thesis on identity

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Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity; the question of whether the identity relation is, or is similar to, the composition relation; and the notion of vague identity. A radical position, advocated by Peter Geach, is that these debates, as usually conducted, are void for lack of a subject matter: the notion of absolute identity they presuppose has no application; there is only relative identity. Another increasingly popular view is the one advocated by David Lewis: although the debates make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. Identity is an utterly unproblematic notion. What there are, are genuine problems which can be stated using the language of identity. But since these can be restated without the language of identity they are not problems about identity. (For example, it is a puzzle, an aspect of the so-called “problem of personal identity”, whether the same person can have different bodies at different times. But this is just the puzzle whether a person can have different bodies at different times. So since it can be stated without the language of personal “identity”, it is not a problem about personal identity , but about personhood.) This article provides an overview of the topics indicated above, some assessment of the debates and suggestions for further reading.

1. Introduction

2. the logic of identity, 3. relative identity, 4. criteria of identity, 5. identity over time, 6. identity across possible worlds, 7. contingent identity, 8. composition as identity, 9. vague identity, 10. are there philosophical problems about identity, other internet resources, related entries.

To say that things are identical is to say that they are the same. “Identity” and “sameness” mean the same; their meanings are identical. However, they have more than one meaning. A distinction is customarily drawn between qualitative and numerical identity or sameness. Things with qualitative identity share properties, so things can be more or less qualitatively identical. Poodles and Great Danes are qualitatively identical because they share the property of being a dog, and such properties as go along with that, but two poodles will (very likely) have greater qualitative identity. Numerical identity requires absolute, or total, qualitative identity, and can only hold between a thing and itself. Its name implies the controversial view that it is the only identity relation in accordance with which we can properly count (or number) things: x and y are to be properly counted as one just in case they are numerically identical (Geach 1973).

Numerical identity is our topic. As noted, it is at the centre of several philosophical debates, but to many seems in itself wholly unproblematic, for it is just that relation everything has to itself and nothing else – and what could be less problematic than that? Moreover, if the notion is problematic it is difficult to see how the problems could be resolved, since it is difficult to see how a thinker could have the conceptual resources with which to explain the concept of identity whilst lacking that concept itself. The basicness of the notion of identity in our conceptual scheme, and, in particular, the link between identity and quantification has been particularly noted by Quine (1964).

Numerical identity can be characterised, as just done, as the relation everything has to itself and to nothing else. But this is circular, since “nothing else” just means “no numerically non-identical thing”. It can be defined, equally circularly (because quantifying over all equivalence relations including itself), as the smallest equivalence relation (an equivalence relation being one which is reflexive, symmetric and transitive, for example, having the same shape). Other circular definitions are available. Usually it is defined as the equivalence relation (or: the reflexive relation) satisfying Leibniz’s Law, the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals, that if x is identical with y then everything true of x is true of y . Intuitively this is right, but only picks out identity uniquely if “what is true of x ” is understood to include “being identical with x ”; otherwise it is too weak. Circularity is thus not avoided. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s Law appears to be crucial to our understanding of identity, and, more particularly, to our understanding of distinctness: we exhibit our commitment to it whenever we infer from “ Fa ” and “ Not-Fb ” that a is not identical with b . Strictly, what is being employed in such inferences is the contrapositive of Leibniz’s Law (if something true of a is false of b , a is not identical with b ), which some (in the context of the discussion of vague identity) have questioned, but it appears as indispensable to our grip on the concept of identity as Leibniz’s Law itself.

The converse of Leibniz’s Law, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, that if everything true of x is true of y , x is identical with y , is correspondingly trivial if “what is true of x ” is understood to include “being identical with x ” (as required if Leibniz’s Law is to characterise identity uniquely among equivalence relations). But often it is read with “what is true of x ” restricted, e.g., to qualitative, non-relational, properties of x . It then becomes philosophically controversial. Thus it is debated whether a symmetrical universe is possible, e.g., a universe containing two qualitatively indistinguishable spheres and nothing else (Black 1952).

Leibniz’s Law has itself been subject to controversy in the sense that the correct explanation of apparent counter-examples has been debated. Leibniz’s Law must be clearly distinguished from the substitutivity principle, that if “ a ” and “ b ” are codesignators (if “ a = b ” is a true sentence of English) they are everywhere substitutable salva veritate . This principle is trivially false. “Hesperus” contains eight letters, “Phosphorus” contains ten, but Hesperus (the Evening Star) is Phosphorus (the Morning Star). Again, despite the identity, it is informative to be told that Hesperus is Phosphorus, but not to be told that Hesperus is Hesperus (“On Sense and Reference” in Frege 1969). Giorgione was so-called because of his size, Barbarelli was not, but Giorgione was Barbarelli (Quine, “Reference and Modality”, in 1963) . It is a necessary truth that 9 is greater than 7, it is not a necessary truth that the number of planets is greater than 7, although 9 is the number of planets. The explanation of the failure of the substitutivity principle can differ from case to case. In the first example, it is plausible to say that “‘Hesperus’ contains eight letters” is not about Hesperus, but about the name, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis , of “‘Phosphorus’ contains ten letters”. Thus the names do not have the same referents in the identity statement and the predications. In the Giorgione/Barbarelli example this seems less plausible. Here the correct explanation is plausibly that “is so-called because of his size” expresses different properties depending on the name it is attached to, and so expresses the property of being called “Barbarelli” because of his size when attached to “Barbarelli” and being called “Giorgione” because of his size when attached to “Giorgione”. It is more controversial how to explain the Hesperus/Phosphorus and 9/the number of planets examples. Frege’s own explanation of the former was to assimilate it to the “Hesperus”/“Phosphorus” case: in “It is informative to be told that Hesperus is Phosphorus” the names do not stand for their customary referent but for their senses. A Fregean explanation of the 9/number of planets example may also be offered: “it is necessary that” creates a context in which numerical designators stand for senses rather than numbers.

For present purposes the important point to recognise is that, however these counter-examples to the substitutivity principle are explained, they are not counter-examples to Leibniz’s Law, which says nothing about substitutivity of codesignators in any language.

The view of identity just put forward (henceforth “the classical view”) characterises it as the equivalence relation which everything has to itself and to nothing else and which satisfies Leibniz’s Law. These formal properties ensure that, within any theory expressible by means of a fixed stock of one- or many-place predicates, quantifiers and truth-functional connectives, any two predicates which can be regarded as expressing identity (i.e., any predicates satisfying the two schemata “for all x , Rxx ” and “for all x , for all y , Rxy → ( Fx → Fy )” for any one-place predicate in place of “ F ”) will be extensionally equivalent. They do not, however, ensure that any two-place predicate does express identity within a particular theory, for it may simply be that the descriptive resources of the theory are insufficiently rich to distinguish items between which the equivalence relation expressed by the predicate holds (“Identity” in Geach 1972).

Following Geach, call a two-place predicate with these properties in a theory an “I-predicate” in that theory. Relative to another, richer, theory the same predicate, interpreted in the same way, may not be an I-predicate. If so it will not, and did not even in the poorer theory, express identity. For example, “having the same income as” will be an I-predicate in a theory in which persons with the same income are indistinguishable, but not in a richer theory.

Quine (1950) has suggested that when a predicate is an I-predicate in a theory only because the language in which the theory is expressed does not allow one to distinguish items between which it holds, one can reinterpret the sentences of the theory so that the I-predicate in the newly interpreted theory does express identity. Every sentence will have just the same truth-conditions under the new interpretation and the old, but the references of its subsentential parts will be different. Thus, Quine suggests, if one has a language in which one speaks of persons and in which persons of the same income are indistinguishable the predicates of the language may be reinterpreted so that the predicate which previously expressed having the same income comes now to express identity. The universe of discourse now consists of income groups, not people. The extensions of the monadic predicates are classes of income groups, and, in general, the extension of an n -place predicate is a class of n -member sequences of income groups (Quine 1963: 65–79). Any two-place predicate expressing an equivalence relation could be an I-predicate relative to some sufficiently impoverished theory, and Quine’s suggestion will be applicable to any such predicate if it is applicable at all.

But it remains that it is not guaranteed that a two-place predicate that is an I-predicate in the theory to which it belongs expresses identity. In fact, no condition can be stated in a first-order language for a predicate to express identity, rather than mere indiscernibility by the resources of the language. However, in a second-order language, in which quantification over all properties (not just those for which the language contains predicates) is possible and Leibniz’s Law is therefore statable, identity can be uniquely characterised. Identity is thus not first-order, but only second-order definable.

This situation provides the basis for Geach’s radical contention that the notion of absolute identity has no application and that there is only relative identity. This section contains a brief discussion of Geach’s complex view. (For more details see the entry on relative identity , Deutsch 1997, Dummett 1981 and 1991, Hawthorne 2003 and Noonan 2017.) Geach maintains that since no criterion can be given by which a predicate expressing an I-predicate may be determined to express, not merely indiscernibility relative to the language to which it belongs, but also absolute indiscernibility, we should jettison the classical notion of identity (1991). He dismisses the possibility of defining identity in a second-order language on the ground of the paradoxical nature of unrestricted quantification over properties and aims his fire particularly at Quine’s proposal that an I-predicate in a first-order theory may always be interpreted as expressing absolute identity (even if such an interpretation is not required ). Geach objects that Quine’s suggestion leads to a “Baroque Meinongian ontology” and is inconsistent with Quine’s own expressed preference for “desert landscapes” (“Identity” in Geach 1972: 245).

We may usefully state Geach’s thesis using the terminology of absolute and relative equivalence relations. Let us say that an equivalence relation R is absolute if and only if, if x stands in it to y , there cannot be some other equivalence relation S , holding between anything and either x or y , but not holding between x and y . If an equivalence relation is not absolute it is relative. Classical identity is an absolute equivalence relation. Geach’s main contention is that any expression for an absolute equivalence relation in any possible language will have the null class as its extension, and so there can be no expression for classical identity in any possible language. This is the thesis he argues against Quine.

Geach also maintains the sortal relativity of identity statements, that “ x is the same A as y ” does not “split up” into “ x is an A and y is an A and x = y ”. More precisely stated, what Geach denies is that whenever a term “ A ” is interpretable as a sortal term in a language L (a term which makes (independent) sense following “the same”) the expression (interpretable as) “ x is the same A as y ” in language L will be satisfied by a pair < x , y > only if the I-predicate of L is satisfied by < x , y >. Geach’s thesis of the sortal relativity of identity thus neither entails nor is entailed by his thesis of the inexpressibility of identity. It is the sortal relativity thesis that is the central issue between Geach and Wiggins (1967 and 1980). It entails that a relation expressible in the form “ x is the same A as y ” in a language L , where “ A ” is a sortal term in L , need not entail indiscernibility even by the resources of L .

Geach’s argument against Quine exists in two versions, an earlier and a later.

In its earlier version the argument is merely that following Quine’s suggestion to interpret a language in which some expression is an I-predicate so that the I-predicate expresses classical identity sins against a highly intuitive methodological programme enunciated by Quine himself, namely that as our knowledge expands we should unhesitatingly expand our ideology, our stock of predicables, but should be much more wary about altering our ontology, the interpretation of our bound name variables (1972: 243).

Geach’s argument is that in view of the mere possibility of carving out of a language L , in which the relational expressions, E 1 , E 2 , E 3 … are not I-predicates, sub-languages L 1 , L 2 , L 3 … in which these expressions are I-predicates, if Quine’s suggested proposal of reinterpretation is possible for each L n , the user of L will be committed to any number of entities not quantified over in L , namely, for each L n , those entities for which the I-predicate of L n ( E n ) gives a criterion of absolute identity. This will be so because any sentence of L will retain its truth conditions in any L n to which it belongs, reinterpreted as Quine proposes, but “of course, it is flatly inconsistent to say that as a member of a large theory a sentence retains its truth-conditions but not its ontological commitment” (1973:299).

