Poster #213 - "I am…": Examining Adolescents’ Identity Content through a Sentence-Completion Task

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Identity development is a central task of adolescence given the biological, cognitive, and social changes during this time (Côté, 2009). Having a sense of identity is good for adolescents and relates to a myriad of positive outcomes (for review see Meeus, 2011). However, as Galliher et al. (2017) note, nearly all developmental research on identity has focused on identity process (such as exploration and commitment; Syed et al., 2013), with less focus on identity content (e.g., what the young person’s identity is about). Content is important to consider because it is not “developmentally invariant” (Galliher et al., 2017), and it is socially and personally relevant. For example, two adolescents may engage in similar amounts of exploration, and both may form strong commitments – but one commitment may be to prosocial content (e.g., being a teacher), whereas the other may be to content that is clearly not prosocial (e.g., being a neo-Nazi). Although the importance of identity content is compelling, how to capture it is less clear (e.g., McLean et al., 2016). Interviews may be effective but may be too intensive and costly for larger samples. We are investigating an alternative method to gather information about identity content: a shortened version of the Twenty Statements Test (TST; Rees & Nicholson, 2004). Here, we report our preliminary analyses of whether the TST could be used to capture identity content and, if so, what kind of information could be gleaned from this method.

Data were drawn from a larger study of the role of important relationships and individual characteristics in the moral development of adolescents. Participants included 592 adolescents from New England (Mage= 15.15 years, 58% girls, 60% identified as White). Participants were prompted with: Please give ten different statements to answer the question, “Who am I?” Give these answers as if you were saying them to yourself, not to somebody else.” Participants were given ten prompts, starting with “I am” and then a blank space.

To systematically examine responses, a team of coders developed descriptive codes based on explorations of the responses. Preliminary results, based on the coding of 75 sets of responses, suggest that we can code the content of responses (i.e., what they wrote about) as well as the structure (i.e., how they wrote about it). Within those two types of codes, we noted subcategories: four content codes (personal characteristics¸ social categories, relationships, and self-evaluation) and three structure codes (qualifiers, tense, and conditionals). We further identified variations within these three main structure codes. Please see Tables 1 and 2 for codes with example statements. Statements could be coded with multiple categories (e.g., with both content and structure codes, with two content codes). Our findings suggest that the TST may be a useful way to capture information about adolescents’ identity content. In ongoing analyses, we will finalize the coding scheme, code the responses of the entire sample, compute descriptive statistics, and investigate relations among content and structure codes and other characteristics such as contributions to society (e.g., engagement in social justice activism).

Authors

• Mary H Buckingham, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara K Johnson, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katharine Odjakjian, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michelle B Weiner, Tufts University
  Presenting Author