How much of your family's story
do you actually know?
These are the twenty questions from Emory University's famous "Do You Know?" scale. Children who could answer more of them showed greater resilience, stronger self-esteem and a deeper sense of belonging. Try them yourself — then try them on your kids at dinner.
Tick what you know
0 / 20
0 stories known. 20 waiting to be told.
Every question you couldn't tick is a conversation waiting to happen — and the research is clear that it's the conversation that matters. The resilience doesn't come from knowing the answers; it comes from the sharing of the stories, together, again and again.
The scale: Duke, M.P., Lazarus, A., & Fivush, R. (2008). Knowledge of family history as a clinically useful index of psychological well-being and prognosis: A brief report. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 45(2), 268–272. This quiz is a conversation-starter, not a clinical assessment — and Professor Duke's own caveat applies: you can't shortcut it by memorising answers. Families with high scores got them by telling the stories together.
Why we added Place
In the original twenty questions, place appears only as a location — where things happened. But for many families, place is far more than a backdrop. It's a character in the family story. A source of identity and belonging. An ongoing relationship. Informed by Indigenous understandings of Country and by research on migration and diaspora, we extended the scale with twelve questions of our own — because for immigrant families, for families shaped by displacement, and for anyone whose identity is tied to a stretch of coast or a family farm, the place is the story.
Tick the ones you could answer
0 / 12
Place as character
Place as relationship
Place and displacement
Place as identity
0 place stories known. 12 waiting to be told.
These twelve are ours, not part of the validated Emory scale — but ask your family the displacement questions at your next gathering and watch what surfaces. Inside the vault, every one of these becomes a guided prompt your whole family can answer in their own voice.
Every "not yet" is a story you can still catch
The whole family in one vault, one price, everyone joining free — asking these very questions, keeping the answers in the voices that matter.