The crucial premiss of this argument is thus that sameness of truth-conditions entails sameness of ontological commitment. But this is not true. The ontological commitments of a theory (according to Quine, whose notion this is) are those entities that must lie within the domain of quantification of the theory if the theory is to be true; or, the entities the predicates of the theory have to be true of if the theory is to be true. A theory is not ontologically committed, we may say, to whatever has to be in the universe for it to be true, but only to whatever has to be in its universe for it to be true. Thus there is no argument from sameness of truth-conditions to sameness of ontological commitments.

The later version of Geach’s argument needs a different response. The difference between the earlier version and the later one is that in the later (to be found in Geach 1973) Geach’s claim is not merely that Quine’s thesis about possible reinterpretation has a consequence which is unpalatable, but that it leads to an out-and-out logical absurdity, the existence of what he calls “absolute surmen” (entities for which having the same surname constitutes a criterion of absolute identity, i.e., entails indiscernibility in all respects). Because Geach is now making this stronger claim, the objection that his argument depends upon the incorrect assumption that sameness of truth-conditions entails sameness of ontological commitment is no longer relevant. In order to make out his case Geach has to establish just two points. First, that there are sentences of English supplemented by the predicate “is the same surman as” (explained to mean “is a man and has the same surname as”), which are evidently true and which, considered as sentences of that fragment of English in which “is the same surman as” is an I-predicate, when this is interpreted in the way Quine suggests, can be true only if absolute surmen exist. And secondly, that the existence of absolute surmen is absurd.

But in the end Geach fails to establish these two points. Quine would say that, for the fragment of English in question, the domain of the variables can be considered to consist of classes of men with the same surname and the predicates interpreted as holding of such classes. Thus, the predicate “is the same surman as” will no longer be true of pairs of men if we adopt Quine’s suggestion (I am writing, remember in English, not in the fragment of English under discussion), but rather of pairs of classes of men with the same surname – these then will be Geach’s “absolute surmen”. Now, Geach attempts to rule this out by the argument that “whatever is a surman is by definition a man.” But this argument fails. The predicate “is a man” will also be in the language-fragment in which “is the same surman as” is the I-predicate; and so it, too, will, be reinterpreted, if we follow Quine’s suggestion, as holding of classes of men with the same surname. Thus the sentence “Whatever is a surman is a man” will be true in the language fragment interpreted in Quine’s way, just as it is in English as a whole. What will not be true, however, is that whatever the predicate “is a surman” is true of, as it occurs in the language-fragment reinterpreted in Quine’s way , is a thing of which “is a man”, as it occurs in English as a whole , is true of. But Geach has no right to demand that this should be the case. Even so, this demand can be met. For the domain of the interpretation of the language fragment in which “is the same surman as” is the I-predicate can, in fact, be taken to consist of men, namely, to be a class containing exactly one representative man for each class of men with the same surname. Thus, as Geach says, absolute surmen will be just some among men (1973, 100). Geach goes on, “there will, for example, be just one surman with the surname ‘Jones’, but if this is an absolute surman, and he is a certain man, then which of the Jones boys is he?” But this question, which is, of course, only answerable using predicates which belong to the part of English not included in the language fragment in which “is the same surman as” is the I-predicate, is not an impossible one to answer. It is merely that the answer will depend upon the particular interpretation that the language fragment has, in fact, been given. Geach is, therefore not entitled to go on, “Surely we have run into an absurdity.” It thus seems that his argument for the non-existence of absolute identity fails.

Geach’s argument for his second thesis, that of the sortal relativity of identity, is that it provides the best solution to a variety of well known puzzles about identity and counting at a time and over time. The most well known puzzle is that of the cat on the mat, which comes in two versions.

The first version goes like this. (Wiggins 1968 contains the first appearance of this version in present-day philosophical literature; an equivalent puzzle is that of Dion and Theon, see Burke 1995.) Suppose a cat, Tibbles, is sitting on a mat. Now consider that portion of Tibbles that includes everything except its tail – its “tail complement” – and call it “Tib”. Tib is smaller than Tibbles so they are not identical. But what if we now amputate the cat’s tail? (A time-reversed, or “growing”, version can be considered in which a tail is grafted on to a tailless cat; the same responses considered below will be available, but may differ in relative plausibility.) Tibbles and Tib will now coincide. If Tibbles is still a cat, it is hard to see by what criterion one could deny that Tib is a cat. Yet they are distinct individuals, since they have different histories. But there is just one cat on the mat. So they cannot be distinct cats. They must be the same cat, even though they are distinct individuals; and so identity under the sortal concept cat must be a relative identity relation.

The second version (presented in Geach 1980, compare Unger 1980) goes as follows. Tibbles is sitting on the mat and is the only cat sitting on the mat. But Tibbles has at least 1,000 hairs. Geach continues:

Now let c be the largest continuous mass of feline tissue on the mat. Then for any of our 1,000 cat-hairs, say h n , there is a proper part c n of c which contains precisely all of c except the hair h n ; and every such part c n differs in a describable way both from any other such part say c m , and from c as a whole. Moreover, fuzzy as the concept cat may be, it is clear that not only is c a cat, but also any part c n is a cat: c n would clearly be a cat were the hair h n to be plucked out, and we cannot reasonably suppose that plucking out a hair generates a cat, so c n must already have been a cat. (Geach 1980, 215)

The conclusion, of course, is the same as in the previous version of the argument: there is only one cat on the mat so all the distinct entities that qualify as cats must be the same cat.

This version of the argument can be resisted by insisting that the concept of a cat is maximal, i.e. no proper part of a cat is a cat. The first version may be resisted in a variety of ways. Some deny the existence of the tail-complement at all (van Inwagen 1981, Olson 1995); others deny that the tail-complement survives the amputation (Burke 1995). Another possibility is to say that certain of the historical and/or modal predicates possessed by Tibbles and not Tib are essential to being a cat, so that Tib is not (predicatively) a cat (Wiggins 1980). Again, it can be accepted that both Tib and Tibbles are cats, but deny that in counting them as one we are counting by identity, rather, we are counting by “almost identity” (Lewis 1993). Another possibility is to accept that both Tib and Tibbles are cats, but deny that they are distinct: rather “Tib” and “Tibbles” are two names of the same cat-stage (Hawley 2001, Sider 2001).

There is, then, no very compelling argument for Geach’s sortal relativity thesis to be based on such examples, given the variety of responses available, some of which will be returned to below. On the other hand, no alternative solution to the puzzle of the cat on the mat stands out as clearly superior to the rest, or clearly superior to the sortal relativity thesis as a solution. We should conclude that this component of Geach’s position, though not proven, is not refuted either, and, possibly, that the linguistic data provide no basis for a decision for or against.

A notion that Geach deploys extensively, and which is also in common use by his opponents, is that of a criterion of identity, a standard by which identity is to be judged. This section will attempt to untangle some of the complexities this notion involves.

The notion of a criterion of identity was introduced into philosophical terminology by Frege (1884) and strongly emphasised by Wittgenstein (1958). Exactly how it is to be interpreted and the extent of its applicability are still matters of debate.

A considerable obstacle to understanding contemporary philosophical usage of the term, however, is that the notion does not seem to be a unitary one. In the case of abstract objects (the case discussed by Frege) the criterion of identity for F s is thought of as an equivalence relation holding between objects distinct from F s. Thus the criterion of identity for directions is parallelism of lines , that is, the direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b if and only if line a is parallel to line b . The criterion of identity for numbers is equinumerosity of concepts , that is, the number of A s is identical with the number of B s if and only if there are exactly as many A s as B s. The relation between the criterion of identity for F s and the criterion of application for the concept F (the standard for the application of the concept to an individual) is then said by some (Wright and Hale 2001) to be that to be an F is just to be something for which questions of identity and distinctness are to settled by appeal to the criterion of identity for F s. (Thus, when Frege went on to give an explicit definition of numbers as extensions of concepts he appealed to it only to deduce what has come to be called Hume’s Principle – his statement of his criterion of identity for numbers in terms of equinumerosity of concepts, and emphasised that he regarded the appeal to extensions as inessential.) In the case of concrete objects, however, things seem to stand differently. Often the criterion of identity for a concrete object of type F is said to be a relation R such that for any F s, x and y , x = y if and only if Rxy . In this case the criterion of identity for F s is not stated as a relation between entities distinct from F s and the criterion of identity cannot plausibly be thought of as determining the criterion of application. Another example of the lack of uniformity in the notion of a criterion of identity in contemporary philosophy is, in the case of concrete objects, a distinction customarily made between a criterion of diachronic identity and a criterion of synchronic identity; the former taking the form “ x is at t the same F as y is at t ′ if and only if…”, where what fills the gap is some statement of a relation holding between objects x and y and times t and t ′. (In the case of persons, for example, a candidate criterion of diachronic identity is: x is at t the same person as y is at t ′ if and only if x at t is psychologically continuous with y at t ′.) A criterion of synchronic identity, by contrast, will typically specify how the parts of an F -thing existing at a time must be related, or how one F at a time is marked off from another.

One way of bringing system into the discussion of criteria of identity is to make use of the distinction between one-level and two-level criteria of identity (Williamson 1990, Lowe 2012). The Fregean criteria of identity for directions and numbers are two-level. The objects for which the criterion is given are distinct from, and can be pictured as at a higher level than, the entities between which the relation specified holds. A two-level criterion for the F s takes the form (restricting ourselves to examples in which the criterial relation holds between objects):

If x is a G and y is a G then d ( x ) = d ( y ) iff Rxy

e.g., If x and y are lines then the direction of x is identical with the direction of y iff x and y are parallel.

A two-level criterion of identity is thus in the first place an implicit definition of a function “ d ( )” (e.g., “the direction of”) in terms of which the sortal predicate “is an F ” can be defined (“is a direction” can be defined as “is the direction of some line”). Consistently with the two-level criterion of identity stated several distinct functions may be the reference of the functor “ d ”. Hence, as emphasised by Lowe (1997: section 6), two-level criteria of identity are neither definitions of identity, nor of identity restricted to a certain sort (for identity is universal), nor even of the sortal terms denoting the sorts for which they provide criteria. They merely constrain, but not to uniqueness, the possible referents of the functor “d” they implicitly define and they thus give a merely necessary condition for falling under the sortal predicate “is an F ” (where “ x is an F ” is explained to mean “for some y , x is identical with d ( y )”).

On the other hand, the criterion of identity for sets given by the Axiom of Extensionality (sets are the same iff they have the same members), unlike the criterion of identity for numbers given by Hume’s Principle, and Davidson’s criterion of event identity (events are the same iff they have the same causes and effects (“The Individuation of Events” in his 1980)) are one-level: the objects for which the criterion of identity is stated are the same as those between which the criterial relation obtains. In general, a one-level criterion for objects of sort F takes the form:

If x is an F and y is an F then x = y iff Rxy

Not all criteria of identity can be two-level (on pain of infinite regress), and it is tempting to think that the distinction between objects for which a two-level criterion is possible and those for which only a one-level criterion is possible coincides with that between abstract and concrete objects (and so, that a two-level criterion for sets must be possible).

However, a more general application of the two-level notion is possible. In fact, it can be applied to any type of object K , such that the criterion of identity for K s can be thought of as an equivalence relation between a distinct type of object, K *s, but some such objects may intuitively be regarded as concrete.

How general this makes its application is a matter of controversy. In particular, if persisting things are thought of as composed of (instantaneous) temporal parts (see discussion below), the problem of supplying a diachronic criterion of identity for persisting concrete objects can be regarded as the problem of providing a two-level criterion. But if persisting things are not thought of in this way then not all persisting things can be provided with two-level criteria. (Though some can. For example, it is quite plausible that the criterion of identity over time for persons should be thought of as given by a relation between bodies.)

