Context of Interview and Subject Background It was a cold morning as I walked up the hill toward my neighbor’s house. The monkey grass needles bent with the weight of frozen dew. I look to my left and Tim has planted eight blueberry bushes. An addition to the garden both he and his wife tend. A gentle knock at the door and I am warmly welcomed by Tim's wife Lynn. She directs me to the living room where I sit to begin the interview. Tim says to me "it's going to be hard to put sixty five years into an hour and a half, but I will do my best". Tim and his wife live in a four bedroom house that was built in 1980. It is a wonderfully quaint red brick house, secluded in five acres of woods that is just six miles from downtown Knoxville. The inside of the house is fully decorated and furnished, but without clutter. I am immediately offered coffee and cinnamon toast. I begin by asking Tim to tell me his life story in his own words. Tim was born in 1946, the first year of the baby boomers, in Newport, Rhode Island. He was raised in a Catholic family that instilled core values in his life. Tim and his wife Lynn have six children and several grandchildren. There are pictures of family on many walls of the house. In his life he has served in the military during Vietnam, graduated from college, had a successful career, and even raised a family. As he begins, my pen is moving, and it hardly stops for the next hour and a half.
Cultural Identity "Identity, or a sense of persistent personal selfhood within a larger web of social connections, was first recognized by personality theorists as a critical feature of adolescence. However, recent research has shown that identity is often an important issue in midlife, perhaps because it may be challenged, revised, and/or affirmed or strengthened and consolidated in the period" (Stewart, Ostrove, & Helson, 2001;