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This week in adolescent development: Identity

2/3/2014

1 Comment

 
I’d say that the readings for the week on identity, and later in the semester, cognition, are the ones that give the students (and admittedly, me) the most trouble. Identity is such a philosophical and hard to capture construct that some of the writing in this area can be challenging. That said, it’s also a topic that gets students engaged in talking about broad developmental issues. The articles that generated the most discussion last week:

1. Arnett (2000). Google scholar stats give this paper over 4000 citations. I assign this paper in all of my undergraduate and graduate adolescent and lifespan courses. Students all enjoy reading this paper, whether they love the paper itself. I always admire scholars who are willing to put themselves out there with large-scale conceptual ideas, even if not everyone agrees with them.

2.  Klimstra, Luyckx, Hale, Frijns, van Lier, & Meeus (2010). We spent a lot of time in class discussing how to differentiate exploration in breadth from reconsideration, and given that identity is often thought of as a higher order/global construct, people also were interested in the idea that there could be daily fluctuations in commitment and reconsideration.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Identity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 3, 2014.”

1 Comment
Erin Hiley Sharp
2/3/2014 06:10:36 am

As someone very interested in identity development, I struggle with thinking of identity as a status based on level of exploration and commitment and find myself much more comfortable with Waterman's identity discovery model. Why? Because of what comes up in your class discussions about exploration and commitment to different domains as fluctuating. But, more importantly, thinking of exploration and commitment neglects the idea that identity is actually a "quality." So, for example, someone may spend a lot of time thinking about becoming a doctor and then they commit to becoming a doctor (identity achieved) but this tells us nothing about whether this was a "good" choice. Waterman's identity discovery model talks more about identity being about having a good understanding of one's core elements - interests, talents, skills - and then making choices based on knowledge of those core elements. When is an identity choice a "good" choice? When it feels good (goodness of fit) - it is much more of an affective conceptualization of identity than a cognitive...

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    Eva S. Lefkowitz

    I write about professional development issues (in HDFS and other areas), and occasionally sexuality research or other work-related topics. 

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