Identity in Context

In addition to gender, sexual, and racial-ethnic identities, developmental psychologists have researched multiple other areas of identity development. Some of the main areas include:

• Vocational identity. While adolescents in earlier generations envisioned themselves as working in a particular job, and often worked as an apprentice or part-time in such occupations as teenagers, this is rarely the case today. Vocational identity takes longer to develop, as most of today’s occupations require specific skills and knowledge that will require additional education or are acquired on the job itself. In addition, many of the jobs held by teens are not in occupations that most teens will seek as adults. Rapid changes in the nature of employment, and the fact that most adults will hold multiple jobs over their working lives, also suggest that this identity may be re-negotiated several times over the lifespan.
• Religious identity. Adolescence is a time when teens normatively question their participation in religious practices. At the same time, most teens end up adopting religious views that are similar to those of their families (Kim-Spoon et al., 2012). Most teens may question specific customs, practices, or ideas in the faith of their parents, but few completely reject the religion of their families.
• Political identity. The political ideology of teens is also influenced by their parents’ political beliefs. Although adolescents do tend to be more liberal than their elders, especially on social issues (Taylor, 2014), like other aspects of identity formation, adolescents’ interest in politics is predicted by their parents’ involvement and by current events (Stattin et al., 2017). As with other aspects of identity, political identity is fluid (Flanagan & Sherrod, 2010), but is often rooted in cultural attitudes they were exposed to during childhood (Rekker et al., 2017), but more recently is negotiated by access to political rhetoric on social media (Sajjad et al., 2017).
• Negative identity. A negative identity is the adoption of norms and values that are the opposite of one’s family and culture, and it is assumed to be one of the more problematic outcomes of identity development in young people (Hihara et al., 2019). Those with a negative identity hold dichotomous beliefs, and consequently divide the world into two categories (e.g., friend or foe, good or bad). Hihara et al. suggest that this may be because teens with a negative identity cannot integrate information and beliefs that exist in both their inner and outer world. In addition, those with a negative identity are generally hostile and cynical toward society, often because they do not trust the world around them. These beliefs may lead teens to engage in delinquent and criminal behavior and prevent them from engaging in more positive prosocial acts that could be beneficial to society
• Disability identity: Individuals with disabilities often integrate their disability into their sense of self. Gibson (2006) proposed a model of disability identity development in which children being with a passive awareness of their disability, continued by the realization that they have a disability during which time they may have negative feelings about themselves and their disabilities. In adulthood, individuals may accept their disability and rather than see it as a deficit, they integrate themselves into the able-bodied world.

Intersectionality

Social identities, or our social group memberships, shape our perceptions, interactions, and choice. Rather than personality traits or interests that make up your identity and sense of self, social identities describe the socially constructed groups that are present in specific environments within human societies. Our social identities are deeply connected to the social issues with which we may be engaging during our experiences.

Our multiple identities are connected in ways that uniquely shape our experience (Figure 11.9). They may overlap and interact with each other in complex ways. It is especially important to be aware of the social identities that are important to you and the complex ways in which your different identities intersect, and recognize how certain social identities may carry unearned advantages or disadvantages with them (Crenshaw, 1989).

The value of considering the interactions of a person’s identity domains is reflected in the intersectional approach to psychology. Civil rights advocate Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) coined the term intersectionality as a framework for understanding the way people simultaneously experience multiple aspects of their identity and their associated privileges or discrimination. For example, a young person with a disability may experience discrimination differently than an elderly person with a disability; women of color experience discrimination in a completely different way than men of color, or than white women; a Korean American adolescent’s life experience is different from a Biracial American adolescent’s.

Recognizing intersectional identity especially matters when one or more of a person’s identity domains are marginalized. Goffman (1963) asserts that people with stigmatized identities may feel burdened with the additional work of impression management, as they constantly try to offset negative stereotypes during their daily interactions. This attempt to manage other’s expectations across changing social contexts can inhibit a person’s perceived freedom of choice in their personal development and hamper their identity development (Erikson, 1968). When considered in context, identity development is just as much about who you do want to be (and be perceived as) as who you do not want to be (or be seen as; MClean et al., 2021; Marcus & Nurius, 1986). Identity development is not a single dimension, but a function of multiple identities that cannot be examined independently of each other. The historical and cultural contexts in which adolescents develop is a unique experience (Azmitia & Mansfield, 2021) that impacts identity development (Moffit et al., 2020) and mental health (Kern et al., 2020). Consider how the domains of ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, and religion, ability, intersect to create varied developmental experiences for people as they begin adulthood in a variety of social contexts.