Exploring the sharing of autobiographical memories and memory objects in Chinese families

Autobiographical memories can be mental constructions, told to others as oral stories, and recorded in or evoked by objects that have material form (i.e., they can be anchored in “memory objects”), and they can be shared, withheld, and received in everyday life. This dissertation is an exploratory study that aims to understand how Chinese individuals experience information practices of sharing and receiving autobiographical memories in families, including decision-making considerations about what to share/withhold and how memory objects might be involved in such practices. Semi-structured interviews and supplementary ethnographic fieldwork were used to gather information from 32 Chinese participants living in urban areas of Xi’an (Shaanxi Province) and Beijing in China. During data analysis, providing and receiving parental guidance in families emerged as a particularly significant life context where sharing memories and interacting with memory objects can take on rich meanings. The findings revealed that parents’ information practices of sharing memories with children could be synthesized into four approaches: the open referential guiding approach, the reserved referential guiding approach, the preventive role modeling approach, and the motivational role modeling approach. As identifiable tendencies that collectively form a fluid continuum of practices, the four approaches reflect how key elements such as parental beliefs about how children learn, navigating trust and risk, framing memories for children, and shaping parent-child power dynamics can interact. Memory objects can play three roles when autobiographical memories are shared and received in families in contexts and situations that may impact parental guidance: they can affect the shaping and reshaping of the images of parents, help parents to provide guidance for children (especially adolescent children) that is sensitive to their characteristics, and help parents to retain memories of parenting or to retain/expand the parental guidance value of their memories. On a fundamental level, memory objects can play these roles because they can function as “natural traces” of the past, exist in different cultural/media forms with various characteristics, stay relatively durable across time and space as independently accessible entities, and be used individually or in sets. The findings suggest that parents’ approaches to sharing memories with children may reflect broader societal trends in China, which are characterized by rapid changes in generational life experiences and tensions between traditional and newer ways of conceptualizing parent-child relationships and performing parenting. Under this background, memory objects can weave together a web of activities such as information sharing, receiving, exchanging, encountering, and avoidance in families, offering opportunities for illuminating, leveraging, questioning, and negotiating past personal identities and their meanings for family members of different generations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Library & Information Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Han, Ruohua

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kendall, Lori S
• Schneider, Jodi A
• Magee, Rachel
• Ma, Linqing

• Autobiographical Memory
• Memory Objects
• Chinese Families
• Information Behavior And Practices
• Information Sharing
• Personal Archives And Archiving
• Parenting

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Ruohua Han

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121327

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121327