Decision-making as Communicated Narrative Sense-Making: Resilient Experiences of Mormon Adoptive Parents

Adopting a child is a consequential decision with many effects on the wellbeing of individuals and families which is no less true within Mormon contexts. As such, scholarship within decision-making around adoption continues to focus on empirical, rational and other modernist frameworks to account for these vital decisions. In order to more fully account for a wholistic framework of how these decisions are made, this study proposes an narrative approach to decision-making to uncover the lived decision-making experience of Mormon adoptive parents holistically. Mormon adoptive parents were interviewed to understand their decision-making experience as process of communicated narrative sense-making (Koneig-Kellas, 2018). I argue using this emergent data, adoptive parents experience constitutes resilient decision-making as a form of resilient narrative sense-making. In adopting CNSM and constitutive approaches to resilience (Buzzanell, 2010; Afifi, 2018) this qualitiave study seeks to explain decision-making as a narrative constitutive process of resilience: decision making becomes an ongoing ontological process of decision-making narrated through time. Future researchers of decision-making can understand the experience of adoptive parents within the larger narrative framework of their historical contexts as a means of understanding the interpellation of hegemonic narratives in ongoing decisions making.