19.4 Identity
The Human Development Teaching & Learning Group
Learning Objectives
- Summarize the four identity statuses Marcia posits
- In what domains does identity development take place?
What is identity?
One of the fascinating things about human psychology is our ability to reflect on ourselves as objects of our own thinking. We have seen how this ability makes it possible, starting in early childhood, to have thoughts about the self and to develop a self-concept that includes the “I” self and the “Me” self. In adolescence, our thinking about ourselves begins to involve more abstract categories and characteristics. Identity occurs in multiple areas of our life. These domains include academic, religious, ethnic, and social identity. Identity encompasses our personal preferences and characteristics and our group memberships.
Identity has been described as the individual’s answer to the question, “Who am I?” It has been depicted as a mental structure or representation of the self. But identity is only partially about who and what we are. It also includes what we do, what we like, and even how we feel. So identity is more than a mental model. It is full of meanings, emotions, desires, and goals. Identity is only partially stable, because it is also flexible across situations and malleable over time. Identity is somewhat like a thing and a lot like a process. It is our conceptualization of a network of associations and mental events that we use to think about and talk about ourselves and other people.
The multiple personal and social identities we hold play out in a variety of domains and situations in complex ways. One way in which we incorporate the social world into our views of ourselves is through our positionality in the social hierarchies in our society. This suggests that a useful approach to understanding this complexity and unraveling some of the interconnections is to examine identity in terms of the intersections between aspects of our positions, such as where we fall in terms of race, gender, and class (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991). From this perspective, it is the intersection among our positions on these hierarchies (as well as others, such as immigrant and disability status, age, and so on) that influence our experiences (e.g., the conditions under which we live, the opportunities we enjoy, and how we are treated) as well as how we see ourselves (based in part on society’s messages about our value). For example, the experiences of black women may be different in many ways from those of black men. And the experiences of rich black women will be different from those lower in socioeconomic status. These experiences involve overlapping and interacting systems of social structure and meaning, where layers of identity are not just additive or compounded, but instead create specific niches that are emergent and unique (as well as changing as society’s prejudices and hierarchies shift). The intersectionality approach has been applied in research