Contexts of life-world experiences are analysed hermeneutically from 128 essays of foreign students, often classed as Bildungsausländer, in this dissertation survey. The focus is on basic processes in the field of development and change of social identity formation.
This qualitative longitudinal study uses coded interpretation results – case internally or comprising several cases – and follows the Grounded Theory as an empirical method in order to discover patterns, construct typologies and to generalize the respective (cultural) horizon in the essays.
Besides Grounded Theory, the theory ’der alltäglichen Lebenswelt’ (Alfred Schütz) serves as a reference point for the survey. The question is in this context – proceeding from the classifications of everyday, structural and radical otherness and from Goffman`s concept of identity – is to what extent one can prove the formation and change of social identities in the analysed texts. Upon this premise, accuIturation processes and processes of self-identification, in relation to an imagined community, are analysed. These processes are determined by collective (cultural) schemas and this dissertation shows that particular cultural schemas are developed in dealing with the (previously new) life in Germany. Specific older experiences are taken to uphold these images or schemas of experiences, fossilized like an imprint in stone.
gestellt an Dr. Christian Jennerich
