Identity research in higher education: Commonalities, differences, and complementarities; Kristen A. Renn, Patrick Dilley, Matthew Prentice

Pg 191 – “…The very notion of identity means, as its Latin root idem betrays, being the same…”

~ I’ve wondered this for awhile…but what’s the same? Everyone’s identity is different.

Pg 191 – “Researchers today routinely use variation within such identity characteristics as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socio-economic background to investigate differences in student experiences and outcomes, faculty careers, and administrative development.”

~ Just a few of the different things people have made developmental models about, too.

Pg 191 – “Identity research in higher education comprises research on groups of individuals assumed to share some characteristics based on their role in the system (i.e. students, faculty, administrators), on some cross-role (192) category (i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation), or on some combination  (i.e. African American students, lesbian faculty).”

~ Identity research is so broken down, one has to know so much just to help one person. I feel like there should be an easier way.

Pg 192 – “The arc of identity research in higher education began therefore in “what we do”, shifted to exploring “who we are”, and continues today by asking how what we do is informed by who we are and how who we are is constructed by what we do.”

~ This is interesting, I think my theory is on the “who we are” side of this.

Pg 192 – “Identity research holds a central place in the literature about college students and, increasingly, faculty and administrators. It is used to describe, explain, and predict experiences and outcomes of individuals and identity-based groups of individuals in higher education (see Evans, Forney and Guido-DiBrito, 1998, pp. 16-17).”

~ Why we do research on identity. Important!

Pg 194 – “Early applications of concepts of identity within higher education research and practice were based on psychological and sociological theories and sorted individuals according to their roles in higher education: students, faculty, or administrators.”

~ History of studies of identity.

Pg 194 – “According to role theory, one’s social identity is constructed largely on the basis of the expectations that others hold, thus role theory views actors as human “thermostats”, constantly adjusting behavior to maintain equilibrium (Biddle, 1986).”

~ I agree with the constantly adjusting behavior, that’s what the working self-concept does. This forms the social identity because the working self-concept is what is actively working during social interactions.

Pg 195 – “The student development movement among student affairs administrators called for the creation of theories that might predict some orderly pattern of intellectual, personal, and social growth among a student population that is/was largely homogenous by institution, even while growing more heterogeneous nationally…”

~ We want things in order and categorized because it’s easier for us to understand. It is easier to do this when everything is very similar than when things keep on constantly changing.

Pg 195 – “Erikson’s psychosocial theories of development formed the foundation of research on college students and identity in this first season. Erikson (1968, 1980) demarcated eight steps of identity development over an individual’s lifespan, positing that each stage is characterized by a psychosocial crisis to be resolved by the individual.”

~ I like Erickson’s theory, except that it’s so overarching that it misses many of the tiny steps people take and only focuses on the huge steps.

Pg 195 – Goes into detail about stages.

Pg 196 – “How an individual deals with exploration or crisis of values and goals and commitment to values and goals determines his or her ego identity status.”

~ So how one works through mental challenges determines how they will develop and how their identity will be affected. I agree.

Pg 196 – About Chickering…“Within each vector are developmental challenges, which prompt responses (or non-responses) from students. While the actual prompts might differ, the challenges as a whole are common for all students; though understanding those responses one could understand the growth or development of individuals.”

~ Challenges are what prompt development and developmental response. I do agree with Chickering on this.

198 – “Astin’s involvement theory (1984) is mainly concerned with the factors that facilitate development, including the development of identity. He defined involvement as “the amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience” (Astin, 1984, p. 297).”

~ Good definition of involvement. Involvement opens people up to more and new social experiences that foster change because the person is in a situation that they do not have a lot of personal history to draw from so their working self-concept must work harder to find information to use, and thus the change is greater than those doing things more closely related to things they have done before.

Pg 198 – “Astin focused on what students do, postulating that what students become (or develop into) will follow from their behaviors; a foundational idea in identity research, involvement theory attempts to explain the processes rather than the outcome of the development.”

~ I think I’m doing this, too. I’m describing how development occurs (at least right now I am) and not really what happens after development (I’ll add a yet to this).

Pg 204 – “The first season’s crop of identity theory is marked by its emphasis on describing and explaining commonalities within the role groups of students, faculty, and administrators.”