As noted by Lowe (1997) and Wright and Hale (2001) any two-level criterion can be restated in a one-level form (though, of course, not conversely). For example, to say that the direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b if and only if line a is parallel to line b is to say that directions are the same if and only if the lines they are of are parallel, which is the form of a one-level criterion. A way of unifying the various different ways of talking of criteria of identity is thus to take as the paradigmatic form of a statement of a criterion of identity a statement of the form: for any x , for any y , if x is an F and y is an F then x = y if and only if Rxy (Lowe 1989, 1997).

If the notion is interpreted in this way then the relation between the criterion of identity and the criterion of application will be that of one-way determination. The criterion of identity will be determined by, but not determine, the criterion of application.

For, in general, a one-level criterion of identity for F s as explained above is equivalent to the conjunction of:

If x is an F then Rxx

If x is an F then if y is an F and Rxy then x = y

Each of these gives a merely necessary condition for being an F . And the second says something about F s which is not true of everything only if “ Rxy ” does not entail “ x = y ”

Together these are equivalent to the proposition that every F is the F “ R -related” to it. By its form this states a merely necessary condition for being a thing of sort “ F ”. The one-level criterion of identity thus again merely specifies a necessary condition of being an object of sort “ F ”.

Hence, once the necessary and sufficient conditions of being an “ F ” are laid down, no further stipulation is required of a criterion of “ F ”-identity, whether one-level or two-level.

This conclusion is, of course, in agreement with Lewis’s view that there are no genuine problems about identity as such (Lewis 1986, Ch. 4), but it is in tension with the thought that sortal concepts, as distinct from adjectival concepts, are to be characterised by their involvement of criteria of identity as well as criteria of application.

A conception of identity criteria which allows this characterisation of the notion of a sortal concept, and which has so far not been mentioned, is that of Dummett (1981). Dummett denies that a criterion of identity must always be regarded as a criterion of identity for a type of object . There is a basic level, he suggests, at which what a criterion of identity is a criterion of, is the truth of a statement in which no objects are referred to. Such a statement can be expressed using demonstratives and pointing gestures, for instance, by saying “This is the same cat as that”, pointing first to a head and then a tail. In such a statement, which he calls a statement of identification, in Dummett’s view, there need be no reference to objects made by the use of the demonstratives, any more than reference is made to any object in a feature-placing sentence like “It’s hot here”. A statement of identification is merely, as it were, a feature-placing relational statement, like “This is darker than that”. A grasp of a sortal concept F involves both grasp of the truth-conditions of such statements of identification involving “ F ” and also grasp of the truth-conditions of what Dummett calls “crude predications” involving “ F ”, statements of the form “this is F ”, in which the demonstrative again does not serve to refer to any object. Adjectival terms, which have only a criterion of application and no criterion of identity, are ones which have a use in such crude predications, but no use in statements of identification. Sortal terms, as just noted, have a use in both contexts, and sortal terms may share their criteria of application but differ in their criteria of identity since grasp of the truth-conditions of the crude predication “This is F ” does not determine grasp of the truth-conditions of the statement of identification “This is the same F as that” (thus I can know when it is right to say “This is a book” without knowing when it is right to say “This is the same book as that”).

On Dummett’s account, then, it may be possible to accept that whenever a criterion of identity for a type of object is to be given it must be (expressible as) a two-level criterion, which implicitly defines a functor. Essentially one-level criteria (one-level criteria not expressible in a two-level form) are redundant, determined by specifications of necessary and sufficient conditions for being objects of the sorts in question.

As noted in the last section, another source of apparent disunity in the concept of a criterion of identity is the distinction made between synchronic criteria of identity and diachronic criteria of identity. Criteria of identity can be employed synchronically, as in the examples just given, to determine whether two coexistent objects are parts of the same object of a sort, or diachronically, to determine identity over time. But as Lowe notes (2012: 137), it is an error to suppose that diachronic identity and synchronic identity are different kinds of identity and so demand different kinds of identity criteria. What then is a criterion of identity over time?

Identity over time is itself a controversial notion, however, because time involves change. Heraclitus argued that one could not bathe in the same river twice because new waters were ever flowing in. Hume argued that identity over time was a fiction we substitute for a collection of related objects. Such views can be seen as based on a misunderstanding of Leibniz’s Law: if a thing changes something is true of it at the later time that is not true of it at the earlier, so it is not the same. The answer is that what is true of it at the later time is, say, “being muddy at the later time”, which was always true of it; similarly, what is true of it at the earlier time, suitably expressed, remains true of it. But the question remains how to characterise identity through time and across change given that there is such a thing.

One topic which has always loomed large in this debate has been the issue (in the terminology of Lewis 1986, Ch. 4) of perdurance versus endurance . (Others, for which there is no space for discussion here, include the debate over Ship of Theseus and reduplication or fission problems and associated issues about “best candidate” or “no rival candidate” accounts of identity over time, and the debate over Humean supervenience – see articles on relative identity, personal identity, Hawley 2001 and Sider 2001.)

According to one view, material objects persist by having temporal parts or stages, which exist at different times and are to be distinguished by the times at which they exist – this is known as the view that material objects perdure. Other philosophers deny that this is so; according to them, when a material object exists at different times, it is wholly present at those times, for it has no temporal parts, but only spatial parts, which likewise are wholly present at the different times they exist. This is known as the view that material objects endure.

Perdurance theorists, as Quine puts it, reject the point of view inherent in the tenses of our natural language. From that point of view persisting things endure and change through time, but do not extend through time, but only through space. Thus persisting things are to be sharply distinguished from events or processes, which precisely do extend through time. One way of describing the position of the perdurance theorist, then, is to say that he denies the existence of a distinct ontological category of persisting things , or substances. Thus, Quine writes, “physical objects, conceived thus four-dimensionally in space-time, are not to be distinguished from events, or, in the concrete sense of the term, processes. Each comprises simply the content, however heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered” (1960:171).

In recent controversy two arguments have been at the centre of the endurance/perdurance debate, one employed by perdurance theorists and the other by endurance theorists (for other arguments and issues see the separate article on temporal parts, Hawley 2001 and Sider 2001).

An argument for perdurance which has been hotly debated is due to David Lewis (1986). If perdurance is rejected, the ascription of dated or tensed properties to objects must be regarded as assertions of irreducible relations between objects and times. If Tabby is fat on Monday, that is a relation between Tabby and Monday, and if perdurance is rejected it is an irreducible relation between Tabby and Monday. According to perdurance theory, however, while it is still, of course, a relation between Tabby and Monday it is not irreducible; it holds between Tabby and Monday because the temporal part of Tabby on Monday, Tabby-on-Monday, is intrinsically fat. If perdurance is rejected, however, no such intrinsic possessor of the property of fatness can be recognised: Tabby’s fatness on Monday must be regarded as an irreducible state of affairs.

According to Lewis, this consequence of the rejection of the perdurance theory is incredible. Whether he is right about this is the subject of intense debate (Haslanger 2003).

Even if Lewis is right, however, the perdurance theory may still be found wanting, since it does not secure the most commonsensical position: that fatness is a property of a cat (Haslanger 2003). According to perdurance theory, rather, it is a property of a (temporal) cat part. Those known as stage theorists (Hawley 2001, Sider 2001), accepting the ontology of perdurance theory, but modifying its semantics, offer a way to secure this desirable result. Every temporal part of a cat is a cat, they say, so Tabby-on-Monday (which is what we refer to by “Tabby”, on Monday) is a cat and is fat, just as we would like. Stage theorists have to pay a price for this advantage over perdurance theory, however. For they must accept either that our reports of the cross-temporal number of cats are not always reports of the counting of cats (as when I say, truly, that I have only ever owned three cats) or that two cat-stages (cats) may be counted as one and the same cat, so that counting cats is not always counting in accordance with absolute identity.

An argument against the perdurance theory that has been the focus of interest is one presented in various guises by a number of writers, including Wiggins (1980), Thomson (1983) and van Inwagen (1990). Applied to persons (it can equally well be applied to other persisting things), it asserts that persons have different properties, in particular, different modal properties, from the summations of person-stages with which the perdurance theory identifies them. Thus, by Leibniz’s Law, this identification must be mistaken. As David Wiggins states the argument: “Anything that is a part of a Lesniewskian sum [a mereological whole defined by its parts] is necessarily part of it…But no person or normal material object is necessarily in the total state that will correspond to the person- or object-moment postulated by the theory under discussion” (1980: 168).

To elaborate a little. I might have died when I was five years old. But that maximal summation of person-stages which, according to perdurance theory, is me and has a temporal extent of at least fifty years, could not have had a temporal extent of a mere five years. So I cannot be such a summation of stages.

This argument illustrates the interdependence of the various topics discussed under the rubric of identity. Whether it is valid, of course, depends on the correct analysis of modal predication, and, in particular, on whether it should be analysed in terms of “identity across possible worlds” or in terms of Lewisian counterpart theory. This is the topic of the next section.

In the interpretation of modal discourse recourse is often made to the idea of “identity across possible worlds”. If modal discourse is interpreted in this way it becomes natural to regard a statement ascribing a modal property to an individual as asserting the identity of that individual across worlds: “Sarah might have been a millionaire”, on this view, asserts that there is a possible world in which an individual identical with Sarah is a millionaire. “Sarah could not have been a millionaire” asserts that in any world in which an individual identical with Sarah exists that individual is not a millionaire.

However, though this is perhaps the most natural way to interpret de re modal statements (once it has been accepted that the apparatus of possible worlds is to be used as an interpretative tool), there are well-known difficulties that make the approach problematic.

For example, it seems reasonable to suppose that a complex artefact like a bicycle could have been made of different parts. On the other hand, it does not seem right that the same bicycle could have been constructed out of completely different parts.

But now consider a series of possible worlds, beginning with the actual world, each containing a bicycle just slightly different from the one in the previous world, the last world in the sequence being one in which there is a bicycle composed of completely different parts from the one in the actual world. One cannot say that each bicycle is identical with the one in the neighbouring world, but not identical with the corresponding bicycle in distant worlds, since identity is transitive. Hence it seems one must either adopt an extreme mereological essentialism, according to which no difference of parts is possible for an individual, or reject the interpretation of de re modal discourse as asserting identity across possible worlds.

This and other problems with cross-world identity suggest that some other weaker relation, of similarity or what David Lewis calls counterparthood, should be employed in a possible world analysis of modal discourse. Since similarity is not transitive this allows us to say that the bicycle might have had some different parts without having to say that it might have been wholly different. On the other hand, such a substitution does not seem unproblematic, for a claim about what I might have done hardly seems, at first sight, to be correctly interpretable as a claim about what someone else (however similar to me) does in another possible world (Kripke 1972 [1980], note 13).

An assessment of the counterpart theoretic analysis is vital not just to understanding modal discourse, however, but also to getting to the correct account of identity over time. For, as we saw, the argument against perdurance theory outlined at the end of the last section depends on the correct interpretation of modal discourse. In fact, it is invalid on a counterpart theoretic analysis which allows different counterpart relations (different similarity relations) to be invoked according to the sense of the singular term which is the subject of the de re modal predication (Lewis 1986, Ch. 4), since the counterpart relation relevant to the assessment of a de re modal predication with a singular term whose sense determines that it refers to a person will be different from that relevant to the assessment of a de re modal predication with a singular term whose sense determines that it refers to a sum of person-stages. “I might have existed for only five years” means on the Lewisian account “There is a person in some possible world similar to me in those respects important to personhood who exists for only five years”; “The maximal summation of person stages of which this current stage is a stage might have existed for only five years” means “There is a summation of person stages similar to this one in those respects important to the status of an entity as a summation of stages which exists for only five years”. Since the two similarity relations in question are distinct the first modal statement may be true and the second false even if I am identical with the sum of stages in question.

