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High Points, Low Points, Turning Points: Life Stories Of Cambodian American Youth, Allyssa Mccabe, Khanh Dinh

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Qualitative methods such as McAdam's Life Story Interview offer a rich means of exploring how culture affects an individual's development. Such a method has seldom been used with Asian Americans. In the present study, 20 Cambodian American teenagers aged 15-18 (half female, half male) narrated the high, low, and turning points of their lives. Those narratives were transcribed and coded with respect to the predominant emotional valence and context of those key events. Half of high point narratives were painful events that the narrator had recast in a positive light, a hallmark of resilience and of a tendency to redeem …