~ What’s in the first section of this chapter.

Pg 205 – “Demographic changes, including racial and gender diversity in higher education, as well as political movements of African American women, gay men and lesbians, and people with disabilities, drew…to differences in experiences and outcomes for college students…not the white men from college-going families on whom Chickering and Perry had based their theories…”

~ Chickering and Perry’s theories are great, but based on white males, and thus, not really applicable to everyone that we work with.

Pg 206 – “Research involving college students and their identities falls into two categories: (1) the psychosocial development of various facets of identity and  (2) the ways in which those identities are studied in terms of inputs, experiences, and outcomes.”

~ I think I’m type one, because I’m looking into the psychosocial pieces of identity that work with student development.

Pg 210 – “Current work on racial and ethnic identity development in college students is built on the concept that race is socially constructed and examines the ways in which students construct racial and ethnic identity. Although social constructionism, the notion that interactions between people produce and reproduce social actions and identities, is relatively new to the study of student identity development, scholars in other fields have been discussing this idea of some time (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 1991, 1994). Social constrcutionist research on racial identity begins with the fact that there is no biological basis to the concept of race (see Lewontine, Rose, and Kamin, 1984); on campus, race and ethnicity are culturally (re)constructed through racialized encounters among students, faculty, and staff and through institutional organizations and structures that maintain a racialized environment.”

~ Good defintion of social constructionism. I think this is kind of the direction that I am beginning to take.

Pg 213 – “D’Augelli (1994a, 1994b) presented a lifespan model of lesbian, gay, and bisexual identity development based on his social constructionist view of sexual orientation.”

~ Social constructionism sounds interesting, there seem to be a lot of studies that use this perspective.

Pg 215 – Talks about students self-identifying as deaf

Pg 216 – “Her work mapped how self-expression and activity by the students concerning issues related to identity created conflicts on campus and within the student, fostering an activist identity.”

~ Self-expression creates conflict…I wonder what the rest of the study showed. Based on what I’ve read, I would assume that the reason that the activist students felt internal conflict was because they internalized the social environment in which they partake (the campus) and since the campus was in turmoil, so were they.

Pg 217 – “Root’s (1990) work on biracial…development formed the foundation for Reynolds and Pope’s…Multidimensional Identity Model (MIM). The MIM comprises two dimensions of identity development: (1) whether an individual choose to identify with more than one aspect of her or his identity, and (2) whether…individual actively or passively takes on one or more identities…(1995) explored the concept further, and McEwen (1996)…emerging model for multiple dimensions of identity development. Together Jones and McEwen (2000) proposed a fluid and dynamic…of multiple dimensions of identity to account for an individual’s…(personal attributes, personal characteristics, personal identity…well asw her or his context (family background, sociocultural…current experiences, career decisions and life planning) and social…(roles, such as student, and membership categories, such as…”

~ I like the fluid and dynamic dimensions for the identity development. I should look into this more…I might have notes about it somewhere.

Pg 220 – “Gender has often been used as a lens through which to study the history of higher education and the ways in which institutions shape and are shaped by students’ gender identities.”

~ Gender is used because it’s an easy way to divide things basically in half, since more women joined the ranks of the college-educated before other minorities.

Pg 222 – “MacLeod’s (1995) study of urban youth, for example, suggests that socioeconomic class structures the way that students perceive the benefits of education and understand their academic abilities; it also influences their ability to persist in school.”

~ This is so SIUC. I wish we used this study in housing.

Pg 224 – “Historically, the dominance of men in higher education created a culture that reflected socially accepted male behaviors. For example, researchers were supposed to be disinterested observers, an expectation grounded in “feminine” versus “masculine” characteristics. Thus the university researcher was rational, unemotional, objective, unbiased, and detached, rather than passionate (Bordo, 1987; Harding, 1991).”

~ Ugh, so true, but it still is true.

Pg 224 – “Another masculinized trait of faculty identity was individualism, which became the operational paradigm in the academy.”

~ This basically becomes an “every man for himself” sort of idea that kills working together and learning together.

Pg 225 – “Individualism and objectivity underlay the achievement…integral to academic identity.”

~ I think that individualism and objectivity kill academic integrity because they section everyone off so much that no one gets done what ought to be done.

