The dialogical self of migrants: exploring the migration experience through self-narratives

This research employed the theory of the dialogical self to study the effect of migration on the self. Data from structured interviews of a sample of 38 migrants to Australia yielded life narratives that incorporated distinct Australian and country of origin perspectives or I-positions Cluster analysis, probability distribution analysis and case studies identified two modes of biculturalism, compatible and oppositional, and showed that many migrants had I-positions with unambiguously different content. The data support the utility of a dialogical approach to understanding the sense of self rather than models based on a single integrated self.