Counterpart theory is also significant to the topic of identity over time in another way, since it provides the analogy to which the stage theorist (who regards all everyday reference as reference to momentary stages rather than to perdurers) appeals to explain de re temporal predication. Thus, according to the stage theorist, just as “I might have been fat” does not require the existence of a possible world in which an object identical with me is fat, but only the existence of a world in which a (modal) counterpart of me is fat, so “I used to be fat” does not require the existence of a past time at which someone identical with (the present momentary stage which is) me was fat, but only the existence of a past time at which a (temporal) counterpart of me was fat. The problem of identity over time for things of a kind, for stage theorists, is just the problem of characterizing the appropriate temporal counterpart relation for things of that kind.

For a more detailed discussion of the topic, see the entry transworld identity . Whether de re modal discourse is to be interpreted in terms of identity across possible worlds or counterpart theoretically (or in some other way entirely) is also relevant to our next topic, that of contingent identity.

Before Kripke’s writings (1972 [1980]), it seemed a platitude that statements of identity could be contingent – when they contained two terms differing in sense but identical in reference and so were not analytic. Kripke challenged this platitude, though, of course, he did not reject the possibility of contingent statements of identity. But he argued that when the terms flanking the sign of identity were what he called rigid designators, an identity statement, if true at all, had to be necessarily true, but need not be knowable a priori , as an analytic truth would be. Connectedly, Kripke argued that identity and distinctness were themselves necessary relations: if an object is identical with itself it is necessarily so, and if it is distinct from another it is necessarily so.

Kripke’s arguments were very persuasive, but there are examples that suggest that his conclusion is too sweeping – that even identity statements containing rigid designators can be, in a sense, contingent. The debate over contingent identity is concerned with the assessment and proper analysis of these examples.

One of the earliest examples is provided by Gibbard (1975). Consider a statue, Goliath, and the clay, Lumpl, from which it is composed. Imagine that Lumpl and Goliath coincide in their spatiotemporal extent. It is tempting to conclude that they are identical. But they might not have been. Goliath might have been rolled into a ball and destroyed; Lumpl would have continued to exist. The two would have been distinct. Thus it seems that the identity of Lumpl and Goliath, if admitted, must be acknowledged as merely contingent.

One reaction to this argument available to the convinced Kripkean is simply to deny that Lumpl and Goliath are identical. But to accept this is to accept that purely material entities, like statues and lumps of clay, of admittedly identical material constitution at all times, may nonetheless be distinct, though distinguished only by modal, dispositional or counterfactual properties. To many, however, this seems highly implausible, which provides the strength of the argument for contingent identity. Another way of thinking of this matter is in terms of the failure of the supervenience of the macroscopic on the microscopic. If Lumpl is distinct from Goliath then a far distant duplicate of Lumpl, Lumpl*, coincident with a statue Goliath*, though numerically distinct from Goliath will be microscopically indistinguishable from Goliath in all general respects, relational as well as non-relational, past and future as well as present, even modal and dispositional as well as categorical, but will be macroscopically distinguishable in general respects, since it will not be a statue, and will have modal properties, such as the capacity to survive radical deformation in shape, which no statue possesses.

David Lewis (in “Counterparts of Persons and their Bodies”, 1971) suggests that the identity of a person with his body (assuming the person and the body, like Goliath and Lumpl, are at all times coincident) is contingent, since bodily interchange is a possibility. He appeals to counterpart theory, modified to allow a variety of counterpart relations, to explain this. Contingent identity then makes sense, since “I and my body might not have been identical” now translates into counterpart theory as “There is a possible world, w , a unique personal counterpart x in w of me and a unique bodily counterpart y in w of my body, such that x and y are not identical”.

What is crucial to making sense of contingent identity is an acceptance that modal predicates are inconstant in denotation (that is, stand for different properties when attached to different singular terms or different quantifying expressions). Counterpart theory provides one way of explaining this inconstancy, but is not necessarily the only way (Gibbard 1975, Noonan 1991, 1993). However, whether the examples of contingent identity in the literature are persuasive enough to make it reasonable to accept the certainly initially surprising idea that modal predications are inconstant in denotation is still a matter of considerable controversy.

Finally, in this section, it is worth noting explicitly the interdependence of the topics under discussion: only if the possibility of contingent identity is secured, by counterpart theory or some other account of de re modality which does not straightforwardly analyse de re modal predication in terms of identity across possible worlds, can perdurance theory (or stage theory) as an account of identity across time be sustained against the modal arguments of Wiggins, Thomson and van Inwagen.

A thesis that has a long pedigree but has only recently been gathering attention in the contemporary literature is the “Composition as Identity” thesis. The thesis comes in a weak and a strong form. In its weak form the thesis is that the mereological composition relation is analogous in a number of important ways to the identity relation and so deserves to be called a kind of identity. In its strong form the thesis is that the composition relation is strictly identical with the identity relation, viz. that the parts of a whole are literally (collectively) identical with the whole itself. The strong thesis was considered by Plato in Parmenides and versions of the thesis have been discussed by many historical figures since (Harte 2002, Normore and Brown 2014). The progenitor of the modern version of the thesis is Baxter (1988a, 1988b, 2001) but it is most often discussed under the formulation of it given by Lewis (1991), who first considers the strong thesis before rejecting it in favour of the weak thesis.

Both the strong and the weak versions of the thesis are motivated by the fact that there is an especially intimate relation between a whole and its parts (a whole is “nothing over and above” its parts), buttressed by claims that identity and composition are alike in various ways. Lewis (1991: 85) makes five likeness claims:

• Ontological Innocence. If one believes that some object x exists, one does not gain a commitment to a further object by believing that something identical with x exists. Likewise, if one believes that some objects x 1 , x 2 , …, x n exist, one does not gain a commitment to a further object by claiming that something composed of x 1 , x 2 , …, x n exists.
• Automatic Existence. If some object x exists, then it automatically follows that something identical with x exists. Likewise, if some objects x 1 , x 2 , …, x n exist, then it automatically follows that something composed of x 1 , x 2 , …, x n exists.
• Unique Composition. If something y is identical with x , then anything identical with x is identical with y , and anything identical with y is identical with x . Likewise, if some things y 1 , y 2 , …, y n compose x , then any things that compose x are identical with y 1 , y 2 , …, y n , and anything identical with x is composed of y 1 , y 2 , …, y n .
• Exhaustive Description. If y is identical with x , then an exhaustive description of y is an exhaustive description of x , and vice versa. Likewise, if y 1 , y 2 , …, y n compose x , then an exhaustive description of y 1 , y 2 , …, y n is an exhaustive description of x , and vice versa.
• Same Location. If y is identical with x , then necessarily, x and y fill the same region of spacetime. Likewise, if y 1 , y 2 , …, y n compose x , then necessarily, y 1 , y 2 , …, y n and x fill the same region of spacetime.

Clearly not all will agree with each of Lewis’s likeness claims. Anyone who denies unrestricted mereological composition, for example, will deny 2. And the defender of strong pluralism in the material constitution debate (i.e. one who defends the view that there can be all-time coincident entities) will deny 3. And some endurantists who think that ordinary material objects can have distinct parts at distinct times will deny 5. But there is a more general problem with 1, as van Inwagen has made clear (1994: 213). Consider a world w1 that contains just two simples s1 and s2. Now consider the difference between someone p1 who believes that s1 and s2 compose something and someone p2 who does not. Ask: how many objects do p1 and p2 believe there to be in w1? The answer, it seems, is that p1 believes that there are three things and p2 only two. So how can a commitment to the existence of fusions be ontologically innocent? One recent suggestion is that although a commitment to the existence of fusions is not ontologically innocent, it almost is: to commit oneself to fusions is to commit oneself to further entities, but because they are not fundamental entities they are not ones that matter for the purpose of theory choice (Cameron 2014, Schaffer 2008, Williams 2010, and see also Hawley 2014).

If one believes Lewis’s likeness claims one will be tempted by at least the weak Composition as Identity thesis. If composition is a type of identity this gives some kind of explanation of why the parallels between the two hold. But the strong thesis, that the composition relation is the identity relation, gives a fuller explanation. So why not hold the strong thesis? Because, many think, there are additional challenges that face anyone who wishes to defend the strong thesis.

The classical identity relation is one that can only have single objects as relata (as in: “Billie Holiday = Eleanora Fagan”). If we adopt a language that allows the formation of plural terms we can unproblematically define a plural identity relation that holds between pluralities of objects too. Plural identity statements such as “the hunters are identical with the gatherers” are understood to mean that for all x , x is one of the hunters iff x is one of the gatherers. But, according to the strong Composition as Identity thesis, there can also be true hybrid identity statements that relate pluralities and single objects. That is, sentences such as “the bricks = the wall” are taken by the defender of strong Composition as Identity to be well-formed sentences that express strict identities.

The first challenge facing the defender of the strong thesis is the least troublesome. It is the syntactic problem that hybrid identity statements are ungrammatical in English (Van Inwagen, 1994: 211). Whilst “Billie Holiday is identical with Eleanora Fagan” and “the hunters are identical with the gatherers” are well-formed, it seems that “the bricks are identical with the wall” is not. However, there is in fact some doubt about whether hybrid identity statements are ungrammatical in English, and some have pointed out that this is anyway a mere grammatical artefact of English that is not present in other languages (e.g. Norwegian and Hungarian). So it seems that the most this challenge calls for is a mild form of grammatical revisionism. And we have, at any rate, formal languages that allow hybrid constructions to be made in which to express the claims made by the defender of the strong Composition as Identity thesis. (Sider 2007, Cotnoir 2013) (NB The claims regarding Norwegian and Hungarian are to be found in these two papers.)

The second challenge is more troublesome. It is the semantic problem of providing coherent truth-conditions for hybrid identity statements. The standard way to provide the truth-conditions for the classical identity relation is to say that an identity statement of the form “ a = b ” is true iff “ a ” and “ b ” have the same referents. But this account clearly does not work for hybrid identity statements, for there is no (single) referent for a plural term. Moreover, the standard way of giving the truth-conditions for plural identity statements (mentioned above) does not work for hybrid identity statements either. To say that “ x is one of the y s” is to say that x is (classically) identical with one of the things in the plurality, i.e., that x is identical with y 1 , or identical with y 2 … or identical with y n . But then “the bricks = the wall” is true only if the wall is (classically) identical with one of the bricks, i.e. with b 1 , or with b 2 … or with b n , which it isn’t.

The third challenge is the most troublesome of all. In section 2 it was noted that Leibniz’s Law (and its contrapositive) appear to be crucial to our understanding of identity and distinctness. But it seems that the defender of strong Composition as Identity must deny this. After all, the bricks are many, but the wall is one. The onus is thus on the defender of strong Composition as Identity to explain why we should think the “are” in hybrid identity statements really expresses the relation of identity.

The second and the third challenges have been thought by many to be insurmountable (Lewis, for example, rejects strong Composition as Identity on the basis of them). But, in recent semantic work in this area, accounts have emerged that promise to answer both challenges. (Wallace 2011a, 2011b, Cotnoir 2013). Whether they do so, however, remains to be seen.

Like the impossibility of contingent identity, the impossibility of vague identity appears to be a straightforward consequence of the classical concept of identity (Evans 1978, see also Salmon 1982). For if a is only vaguely identical with b , something is true of it – that it is only vaguely identical with b – that is not true of b , so, by Leibniz’s Law, it is not identical with b at all. Of course, there are vague statements of identity – “Princeton is Princeton Borough” (Lewis 1988) – but the conclusion appears to follow that such vagueness is only possible when one or both of the terms flanking the sign of identity is an imprecise designator. Relatedly, it appears to follow that identity itself must be a determinate relation.

But some examples suggest that this conclusion is too sweeping – that even identity statements containing precise designators may be, in some sense, indeterminate. Consider Everest and some precisely defined hunk of rock, ice and snow, Rock, of which it is indeterminate whether its boundaries coincide with those of Everest. It is tempting to think that “Everest” and “Rock” are both precise designators (if “Everest” is not, is anything? (Tye 2000)) and that “Everest is Rock” is nonetheless in some sense indeterminate.