Pg 225 – “Objectivity…that all were treated equally, and if some groups did not…place in academe, it merely reflected their inability to compe…competition (Wilson, 1942, pp. 205-206).”

~ The harsh side of objectivity, it has no compassion for people and doesn’t look towards the macro- and exosystems, but only towards the microsystems and things that are in the now and understandable in the now.

Idea of tree model

Pg 239 – Need last paragraph in section before “Blurring Genres.” It did not copy well, but looks to be informative about technology and identity.

Pg 242-243 – Good history of identity theories.

Understanding the identities of mixed-race college students through a developmental ecology lens; Kristen A. Renn

Pg 383 – “The identity development of mixed-race college students, those students whose parents are form more than one federally designated racial or ethnic category, does not appear to follow the path outlined in traditional models of racial identity development (e.g., Atkinson, Morten, & Sue, 1979; Atkinson & Sue, 1993; Cross, 1987, 1995; Helms, 1990, 1995).”

~ No one model fits everyone, that’s the flaw of most if not all identity theory models.

Pg 385 – “In the first phase of an ongoing study of mixed-race college students, I, too, found that students identified in four patterns similar to those found by Root (1996) and Wallace (2001), but that a significant number of them also identified in a fifth pattern, choosing to opt out of racial identity categories altogether by deconstructing them.”

~ Can you really opt out? I mean you can deconstruct them and not self-identify, but others will still identify you, regardless of you self-identifying or not.

Pg 387 – “Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1993) attempted in his model to account for the influences of individuals (person), their interactions with the environment and the responses they provoke form the environment (process), their interactions within immediate settings (context), and changing sociocultural influences on development (time). The elements of person, process, context, and time (PPCT) create a developmental environment unique to an individual, though organizations such as college and universities provide shared settings where the unique developmental environments of hundreds or thousands of students overlap significantly and are influenced by institutional policy and programs.”

~ For me the person = self; process = personal history; context = working self-concept; and time = development.

Pg 387 – “The Person component of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1993) ecology model can be considered to be the personal experiences and characteristics that students bring with them to higher education, including socially constructed identities (race, ethnicity, gender, abilities and disabilities, etc.), prior academic performance and academic self-concept, political and social ideologies, and family background (Renn & Arnold, in press).”

~ So this is basically my idea of the complete self.

Pg 387 – “Bronfenbrenner’s (1979. 1993) ecology model places the individual squarely at the center, with ever-more-distal developmental influences arrayed around him or her in a series of nested contexts called microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystems. The four levels of environmental analysis are useful in examining the processes and contexts of identity development. From each of the four levels, the individual receives (388) messages about identity, developmental forces and challenges, and resources or supports for addressing those challenges. The systems themselves interact in important ways, as well, to create congruent, non-conflicting settings; incongruent, conflict-free settings; or sometimes in between.”

~ So maybe there’s more than just one form of environment that can influence you. There’s close friends and family, general acquaintances, and random encounters, and non-social environment.

Pg 388 – Diagram of ecology model.

~ Interesting picture, it’s like the cross-section of a tree with little bubbles in it.

Pg 388 – “Microsystems are the face-to-face settings containing the individual.”

~ Social interactions = microsystems.

Pg 388 – “Microsystems for college students may include classrooms, laboratories, athletic teams, living situations, friendship groups, student organizations, on- or off-campus jobs, families of origin, partners or spouses, and possibly children.”

~ Again, all social interactions.

Pg 388 – “Mesosystems occur when two or more microsystems interact, and “special attention is focused on the synergistic effects created by the interaction of developmentally instigative or inhibitory features and process-(389)es present in each setting” (Bronfenbrenner, 1993, p. 22)

~So large social interactions where multiple roles conflict = mesosystems.

Pg 389 – “Students are embedded in interacting mesosytems of academic, social, and work life, and the mesosystems provide a variety of forces and resources that affect identity development.”

~ Mesosystems affect identity development because they cause conflict, which inevitably causes development.

Pg 389 – “Bronfenbrenner model (1979. 1993) holds that for development to occur, the individual must engage in increasingly complex actions and tasks. Both highly congruent and incongruent environments can provide settings for this increasing complexity, assuming that necessary forces and resources are present.”

