The single greatest life challenge: How late-midlife adults construct narratives of significant personal challenges

This study introduces the concept of the single greatest life challenge—the most subjectively-significant challenge a person has ever faced—and explores its implications for narrative identity. Through content coding of 157 late-midlife community adults’ life challenge narratives, we catalogued the distribution of 18 life challenge topics. Through exploratory factor analysis of narrative features, we found a four-factor structure (identity processing, agency/emotion, verbosity/specificity, and scope) largely consistent with the “big three” narrative identity metastructure. The agency/emotion factor was most closely tied to traits and functioning: it correlated negatively with neuroticism and depression, correlated positively with psychological well-being and life satisfaction, and provided incremental validity in predicting depression. The stories adults tell of their greatest challenges are informative about personality and psychological functioning.