Those who take this view have to respond to Evans’s original argument, about which there has been intense debate (see separate article on vagueness, Edgington 2000, Lewis 1988, Parsons 2000, van Inwagen 1990, Williamson 2002 and 2003), but also to more recent variants. There is no space to go into these matters here, but one particular variant of the Evans argument worth briefly noting is given by Hawley (2001). Alpha and Omega are (two?) people, the first of whom steps into van Inwagen’s (1990) fiendish cabinet which disrupts whatever features are relevant to personal identity, and the second of whom then steps out:

(1) It is indeterminate whether Alpha steps out of the cabinet (2) Alpha is such that it is indeterminate whether she steps out of the cabinet (3) It is not indeterminate whether Omega steps out of the cabinet (4) Omega is not such that it is indeterminate whether she steps out of the cabinet (5) Alpha is not identical to Omega.

This argument differs from the standard version of Evans’s argument by not depending upon identity-involving properties (e.g. being such that it is indeterminate whether she is Omega) to establish distinctness, and this removes some sources of controversy. Others, of course, remain.

The debate over vague identity is too vast to survey here, but to finish this section we can relate this debate to the previously discussed debate about identity over time.

For some putative cases of vagueness in synchronic identity it seems reasonable to accept the conclusion of Evans’s argument and locate the indeterminacy in language (see the “Reply” by Shoemaker in Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984 for the following example). A structure consists of two halls, Alpha Hall and Beta Hall, linked by a flimsy walkway, Smith is located in Alpha Hall, Jones in Beta Hall. The nature of the structure is such that the identity statement “The building in which Smith is located is the building in which Jones is located” is neither true nor false because it is indeterminate whether Alpha Hall and Beta Hall count as two distinct buildings or merely as two parts of one and the same building. Here it is absolutely clear what is going on. The term “building” is vague in a way that makes it indeterminate whether it applies to the whole structure or just to the two halls. Consequently, it is indeterminate what “the building in which Smith is located” and “the building in which Jones is located” denote.

Perdurance theorists, who assimilate identity over time to identity over space, can accommodate vagueness in identity over time in the same way. In Hawley’s example they can say that there are several entities present: one that exists before and after the identity-obscuring occurrences in the cabinet, one that exists only before, and one that exists only after. It is indeterminate which of these is a person and so it is indeterminate what the singular terms “Alpha” and “Omega” refer to.

This involves taking on an ontology that is larger than we ordinarily recognise, but that is not uncongenial to the perdurance theorist, who is happy to regard any, however spatiotemporally disconnected, region as containing a physical object (Quine 1960:171).

But what of endurance theorists?

One option for them is to adopt the same response and to accept a multiplicity of entities partially coinciding in space and time where to common sense there seems to be only one. But this is to give up on one of the major advantages claimed by the endurance theorist, his consonance with common sense.

The endurance theorist has several other options. He may simply deny the existence of the relevant entities and restrict his ontology to entities which are not complex; he may insist that any change destroys identity so that in a strict and philosophical sense Alpha is distinct from Omega; or he may reject the case as one of vagueness, insisting that, though we do not know the answer, either Alpha is Omega or she is not.

However, the most tempting option for the endurance theorist, which keeps closest to common sense, is to accept that the case is one of vagueness, deny the multiplicity of entities embraced by the perdurance theorist and reject Evans’s argument against vague identity.

That this is so highlights the fact that there is no easy solution to the problem consonant in every respect with common sense. Locating the vagueness in language requires us to acknowledge a multiplicity of entities of which we would apparently otherwise have to take no notice. Whilst locating it in the world requires an explanation of how, contrary to Evans’s argument, the impossibility of vague identity is not a straightforward consequence of the classical conception of identity, or else the abandonment of that conception.

Finally in this entry we return briefly to the idea mentioned in the introduction that although the debates about identity make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. This view has recently been receiving increasing attention. Lewis is the most cited defender of this view. In the context of discussing the putative “problem” of trans-world identity he says:

[W]e should not suppose that we have here any problem about identity . We never have. Identity is utterly simple and unproblematic. Everything is identical to itself; nothing is ever identical to anything except itself. There is never any problem about what makes something identical to itself; nothing can ever fail to be. (Lewis 1986: 192–93)

Lewis’s argument here might be expanded as follows: Consider any putative problem about the conditions under which a thing x is identical with a thing y . There are only two cases: either (i) x is identical with y , or (ii) x is not identical with y . Consider case (i). In this case the putative problem is about the conditions under which x is identical with itself. But there cannot be any such problem, because it is a conceptual truth that everything is identical with itself, and so x is identical with itself under all conditions. To ask for the conditions under which something is identical with itself is like asking ‘Under what conditions is one thing one thing, and not two things?’ There can be no informative answer because necessarily, if something is one thing then it is one thing, and not two things, and nothing more can be said. Now consider case (ii). The putative problem is now about the conditions under which a thing x is identical with a different thing y . But there cannot be any such problem, because it is a conceptual truth that one thing and a different thing are not identical, and so there are no conditions under which x and y are identical. To ask for the conditions under which one thing and a different thing are identical is like asking ‘Under what conditions are two things one thing, and not two things?’ There can be no informative answer because necessarily, if two things are two things, then they are two things, and not one thing, and nothing more can be said. And so, whether case (i) or case (ii) holds, there can be no problem about the conditions under which a thing x is identical with a thing y .

The argument seems persuasive, but anyone who accepts it is committed to it being possible to state problems that seem to be about identity (such as the “problem” of trans-world identity) in terms that make it clear that such problems are not in fact about identity. Furthermore, it seems that we do very often use the concept of identity, and an explanation of how and why we use it so often seems to be required if the argument above is sound.

Most seem to have accepted Lewis’s view (see, e.g., Akiba 2000, Hawthorne 2003, Noonan 2007, Noonan and Curtis 2018), but there are some who dissent (Gallois 2005, Shumener 2020, Azzano and Carrara 2021). The question of how and why we use the concept of identity was a central concern of Wittgenstein (see Fogelin 1983 for an overview), and has recently received attention from others (Burgess 2018).

• Akiba, K., 2000. “Identity is Simple”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 37(4): 389–404.
• Azzano, L. & Carrara, M., 2021. “The Grounding of Identities”, Philosophia , 49(5): 1943–1952.
• Baxter, D. L. M., 1988a. “Identity in the Loose and Popular Sense”, Mind , 97: 576–582.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Why Identity Matters and How It Shapes Us

Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at Yeshiva University’s clinical psychology doctoral program.

Verywell / Zoe Hansen

Defining Identity

• What Makes Up a Person's Identity?

Identity Development Across the Lifespan

The importance of identity, tips for reflecting on your identity.

Your identity is a set of physical, mental, emotional, social, and interpersonal characteristics that are unique to you.

It encapsulates your core personal values and your beliefs about the world, says Asfia Qaadir , DO, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at PrairieCare.

In this article, we explore the concept of identity, its importance, factors that contribute to its development , and some strategies that can help you reflect upon your identity.

Your identity gives you your sense of self. It is a set of traits that distinguishes you from other people, because while you might have some things in common with others, no one else has the exact same combination of traits as you.

Your identity also gives you a sense of continuity, i.e. the feeling that you are the same person you were two years ago and you will be the same person two days from now.

Asfia Qaadir, DO, Psychiatrist

Your identity plays an important role in how you treat others and how you carry yourself in the world.

What Makes Up a Person's Identity?

These are some of the factors that can contribute to your identity:

• Physical appearance
• Physical sensations
• Emotional traits
• Life experiences
• Genetics 
• Health conditions
• Nationality
• Race  
• Social community 
• Peer group 
• Political environment
• Spirituality
• Sexuality 
• Personality
• Beliefs 
• Finances 

We all have layers and dimensions that contribute to who we are and how we express our identity.

All of these factors interact together and influence you in unique and complex ways, shaping who you are. Identity formation is a subjective and deeply personal experience.

Identity development is a lifelong process that begins in childhood, starts to solidify in adolescence, and continues through adulthood.

Childhood is when we first start to develop a self-concept and form an identity.

As children, we are highly dependent on our families for our physical and emotional needs. Our early interactions with family members play a critical role in the formation of our identities.

During this stage, we learn about our families and communities, and what values are important to them, says Dr. Qaadir. 

The information and values we absorb in childhood are like little seeds that are planted years before we can really intentionally reflect upon them as adults, says Dr. Qaadir.

Traumatic or abusive experiences during childhood can disrupt identity formation and have lasting effects on the psyche.

Adolescence

Adolescence is a critical period of identity formation.

As teenagers, we start to intentionally develop a sense of self based on how the values we’re learning show up in our relationships with ourselves, our friends, family members, and in different scenarios that challenge us, Dr. Qaadir explains.

Adolescence is a time of discovering ourselves, learning to express ourselves, figuring out where we fit in socially (and where we don’t), developing relationships, and pursuing interests, says Dr. Qaadir.

This is the period where we start to become independent and form life goals. It can also be a period of storm and stress , as we experience mood disruptions, challenge authority figures, and take risks as we try to work out who we are.

As adults, we begin building our public or professional identities and deepen our personal relationships, says Dr. Qaadir.

These stages are not set in stone, rather they are fluid, and we get the rest of our lives to continue experiencing life and evolving our identities, says Dr. Qaadir.

Having a strong sense of identity is important because it:

• Creates self-awareness: A strong sense of identity can give you a deep sense of awareness of who you are as a person. It can help you understand your likes, dislikes, actions, motivations, and relationships.
• Provides direction and motivation: Having a strong sense of identity can give you a clear understanding of your values and interests, which can help provide clarity, direction, and motivation when it comes to setting goals and working toward them.
• Enables healthy relationships: When you know and accept yourself, you can form meaningful connections with people who appreciate and respect you for who you are. A strong sense of identity also helps you communicate effectively, establish healthy boundaries, and engage in authentic and fulfilling interactions.
• Keeps you grounded: Our identities give us roots when things around us feel chaotic or uncertain, says Dr. Qaadir. “Our roots keep us grounded and help us remember what truly matters at the end of the day.”
• Improves decision-making: Understanding yourself well can help you make choices that are consistent with your values, beliefs, and long-term goals. This clarity reduces confusion, indecision, and the tendency to conform to others' expectations, which may lead to poor decision-making .
• Fosters community participation: Identity is often shaped by cultural, social, political, spiritual, and historical contexts. Having a strong sense of identity allows you to understand, appreciate, and take pride in your cultural heritage. This can empower you to participate actively in society, express your unique perspective, and contribute to positive societal change.

On the other hand, a weak sense of identity can make it more difficult to ground yourself emotionally in times of stress and more confusing when you’re trying to navigate major life decisions, says Dr. Qaadir.

Dr. Qaadir suggests some strategies that can help you reflect on your identity:

• Art: Art is an incredible medium that can help you process and reflect on your identity. It can help you express yourself in creative and unique ways.
• Reading: Reading peoples’ stories through narrative is an excellent way to broaden your horizons, determine how you feel about the world around you, and reflect on your place in it.
• Journaling: Journaling can also be very useful for self-reflection . It can help you understand your feelings and motivations better.
• Conversation: Conversations with people can expose you to diverse perspectives, and help you form and represent your own.
• Nature: Being in nature can give you a chance to reflect undisturbed. Spending time in nature often has a way of putting things in perspective.
• Relationships: You can especially strengthen your sense of identity through the relationships around you. It is valuable to surround yourself with people who reflect your core values but may be different from you in other aspects of identity such as personality styles, cultural backgrounds, passions, professions, or spiritual paths because that provides perspective and learning from others.

American Psychological Association. Identity .