~ So you cannot develop doing the same thing over and over again because it’s not bringing anything new into the mix, minus more time. Maybe time is also a complex task?

Pg 389 – “Exosystems exist when the individual’s developmental possibilities are influenced by a setting that does not contain her.”

~ So this would be outsider-influence. Things that a person cannot control.

Pg 389 – “Exosystem factors are largely unaccounted for in student development and college impact research, except as they affect a measurable variable attached to students (e.g., academic major, financial aid awarded, parents’ income).

~ Again, outsider forces.

Pg 389 – “Bronfenbrenner’s ecology model (1979, 1993) shines a light on these processes and asks what development influence they have on the student.”

~ The point of his model.

Pg 389 – “Macrosystems, the most distal levels of environmental influence, are also largely missing from traditional student development research. The macrosystem entails the

overarching patterns of micro-, meso- and exosystem characteristics of a given culture, subculture, or other extended social structure, with particular reference to the developmentally instigative belief systems, resources, hazards, lifestyles, opportunity structures, life course options, and patters of interchange that are embedded in such (390) overarching systems. (Bronfenbrenner, 1993, p. 25)
The macrosystem defines and is defined by patterns of developmental possibilities held in the face-to-face and second-degree influences of the micro-, meso, and exosystems, as well as the interactions between and among those systems. The macrosystem is dependent on time, place, and culture.”

~ So macrosystems are really the intangibles, like culture that affect a person, that they are connected to but have no direct influence over, and that is still an integral piece of them.

Pg 390 – “In various iterations of his model, Bronfenbrenner included or omitted time as an essential component.”

~ I think time is a huge part of development. The more time you have to self-reflect the more you can change.

Pg 390 – “Later he added the chronosystem as an element of the ecology model
The individual’s own developmental life course is seen as embedded in and powerfully shaped by conditions and events occurring during the historical period through which the person lives.
A major factor influencing the course and outcome of human development is the timing of biological and social transitions as they relate to the culturally defined age, role expectations, and opportunities occurring throughout the life course (1995, p. 641).
The chronosystem thus operates at a sociohistorical level to make possible certain kinds of developmentally instigative opportunities (e.g., legal desegregation of public institutions or the admission of women to military academies), as well as at an individual level according to the timing of life events in the microsystems (e.g., a divorce, move, or sibling birth).”

~ So the chronosystem is almost like measuring personal history and cultural history and making it have meaning in the greater identity of the individual or culture.

Pg 393 – “The face-to-face interactions in on-campus microsystems contained the “proximal processes” of student development, and sharply influenced students’ sense of where they fit in and how easily the could move from one identity-based space to another.”

~ So the closer something is to a person the more influential it is in determining the development of the person.

Pg 394 – “The competing or complementary message students received about racial identity across the mesosystem influenced both the degree of permeability of group boundaries and the desirability of identifying with various groups within the campus environment. In some cases, students were aware of the interactions within the mesosystem and the contribution to identity development…”

~ The more one understand’s the groups closest to one’s self, the more one can go in-between and understand going in-between groups.

Pg 395 – “Exosystem influences played a role in students’ awareness of racial identity. With few exceptions, students described the experience of having to “check one box only” on institutional forms, state, and federal forms designed and distributed by administrators outside of students’ immediate settings.”

~ Things beyond your control still affect your emotional status, which, in turn, affects other things.

Pg 396 – “The influence of the macrosystem on mixed-race identity is not as concretely described as are the micro-, meso-, or exosystem influences, but it was present in the developmental ecology of participants. Bronfenbrenner (1993) defined the macrosystem as consisting of “developmentally instigative belief systems, resources, hazards, lifestyles, opportunity structures, life course options and patterns of social interchange” (p. 25).”

~ This is almost just like everything else lumped in together.

Pg 400 – “Peer cultures with the greatest permeability of microsystem boundaries supported the greatest diversity of mixed-race student identities. The ability to move freely between and among academic and social microsystems enhanced students’ degree of exploration of multiple identity patterns, including the option not to identify along racial lines. Although the efficacy of attempts to alter student peer cultures is limited (see, for example, Dalton & Petrie, 1997), educators can take steps to enhance students’ ability to move between microsystems.”

~ The more people can change and understand changing their groups the more they understand other groups.