Identity Development Flashcards
Demo 1992 – The Self Concept Over Time
reviews research on the self-concept, which has a variety of meanings but is typically measured through self-esteem due to low-quality data. He walks through the different life stages as they relate to the self-concepts and proposes two main theoretical views: the self as stagnant or a “baseline” self that is dynamic across institutions and times. Swann and Hill (1982) designed an experiment where individuals defined themselves as either dominant or submissive, had a confederate confirm or refute their description, and watch people’s reactions. People who could confront the confederate tended to maintain their identity, whereas people who could not experiened considerable change in their self-description. The self tends to choose people who reinforce its image. Glenn (1980) proposed the self is malleable at younger ages and cements. The end has a call to action for life course theorists to use rich, longitduinal data to have a better idea of how the self develops and stays the same over time.
Erikson 1968 – Identity: Youth and Crisis
Identity formation then results from a selection and assimilation of childhood identifications which is dependent on the process by which society labels the newly forming person. Adolescence and young adults are hyperaware of others.
Heise and MacKinnon 2010 – Self, IDentity, and Social INstitutions
The propose that identities relate to one another and that we can empirically test those connections. They do so using Natural Language Processing and WordNet lexicon (a giant dataset full of words and meanings). They find institutions and roles do share connections. They also say their theory goes against Foucault post-modernism bc they find social structures within linguistic patterns
Kiley and Vaisey 2020 – Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data
se 183 items from the GSS to test whether two cultural theories (active updating and stable dispositions) are reflected across 3 waves of GSS data. Their 3 questions are: which of these cultural theories is more relevant, is there heterogeneity across age groups, and are these trends consistent across item types? They find more support for the stable disposition model, however active updating does occur for respondents who are younger than 30. The specific item also influences whether respondents change responses, as political items are influenced by the party in power and some salient topics (gay rights) change with national discourse. The theoretical implication of this paper is that social change tends to occur through cohort replacement, not active updating.
Martin and Ruble 2010 – Pattenrs of Gender Development
review research on how gender is developed throughout childhood. They find gendered patterns in behavior/recognition as early as 18 months. Children who knew and used gender labels were more likely than other children to show increases in gendeer-typed play with toys. Gender rigidity and exclusion practices fluctuated across ages and individuals. Children tend to hold other children accoutable to gender norms as early as age 3. Findings suggest that gender identity tends to remain stable from 2.5 to eight years old, but this research uses sthe same metric in the same situation. Martin and Ruble propse dynamic systems theory to suggest that perhaps gender performances will shift across contexts and situations. It’s still unclear whether these gendered behaviors are socially learned or innate, but I still think the evidence points to socially learned.
McHale, Courter, and Whiteman 2004 – Family Contexts of Gender Development in Childhood and Adolescence
review the literature on how family processes influence gender development. They break research up into parent and sibling influences. They propose researchers should focus on within-family dynamics. Maccoby and Jacklin (1979) found parents actually treat kids remarkably similar by gender. Work dynamics for parents can influence gendered upbringings. Single parent households tend to have different gendered upbringing than “nuclear famliy” households. Sibling dyads can predict gendered interactions.
Miles 2014 – Addressing the Problem of Cultural Anchoring: An Identity-Based Model of Culture in Action
tries to update Swidler’s cultural toolkit theory by proposing that identities (core selves) react consistently across situations. Identity activation relies on salience and situation. Salience functions in a hierarchy, with some identities much more salient than others. People seeks situations which correspond with their core identity.
Schröder, Hoey, and Rogers 2016 – Modeling Dynamic Identities and Uncertainty in Social Interactions: Bayesian Affect Control Theory
improve upon the affect control theory using a Bayesian model. “Affect control theory (ACT) proposes that the subtle alignment of interactional dynamics with the social order emerges from a motivation to maintain coherence between our situated impressions of actors and shared social knowledge about the meaning of actors’ identities.” The Bayesian model allows for three important improvements: actors need not be aware of another’s identity but instead can be predicted using a variety of distributions, actors need not only have one identity but can be represented by bi-modal or other kinds of distributions, BACT does not require actors have ANY preconceived notions of another’s identity. ACT has three axes: evaluation, potency, and activity (PEA). BACT models these. Python code to implement the process can be found here: http://bayesact.ca/
Stryker and Burke 2000 – The Past, Present, and Future of an Identity Theory
combine their two theoretical forces to propose how idenityt theory can advance. Stryker’s theory reflects how social structures shape identity, while Burke focuses on how centralized identities react to social structures. Identities are relatively stable, but the salience of identities depends on a particular situation. There’s a lot of similarity to Miles’ piece, as identities change if they cannot escape an uncomfortable situation. Identity should not be measured in self reports or experiments, rather ethnographic or observational work should test to see how multiple identity types interact simultaenously and the situations which lead identities to become salient.
Umaña-Taylor and Hill 2020 – Ethnic–Racial Socialization in the Family: A Decade’s Advance on Precursors and Outcomes
review 253 articles on racial-ethnic socialization in families. They go through four aspects of this socialization: cultural, prepartion for bias, promotion of mistrust, and egalitarianism. Cultural socialization tended to have positive effects. The others were mediated by aprental relaitonships and context (neighborhood) effects. High quality parent relationships can moderate the effects of discrimination. Resaerch on transnational (multiracial) families suggests that ignoring cultural differences leads to negative outcomes. Neighborhood context can influence how parents parent and ethnic-racial socialization.
