Sentences might index an “action,”

Sentences might index an “action,” a schema involving a person engaging in an intentional or unintentional act; a “happening,” a schema without human agency, or whose human agency is ambiguous; or a “state,” an ongoing action, situation, or environment that involves no clear change. To account for differences in letter length and complexity, event types for each letter were counted and rendered as ratios against the total number of events in the letter. To ensure that codes reflected the men’s idiosyncratic ways of seeing the world, bivariate analyses (t test, ANOVA, chi-square) assessed the relationships between the narrative codes and the men’s demographic information, as well as the themes from the discourse analysis.