Pfeifer JH, Berkman ET. The development of self and identity in adolescence: neural evidence and implications for a value-based choice perspective on motivated behavior . Child Dev Perspect . 2018;12(3):158-164. doi:10.1111/cdep.12279

Hasanah U, Susanti H, Panjaitan RU. Family experience in facilitating adolescents during self-identity development . BMC Nurs . 2019;18(Suppl 1):35. doi:10.1186/s12912-019-0358-7

Dereboy Ç, Şahin Demirkapı E, et al. The relationship between childhood traumas, identity development, difficulties in emotion regulation and psychopathology . Turk Psikiyatri Derg . 2018;29(4):269-278.

Branje S, de Moor EL, Spitzer J, Becht AI. Dynamics of identity development in adolescence: a decade in review . J Res Adolesc . 2021;31(4):908-927. doi:10.1111/jora.12678

Stirrups R.  The storm and stress in the adolescent brain .  The Lancet Neurology . 2018;17(5):404. doi:10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30112-1

Fitzgerald A. Professional identity: A concept analysis . Nurs Forum . 2020;55(3):447-472. doi:10.1111/nuf.12450

National Institute of Standards and Technology. Identity .

By Sanjana Gupta Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

Self-Image, Self-Concept

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.

• What Is Identity?
• How to Be Authentic
• Theories of Identity

Everyone struggles with existential questions such as, “Who am I?” and “Who do I want my future self to be?” One reason why may be that the answer is so complex.

Identity includes the many relationships people cultivate, such as their identity as a child, friend, partner, and parent. It involves external characteristics over which a person has little or no control, such as height, race, or socioeconomic class. Identity also encompasses political opinions, moral attitudes, and religious beliefs, all of which guide the choices one makes on a daily basis.

People who are overly concerned with the impression they make, or who feel a core aspect of themselves, such as gender or sexuality , is not being expressed, can struggle acutely with their identity. Reflecting on the discrepancy between who one is and who one wants to be can be a powerful catalyst for change.

Identity encompasses the values people hold, which dictate the choices they make. An identity contains multiple roles—such as a mother, teacher, and U.S. citizen—and each role holds meaning and expectations that are internalized into one’s identity. Identity continues to evolve over the course of an individual’s life.

Identity formation involves three key tasks: Discovering and developing one’s potential, choosing one’s purpose in life, and finding opportunities to exercise that potential and purpose. Identity is also influenced by parents and peers during childhood and experimentation in adolescence .

Every individual has a goal of nurturing values and making choices that are consistent with their true self. Some internalize the values of their families or culture, even though they don’t align with their authentic self. This conflict can drive dissatisfaction and uncertainty. Reflecting on one’s values can spark change and a more fulfilling life.

The idea of an identity crisis emerged from psychologist Erik Erikson, who delineated eight stages of crises and development, a concept later expanded upon by others. Although not a clinical term, an identity crisis refers to facing a challenge to one’s sense of self, which may center around politics , religion, career choices, or gender roles.

Adolescence is a time in which children develop an authentic sense of self, distinct from their parents, in order to become an independent adult. Experimentation is an important part of the process: As teens try on different identities—in terms of friends, hobbies, appearance, gender, and sexuality—they come to understand who they are and who they want to be.

Features of identity can highlight similarities or differences between people—through race, gender, or profession—which can function to either unite or divide. People who view themselves as members of a larger overarching group tend to have stronger kinship with other people, animals, and nature.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what's "just not me." Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were "true" to themselves.

Authenticity is also a cornerstone of mental health. It’s correlated with many aspects of psychological well-being, including vitality, self-esteem , and coping skills. Acting in accordance with one's core self—a trait called self-determination—is ranked by some experts as one of three basic psychological needs, along with competence and a sense of relatedness.

Everyone subconsciously internalizes conventions and expectations that dictate how they believe they should think or behave. The decision to examine or challenge those assumptions, even though it’s difficult, is the first step to living more authentically. This set of 20 steps can guide you through that process.

There can be tension between being wholly yourself and operating successfully in your relationships and career. No one should be completely deceitful or completely forthright; a guiding principle to achieve a balance is that as long as you’re not forced to act in opposition to your values or personality , a little self-monitoring can be warranted.

Relationships can come under threat when there’s a disconnect between expressing yourself freely and taking your partner’s feelings into account. The Authenticity in Relationships scale —which measures this construct through statements such as “I am fully aware of when to insist on myself and when to compromise”—can initiate discussion and help couples cultivate a healthy balance.

As so much of the world has shifted online, discrepancies have emerged between one’s virtual self and real self. People may cultivate their online avatar more and more carefully over time, and the virtual self can influence the perception of the real self. Therefore, it can be valuable to reflect on whether the virtual self is really authentic .

One of the most enduring theories of development was proposed by psychologist Erik Erikson. Erikson divided the lifecycle into eight stages that each contained a conflict, with the resolution of those conflicts leading to the development of personality. The conflict that occurs during adolescence, Erikson believed, is “identity versus role confusion.”

Adolescents grapple with so many different aspects of identity, from choosing a career path to cultivating moral and political beliefs to becoming a friend or partner. Role confusion pertains to the inability to commit to one path. Adolescents then go through a period of experimentation before committing, reconciling the pieces of their identity, and emerging into adulthood.

Identity formation is most acute during adolescence, but the process doesn’t stop after the teen years. Taking on a new role, such as becoming a parent, can make self-definition a lifelong process.

As a person grows older, the overall trend is toward identity achievement. But major life upheavals, such as divorce , retirement , or the death of a loved one, often lead people to explore and redefine their identities.

According to Freud’s psychoanalytic framework, the mind was composed of the id, driven by instinct and desire, the superego, driven by morality and values, and the ego which moderates the two and creates one’s identity. Many features contribute to ego functioning, including insight, agency, empathy, and purpose.

Erik Erikson’s proposed a theory of development based on different stages of life. He also coined the term “ego identity,” which he conceived as an enduring and continuous sense of who a person is. The ego identity helps to merge all the different versions of oneself (the parent self, the career self, the sexual self) into one cohesive whole, so that if disaster strikes, there's a stable sense of self.

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted pioneering research on prejudice , revealing that people favor those in their own groups, even when those groups are designated randomly, such as by people’s preferences for artwork. This research was the basis for Social Identity Theory—that self-esteem is in part derived from group membership, which provides pride and social identity.

Understanding links between social media and mental health conditions is not straightforward and requires an understanding of what mental health diagnoses involve.

What is courage? Is courage defined differently for men and women? Is courage socially conditioned, innate, or some mixture of nature and nurture? Can courage be learned?

New documentary chronicles singer-songwriter Dory Previn's experience with hearing voices The voices, Previn contends, evolved from tormentors to collaborators.

Within the film "Moonlight," stages of early identity development are observed through life-shaping experiences.

Diversity, belonging and inclusion are highly personal matters that can separate or connect us with the suffering of others and guide our actions for peace and justice.

Personal Perspective: We’re born knowing we exist and deserve to. And while experiences can damage self-love, nothing takes away the relationship with ourself like brain injury.

Regional culture is an often overlooked aspect of identity that impacts athletes' experiences. Sports ecosystems should discuss athletes' regional identities.

Sometimes, life seems like it's moving slowly. But this could be all in our minds.

Contemplating Hamlet's question is essential to the everyday choices we make in our lives.

Why is there no term for pregnancy loss parents? Find out what a recent panel of experts developed.

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The Role of School in Adolescents’ Identity Development. A Literature Review

• REVIEW ARTICLE
• Open access
• Published: 26 December 2018
• Volume 31 , pages 35–63, ( 2019 )

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• Monique Verhoeven   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9931-3968 1 ,
• Astrid M. G. Poorthuis 2 &
• Monique Volman 1  

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Schools can play an important role in adolescents’ identity development. To date, research on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development is scattered across research fields that employ different theoretical perspectives on identity. The aim of this literature review was to integrate the findings on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development from different research fields and to provide schools and teachers with insights into how adolescents’ identity development can be supported. Using constant comparative analysis, 111 studies were analyzed. We included articles on personal and social identity and on school-related identity dimensions. Three groups of studies emerged. First, studies on how schools and teachers unintentionally impact adolescents’ identity showed that, at school, messages may unintentionally be communicated to adolescents concerning who they should or can be through differentiation and selection, teaching strategies, teacher expectations, and peer norms. Second, studies on how schools and teachers can intentionally support adolescents’ identity development showed that different types of explorative learning experiences can be organized to support adolescents’ identity development: experiences aimed at exploring new identity positions (in-breadth exploration), further specifying already existing self-understandings (in-depth exploration), and reflecting on self-understandings (reflective exploration). The third group suggests that explorative learning experiences must be meaningful and situated in a supportive classroom climate in order to foster adolescents’ identity development. Together, the existing studies suggest that schools and teachers are often unaware of the many different ways in which they may significantly impact adolescents’ identity development.

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Introduction

Identity development is an important task in adolescence. Adolescents are supposed to be concerned with developing educational and professional goals while shaping an image of who they are and want to be. Previous research indicates that a relatively clear and stable identity makes people more resilient, reflective, and autonomous in the pursuit of important life decisions, while promoting a sense of competence (e.g., Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Kroger et al. 2010 ). However, it has been argued that developing a clear and stable identity has become increasingly challenging due to processes of individualization, emancipation, and migration (e.g., Beck et al. 1994 ). School—a place where adolescents spend a lot of time—is an important context where adolescents’ identity development can be supported: Here, teachers can help adolescents to explore the identity implications of the new ideas, activities, or possibilities they are introduced to at school (e.g., Coll and Falsafi 2010 ; Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Kaplan and Flum 2009 ; Kaplan and Flum 2012 ; Rich and Schachter 2012 ; Schachter and Galili-Schachter 2012 ; Schachter and Rich 2011 ; Silseth and Arnseth 2011 ).

To date, the emerging body of literature on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development is scattered across different academic disciplines (e.g., Schachter and Rich 2011 ). Together, these studies cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives on identity development, without there being a common research base. Scholars use the same terminology—identity—while often relating to merely a small share of the studies performed on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development and while being seemingly unaware of work performed by scholars who adopt different theoretical perspectives and, consequently, research designs.

The scattered research field may cause research gaps and ways in which research from different theoretical perspectives can complement each other to be overlooked. Additionally, it remains difficult for scholars, schools, and teachers to determine what insights the literature on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development does and does not yet provide, and, therefore, how the development of adolescents’ identities can best be supported in school.

In this paper, we review the literature on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development to answer the following research question: “What insights does the existing literature provide us into the role of educational processes in adolescents’ personal, social, and school- and learning-related identity development?.” We found literature on the influence of school experiences on adolescents’ racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender identity too, and we acknowledge that education plays an important role in the development of these identity dimensions. However, the articles on the role of school in the development of these identity dimensions form an extensive research field that would require a separate literature review (see, e.g., a review study on the racial identity development of African-American adolescents by DeCuir-Gunby 2009 ). Therefore, we decided to delimit our research scope to general identity dimensions (i.e., personal and social identity) and more circumscribed identity dimensions that are education-related.

The aim of our literature review is threefold: to present an overview of what insights articles, in which different perspectives on identity development are employed, provide us into the role of school in adolescents’ identity development; to derive practical implications from the literature to help schools and teachers support adolescents’ identity development; and to identify research gaps while outlining future research directions to further examine the role of school in adolescents’ identity development.

Literature Search

To find relevant studies, we consulted five databases that cover the disciplines of psychology, education, and the social sciences: PsycINFO, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, and Google Scholar. Two search strings were developed, of which the first regarded the population of adolescent students and consisted of the following keywords: secondary education , middle schools , middle school education , middle school students , junior high schools , junior high school students , high schools , high school students , and high school education . This search string was combined with a search string on identity development that consisted of the keywords identity formation , identity development , identity construction , identity work , and identity process . A more elaborate description of our search strategy can be found in Appendix A (Online Supplement). The search was performed on 22 October 2015 and focused on peer-reviewed articles in English that were published between 2005 and 2015. In total, the search resulted in 3599 unique articles.

