While the broad analysis was essential in capturing overarching lived experiences, these insights will now inform a more detailed case study approach of the lived experiences of Jamal, offering a nuanced understanding of how religiosity and identity evolve within radicalization trajectories.

In this study we intensively studied five in-depth interviews with women who had difficult birth stories. Unexpected hearth disease, premature birth, mother’s life endangered during birth, highly complex fertility issues are circumstances that complexify the transition to motherhood substantially. These women gave birth during the Covid-19 pandemic and as such the related social isolation put a magnifying glass on the issues these mothers and their families encounter in general. There is hardly any research focusing on the experience of mothers with such difficult birth stories. In this study we investigate these stories through different lenses. On the one hand we focused on the experiences of these women through an interpretative phenomenological analysis. On the other hand, we try to understand how societal discourse on pregnancy, birth, and motherhood provide mothers with frameworks to understand their experience and how that allows them to conceive their own identity, what happened, how they think and feel about it and its effects, in a certain way. We additionally discuss how these two perspectives, although adding depth to the analysis and providing a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the phenomenon of interest, do not merely add up, yet tell two different stories.

The complex communication dynamics and group processes within multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) are challenging to study (Bokhour, 2006). Qualitative data collection methods, such as retrospective and ethnographic approaches, have been criticized for their limitations in capturing these dynamics (Smart & Auburn, 2018). Furthermore, methodological challenges identified in psychotherapy research (Timulak & Elliott, 2019) are equally relevant when studying MDT interactions.

This presentation discusses an exploratory, theory-driven ethnographic study that combines observation with focus groups to examine group processes in MDTs. We conducted direct observations and audiotaped MDT meetings in a psychiatric hospital in Belgium to capture real-time interactions. Immediately after each meeting, we organised a focus group with the team to reflect on the meeting, allowing us to deepen our understanding of the group dynamics at play. These combined methods provided rich material for analysing both explicit communication and underlying group processes.

While future research will deepen this investigation, this presentation critically reflects on the methodological challenges encountered, specifically in our data collection techniques, assessing both the contributions and limitations of our approach. By reflecting on our data collection process, we aim to refine our framework for studying MDT group processes and develop a well-adapted methodology for future research.