Methodological choice and its consequences for possible selves research

The literature on possible selves has grown significantly since the development of the construct in the mid-1980s. Situating our discussion of possible selves in the long-standing and extensive literature on self and identity, our goal in this article is to examine methodological choice and its consequences within possible selves research for both the researcher and the participant. Toward this goal, we reviewed 141 empir-ical articles and highlight here 4 methodological clusters within them, including the original predominant cluster, involving structured survey and interview, and 3 more recent less frequently employed clusters: narrative, visual, and drama. In this article, we discuss various limitations and advantages of each cluster, focusing on researcher investment (e.g., time, resources), researcher role (e.g., information gathering, inter-vention), the nature of participant input, and what is learned by each approach. In our conclusion, we outline areas of future development and concern for the study of pos-sible selves and the development of self-knowledge and identity more generally. We argue that for possible selves research to prosper conceptually, it is vital that re-searchers attend carefully to their methodological choices and the implications of those choices for what can be learned. How people of all ages construct a positive sense of self is an important and bur-geoning topic in research on human development. With it comes a renewed interest in how researchers construe and subsequently operationalize constructs related to the development of identity and self-knowledge (Ashmore & Jussim, 1997; Byrne