Selection and Analysis of the Literature

The abstracts of all 3599 articles were read by the first author to establish which studies possibly met our inclusion criteria. An overview of our inclusion criteria is presented in Table 1 . First, only articles using the term identity were included in the review study. Hence, to delimit the scope of the review study, we did not select literature on identity-related concepts such as self-concept (Marsh 1990 ) or possible selves (Oyserman et al. 2006 ). Second, we included articles investigating adolescents’ personal and social identity development. When it comes to more circumscribed identity dimensions, we included articles on the development of adolescents’ school- and learning-related identity dimensions (e.g., mathematics identity, learner identity). Third, we only selected literature that focused on the influence of educational processes on adolescents’ identity development. Studies in which school was merely described as a setting in which adolescents spend their time were excluded from the selection. Fourth, in this stage of the process of literature selection, we did not include studies that were published more than 10 years before we performed our search. We chose to do so because of practical reasons, namely, the limits of the project budget and the time constraints that we were faced with. Finally, we included both empirical and theoretical studies, because we were not exclusively interested in empirical findings regarding the role of school in adolescents’ identity development but also in how these findings could be interpreted.

Based on our inclusion criteria, 176 articles were included in the review. Subsequently, the authors, in pairs, read the abstracts of these articles for two purposes: first, to get an initial overview of the studies in our selection; second, to develop a preliminary coding scheme to analyze the full texts of the articles. In this stage, while being concerned presenting an overview of what insights articles that are grounded in different perspectives on identity development provide us on the role of school in adolescents’ identity development, we generated codes for the explicitly mentioned theoretical perspectives on identity development. We also wanted to know what research methods and designs were used by scholars who adopt different theoretical perspectives on identity development. Therefore, we coded the abstracts, when possible, for methodological information (i.e., research design, sample, type of data collection). We wanted to be responsive to the various identity dimensions that the different studies focused on, which is why we coded for these (e.g., literacy identity, science identity) too. Finally, to disentangle what insights the existing literature provides into the role of school in adolescents’ identity development, the abstracts were coded for the educational processes that were explicitly addressed in the literature. We stayed very close to the text in coding the abstracts. For example, codes such as “Role of teacher: negative non-verbal approach of some students,” “Role of teacher: paid attention to low performing students,” and “Role of teacher: explicitly communicating positive expectations towards students” were assigned to the abstracts.

In this process, we discovered that the articles could be allocated to at least one of the following three categories: (1) studies that provide insights into the educational processes through which schools, teachers, and peers may unintentionally (and often negatively) shape adolescents’ identity development; (2) studies that provide insights into the educational processes through which schools and teachers may intentionally foster adolescents’ identity development; and (3) studies that provide insights into the preconditions to intentionally support adolescents’ identity development in school. Aiming to contribute to the integration of research findings across different research fields, we categorized the studies first by the type of educational process that they identified and second by the theoretical perspective they were grounded in.

Next, the first author read and summarized the full texts. After reading the first author’s reports on the literature, the full research team decided to exclude another 71 articles from the selection that, based on the full text, proved not to meet the inclusion criteria. To prevent ourselves from overlooking key publications in the research field under study that may have been published either before or after 2005, we performed citation tracking, as recommended by Greenhalgh and Peacock ( 2005 ). We kept a list of relevant articles that were referred to three times or more as concerning the role of school in adolescents’ identity development in the articles we had already selected, and we added them to the selection when they met our inclusion criteria ( n  = 6), apart from the criterion concerning the publication date. As a consequence, our final selection of literature comprised 111 articles.

Once we had further narrowed down our selection of literature to 111 articles, the first author coded the full papers with the previously developed coding scheme. Constant comparative analysis was used (e.g., Glaser and Strauss 1967 ) to compare and group the various codes on the explicitly mentioned educational processes in order to distill overarching processes from the data. To provide an illustration, the earlier mentioned codes “Role of teacher: negative non-verbal approach of some students,” “Role of teacher: paid attention to low performing students,” and “Role of teacher: explicitly communicating positive expectations towards students” were combined in the overarching process “Teacher expectations.” In a similar way, we distinguished other unintentional educational processes (selection practices and differentiation, teaching strategies, and peer norms), intentional processes (in-breadth exploration, in-depth exploration, and reflective exploration), and preconditions (meaningful learning experiences and a supportive classroom climate). Whereas some articles focused on one of these educational processes, others concerned the role of various processes (also see Table 2 ). The second and third author critically monitored the entire coding process and, in case of doubt, additional research team discussions were held. In Table 3 through Table 11 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), we alphabetically ordered the studies for the various educational processes and preconditions that we found and present brief summaries of each of the articles.

Characteristics of the Literature

The 111 articles were found across a wide variety of scientific journals ( n  = 80). In total, 19 of the 111 articles were theoretical in nature. Among the empirical research papers, six articles were quantitative in nature and another set of seven articles employed a mixed-methods design. Seventy-eight articles exclusively used qualitative research methods and generally presented small case studies. Of these qualitative studies, 60 reported longitudinal research. Different identity dimensions were studied in the literature, ranging from science identities and art identities to learner identities on a more general level and personal identity on an even more abstract level. Personal and social identities were investigated in respectively 21 and 11 articles. Of the more circumscribed school-related identity dimensions, studies on adolescents’ Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics identity (STEM; n  = 35), learner identity ( n  = 18), and student identity ( n  = 14) were most prevalent. The studies were conducted in a variety of settings—e.g., out-of-school science programs, literacy classes, schools’ hallways—and among a variety of samples such as bilingual high school students, honors students in a science class, or girls attending a middle school in a rural area. The majority of studies ( n  = 62) was based on data that were collected in the USA.

Theoretical Perspectives on Identity Development

Different theoretical perspectives on identity development can be found in the studies included in our literature review. Half of the articles in our literature selection understood identity from sociocultural perspectives ( n  = 55). The remaining articles were based on psychosocial perspectives ( n  = 8), social psychological perspectives ( n  = 4), sociological perspectives ( n  = 4), a combination thereof ( n  = 14), or they did not explicitly mention a particular conceptualization of identity development ( n  = 26). In this section of the present paper, each of the identified perspectives will be discussed based on publications that were referred to in our selection of literature as core theoretical publications that form the foundations of the various theoretical perspectives on identity development. In the next sections, the findings that we distilled from the literature on the various educational processes through which adolescents’ identity development may be influenced will be discussed in relation to the theoretical perspectives on identity development that are employed in the selected articles (also see Table 2 ). In doing so, articles in which perspectives on identity development are (often somewhat eclectically) combined and articles in which no particular theoretical perspective on identity development is mentioned will be discussed together with the studies from the perspective they most strongly appear to relate to in terms of research focus and employed research methods. More information on the combined perspectives can be found in Table 3 through Table 11 in Appendix B (Online Supplement).

Sociocultural Perspectives

Researchers who employ a sociocultural perspective generally understand identity as a multidimensional phenomenon rather than a single entity (e.g., Gee 2001 ; Holland et al. 1998 ; Holland and Lave 2001 ): People are thought to develop a range of self-understandings, for example as a science student (a science identity), a reader (literacy identity), or a music student (a musical identity). On a more general level, people are thought to integrate these self-understandings into a learner identity, a student identity (the person one is in school, not exclusively concerning who one is as a learner), and a social identity (one’s societal position in terms of superiority and inferiority). On an even more abstract level, people are thought to integrate these identity dimensions, together with self-understandings that are neither school- nor learning-related, in their personal identity. Scholars adopting sociocultural perspectives understand a person’s identity to develop through this person’s participation in various sociocultural contexts, such as home, school, and work (e.g., Holland et al. 1998 ; Holland and Lave 2001 ; Wenger 1998 ). These contexts are social in the sense that in every context, through interaction and negotiation, different identity positions—or social roles—are made available, such as those of the creative, ambitious, and/or cooperative person. These contexts are cultural in the sense that they are characterized by specific sets of tools, norms, and values that guide people’s actions, goals, and ideas about appropriate ways to reach those goals (e.g., Holland et al. 1998 ). Researchers who understand identity development from a sociocultural perspective are concerned with how identity positions, and the way these positions are evaluated (for example, girls may not be stimulated to identify with technology; Volman and Ten Dam 2007 ), inform adolescents’ identities. They are also interested in how the tools, norms, and values that are explicitly or implicitly communicated through educational activities and learning contents impact adolescents’ identities. Based on adolescents’ previous encounters with tools, norms, values, and identity positions, adolescents are thought to develop their self-understandings. Moreover, these self-understandings are understood to inform adolescents’ current decisions and future goals. In other words, adolescents’ self-understandings connect their past, present, and future (e.g., Holland et al. 1998 ; Wenger 1998 ). Some sociocultural scholars examine identities as narratives. The primary interest of these scholars is in the self-understandings people share, for example in interviews, and how these self-understandings are informed by people’s experiences with tools, norms, values, and identity positions in the school context (e.g., Solomon 2007 ). Other sociocultural researchers use classroom observations to observe both the actions and activities of teachers and peers (that reflect certain norms, values, and available identity positions, while providing insights into often used tools) and adolescents’ demonstrated engagement in school and school subjects, as an indication of their identities (e.g., Bartlett 2007 ). A third group of sociocultural scholars in our literature selection combines the former two strategies and studies identity development through the interplay between adolescents’ engagement in school and their shared self-understandings by employing various ethnographic research methods (e.g., Anderson 2007 ).

Psychosocial Perspectives

Psychosocial perspectives are often adopted by scholars whose main focus is on the internal, psychological processes of a person’s identity development (e.g., Negru-Subtirica et al. 2015 ; Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry 2008 ). In the studies in our literature selection that adopted psychosocial perspectives, two key stages in the identity development of adolescents are distinguished: exploration and commitment. The process of exploration concerns the inquiry into new possible interests as well as the trying out of new activities in order to learn what values one considers as important and what goals one deems worth pursuing. In the process of commitment, adolescents are thought to make durable life decisions, for example when it comes to their education, profession, and worldview (Erikson 1968 ; Marcia 1993 ). With regard to the role of school in adolescents’ identity development, some researchers who employ a psychosocial perspective are concerned with educational activities and strategies that either foster or hinder exploration and commitment processes. These studies stress the importance of opportunities to try out and reflect upon various activities (e.g., Charland 2010 ). Other studies in our literature selection that employ a psychosocial perspective focus on the effect of educational characteristics (such as education level) on the identity stage in which adolescents find themselves (e.g., Negru-Subtirica et al. 2015 ; Sica 2009 ; Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry 2008 ). Scholars who adopt a psychosocial perspective are generally concerned with the process of identity development, rather than with the content of specific identity dimensions. Consequently, large-scale, quantitative survey studies that examine the developmental stage of adolescents’ identity are more common in this research field than in the sociocultural one.

Social Psychological Perspectives

Scholars adopting a social psychological perspective understand a person’s identity to consist of a social and a personal part (Tajfel 1978 ; Tajfel and Turner 1986 ). Of these two parts, the former concerns one’s, “knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1978 , p. 63). The extent to which one identifies with the social groups one knows to be a member of and the extent to which one has strong emotions regarding these group memberships (in terms of these social groups being inferior, equal, or superior to other social groups) is what constructs the personal part of one’s identity at a given point in time (Tajfel 1978 ; Tajfel and Turner 1986 ).

When it comes to the role of school in adolescents’ identity development, some scholars employing a social psychological perspective are interested in the attributes adolescents themselves ascribe to other groups of adolescents that, for example, differ from them when it comes to the high school track they are in (e.g., a prevocational track, a pre-academic track; Jonsson and Beach 2013 ). Others are more concerned with adolescents’ perceptions of the attributes other people (e.g., society in general) assign to adolescents in different high school tracks (e.g., Knigge and Hannover 2011 ) or in schools with a low- or high-status reputation (Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi 2011 ). Generally, survey studies that may comprise both open and closed questions are performed by scholars who adopt a social psychological perspective (e.g., Knigge and Hannover 2011 ; Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi 2011 ).

