Beyond vulnerability: reflective selfhood, rural woman identity reinterpretation, and agency under structural constraint.

Personality, social, and narrative psychology increasingly call for context-sensitive approaches to understanding how selfhood and agency are organized under structurally unequal conditions. This three-wave field survey examined prospective associations among adversity experiences, reflective selfhood, rural woman identity reinterpretation, family decision-making power, psychological resilience, and agency among rural women in China. Reflective selfhood and rural woman identity reinterpretation were conceptualized as preliminary, narrative-informed, context-sensitive operationalizations of the interpretive processes through which women make sense of lived adversity, social position, responsibility, dignity, and possible agency. Analyses included measurement validation, baseline-adjusted lagged models, attrition robustness checks, and Monte Carlo tests of indirect associations. T1 adversity experiences were positively associated with T2 reflective selfhood and T2 rural woman identity reinterpretation. In turn, both T2 processes were positively associated with T3 psychological resilience and agency after baseline controls were included. Bootstrapped indirect associations through both T2 processes were positive. Exploratory moderation results suggested that family decision-making power may shape the association between reflective selfhood and agency, although this interaction should be interpreted cautiously because post hoc power was limited. The three-wave design strengthens temporal ordering, but the findings should be interpreted as self-report-based prospective associations rather than causal evidence. The study contributes to narrative-informed personality and social psychology by proposing and preliminarily testing a context-sensitive model of rural women's selfhood and agency under structural constraint, while avoiding the implication that hardship itself is beneficial.