Sociological Perspectives

Like scholars adopting a social psychological perspective, researchers who employ a sociological perspective are concerned with adolescents’ group membership, the evaluation thereof, and the extent to which adolescents identify with these groups. Additionally, though, scholars who ground their work in sociological perspectives are interested in how group membership serves to include some people, while excluding others as a means to acquire status. The primary focus of scholars employing sociological perspectives is on how people move in societal power structures, create groups, and try to use their own individual agency to represent themselves in ways that they desire (Côté 2002 ; Foucault 1980 ).

Some scholars who employ a sociological perspective examine how people in adolescents’ school contexts (e.g., peers and teachers) can help them to use their agency to position themselves in desired ways (e.g., Robb et al. 2007 ). Others focus on how educational policies or discourses create new membership groups of achievers and failures (e.g., Anagnostopoulos 2006 ). Because scholars who adopt a sociological perspective are concerned with how structures are reproduced and with how people (can) use their agency, they generally employ qualitative research methods ranging from classroom observations and student reports, to focus groups and interviews.

The Hidden Curriculum: How Schools and Teachers May Unintentionally Affect Adolescents’ Identity Development

In our analysis of the literature, we identified 52 articles that focused on educational processes through which schools and teachers may unintentionally (and often negatively) play a role in adolescents’ identity development. These studies presented in these articles are often performed in formal education settings ( n  = 48) and concern educational processes that are part of what could be called the “hidden curriculum” (Jackson 1968 ): through these processes, messages can be implicitly communicated to adolescents about who they are, should, and can be.

Selection Practices and Differentiation

Twelve exclusively empirical studies in our literature selection addressed the role selection practices at the school level or differentiation processes at the classroom level may unintentionally play in the development of adolescents’ identities. As can be derived from Table 3 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), seven of these articles concern qualitative research, four quantitative research, and one mixed-methods research.

The ethnographic studies by Solomon ( 2007 ) and Yi ( 2013 ) that are grounded in a sociocultural perspective together with ethnographic studies by Hoffman ( 2012 ) and Barnett ( 2006 ) that respectively combine perspectives on identity development or do not explicitly mention one focus on the link between ability grouping and adolescents’ identities. These articles are concerned with adolescents’ sense of proficiency in and belonging to mathematics classes (Solomon 2007 ), English as a Second Language classes (ESL; Yi 2013 ), wind band classes (Hoffman 2012 ), and cheerleading and dancing teams (Barnett 2006 ). In these school-related contexts, the contents of, respectively, the mathematics, student, musical, and social, personal and school identities that adolescents develop were examined. Together, the studies indicate that adolescents who are allocated to a high status group—and hence to whom certain positively evaluated identity positions were available—understand themselves as having something to contribute to their class, whereas this is not the case for other adolescents. The studies also found that adolescents in high status groups seemed to be rather engaged in class (which was considered to be an indication of their domain-specific identities), whereas the opposite applied to adolescents who were denied access to high status groups. Next, three survey studies in which psychosocial perspectives are employed, focused on the degree of identity exploration that adolescents in various school tracks engage in (Negru-Subtirica et al. 2015 ; Sica 2009 ; Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry 2008 ). Two of these studies found that adolescents in prevocational tracks were less likely to explore what vocational goals they deem worth pursuing later on in life than adolescents in pre-academic tracks (Negru-Subtirica et al. 2015 ; Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry 2008 ). However, Sica ( 2009 ) found that the former group of adolescents did engage in identity exploration but often out of a fear for who they might become (out of a fear to sense emptiness, or to forget about their dreams), whereas the latter group of adolescents tend to engage in identity exploration based on a positive perception of their future (Sica 2009 ).

Negru-Subtirica et al. ( 2015 ) and Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry ( 2008 ) argued that their findings could possibly be explained by the negative image of the prevocational track, combined with these students’ limited career prospects and the associated stigma of poverty. Yet, a survey study by Pfeiffer et al. ( 2012 )—in which no particular perspective on identity development was mentioned—suggests that adolescents who are in shorter-lasting tracks (such as the prevocational one) are more likely to be further in the development of their identities, because they will leave school earlier and are therefore closer to the developmental deadline of choosing a career path than students in longer-lasting tracks (like the pre-academic track). Hence, evidence on the role of tracking in adolescents’ process of identity development remains inconclusive.

Articles in which a social psychological perspective is adopted, either examined the attributes adolescents themselves ascribed to students in prevocational and pre-academic high school tracks (Jonsson and Beach 2013 ), or the attributes others ascribe to these students according to adolescents’ own perceptions (Knigge and Hannover 2011 ). For example, Jonsson and Beach ( 2013 ) asked 224 students from the pre-academic track in Sweden to list ten descriptive attributes of a typical student in the pre-academic track and ten descriptive attributes of a typical student in the prevocational track. These adolescents described the former type of student as hard working , with good career prospects , compliant and mainstream , whereas they assigned the latter type of student the following labels: daring , challenging toward authority , rebellious , lazy , substance abusing , and with defective language. Similar patterns were found by Knigge and Hannover’s ( 2011 ) German mixed-methods study when adolescents were asked what people in general think about students in the prevocational and students in the pre-academic track.

Two ethnographic articles in which a sociological perspective is employed were concerned with differentiation at the classroom level and found that adolescents’ experiences with school success or failure—being promoted or demoted (Čeplak 2012 ) or taking an obligatory homework class (Anagnostopoulos 2006 )—created socially constructed yet real status groups of students. However, neither these studies nor the studies that are grounded in a social psychological perspective (Jonsson and Beach 2013 ; Knigge and Hannover 2011 ) provide insights into whether and how selection or differentiation processes are internalized by adolescents in their identities.

Teaching Strategies

We identified 16 studies regarding the role teaching strategies may unintentionally play in the development of adolescents’ identities. As is shown in Table 4 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), these articles comprise one theoretical paper and 15 ethnographic studies. The nine studies in which sociocultural perspectives on identity development are used are concerned with (1) how teaching strategies inform opportunities to engage in the classroom and with the subject matter as constrained by tools, norms, and values and (2) how teaching strategies make certain identity positions available in the classroom. An illustrative example is provided by Horn ( 2008 ). In her longitudinal ethnographic research, Horn compared the teaching strategies in mathematics classes of two different high schools. In one of the schools, students were provided with cumulative sets of short mathematical problems to work on individually. In the other school, students and teachers collaboratively developed activities that supported multiple-ability group work. At the first school, the teaching strategy unintentionally communicated that “Math is something that you only have to remember everything that you’ve ever learned before. And you get to a point somewhere along the line where your brain says, ‘My brain is full.’ And you can’t go on” (student quote in Horn 2008 , p. 220). Hence, the first school appeared to invite adolescents to understand themselves as “just not a mathematics person” as soon as the cumulative learning content got too advanced. However, based on classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, Horn found that the other school’s teaching strategy stressed instead that everyone is able to improve their mathematics skills for as long as they want to. This school did so by providing students who have different abilities and talents with opportunities to collaboratively work on mathematical issues.

Some of the studies grounded in sociocultural perspectives (Clark et al. 2013 ; Evnitskaya and Morton 2011 ; Horn 2008 ), as well as some of the ethnographic (Smagorinsky et al. 2005 ) and theoretical (Wallace 2012 ) studies that do not explicitly mention a theoretical perspective on identity development, were merely concerned with available opportunities to engage and present identity positions in the classroom setting. Other sociocultural studies (Anderson 2007 ; Aschbacher et al. 2010 ; Calabrese Barton et al. 2013 ; Carlone 2004 ; Lambert 2015 ; Rubin 2007 ), together with ethnographic studies that are grounded in combined perspectives on identity development (Brickhouse et al. 2000 ; Cobb et al. 2009 ; Cone et al. 2014 ), or do not mention a particular perspective on identity development (DeGennaro and Brown 2009 ; Hamilton 2002 ), focused in addition on how adolescents developed their identities in relation to these opportunities and positions: Various researchers examined how opportunities to engage shaped students’ demonstrated (Anderson 2007 ; Brickhouse et al. 2000 ; Calabrese Barton et al. 2013 ; Rubin 2007 ) and narrated (Aschbacher et al. 2010 ; Brickhouse et al. 2000 ; Carlone 2004 ; DeGennaro and Brown 2009 ; Lambert 2015 ; Rubin 2007 ) engagement in the classroom as an indication of their identities. Others focused on how teaching strategies shaped adolescents’ self-understandings as capable participants in classroom contexts (Anderson 2007 ; Calabrese Barton et al. 2013 ; Cobb et al. 2009 ; Cone et al. 2014 ; Hamilton 2002 ; Lambert 2015 ), or on adolescents’ envisioned future in a particular field (Calabrese Barton et al. 2013 ) as an indication of their identities. Irrespective of how the various identity dimensions were operationalized, the abovementioned studies found that teaching strategies did unintentionally inform adolescents’ identity development. This finding is also supported by Charland’s ( 2010 ) ethnographic study in which a psychosocial perspective on identity development is employed. Based on interviews with 58 African-American students in art classes, this study suggests that teaching strategies in art classes that do not leave space for self-expression may discourage students to understand themselves as artists, to engage in visual art, and to further explore their artist identities.

Teacher Expectations

In our literature selection, we found 17 articles concerning the role teacher expectations may (often) unintentionally play in the development of adolescents’ identities. As can be derived from Table 5 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), these articles comprise one theoretical paper and 16 ethnographic studies.

Four of the articles that adopt a sociocultural perspective on identity development demonstrated, based on classroom observations and teacher interviews, that teachers may have rather persistent expectations of adolescents through which certain identity positions are made available or unavailable (Berg 2010 ; Rubin 2007 ; Vetter 2010 ; Wortham 2006 ). Berg ( 2010 ) for example found in her longitudinal ethnographic research on a foster child that this adolescent was repetitively approached by his teachers and social workers based on others’ reports and the previous experiences they had with him as an outsider and a difficult student. Yet, these teachers and social workers failed to notice the student’s changed behavior. Consequently, the range of available identity positions in relation to which the adolescent could develop his identity was limited. Together, these four studies indicate that static teacher expectations limit adolescents’ ways to position themselves, which may sometimes benefit (Vetter 2010 ) but other times harm adolescents’ engagement in school practices (Berg 2010 ; Rubin 2007 ; Wortham 2006 ). It should be noted, though, that none of these studies provide insights into how teacher expectations shape adolescents’ narrated self-understandings.

Five other studies in which a sociocultural perspective on identity development is employed (Aschbacher et al. 2010 ; Edwards-Groves and Murray 2008 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Landers 2013 ; Olitsky et al. 2010 ) relied fully on student interviews or questionnaires regarding perceived teacher expectations. Consequently, in these studies, it cannot be examined whether perceived teacher expectations correspond to teachers’ actual expectations of their students. Yet, whether the perceived teacher expectations that are reported represent truth, imagination, or both, the studies do suggest that adolescents’ self-understandings are informed by their perceptions of their teachers’ expectations, as is indicated by an adolescent’s remark in Edwards-Groves and Murray’s study (Edwards-Groves and Murray 2008 ), “And anyway I think I am dumb and stupid ‘coz I am not as good as the others, they [the teachers] think that too” (quote in Edwards-Groves and Murray 2008 , p. 168).

Next, three more studies that are grounded in sociocultural perspectives on identity development (Bartlett 2007 ; Fields and Enyedy 2013 ; Heyd-Metzuyanim 2013 ) combined (participant) classroom observations with student and sometimes teacher interviews or focus groups. These studies provide additional and stronger evidence for the role teacher expectations may play in adolescents’ identity development. The study by Heyd-Metzuyanim ( 2013 ) showed how teacher expectations could inform adolescents’ identity development even when these expectations are communicated implicitly. Heyd-Metzuyanim ( 2013 ) described how she, as a teacher, implicitly and unintentionally expressed her low expectations of one of her students’ mathematical abilities through her continuous disengagement from this student’s mathematical thinking problems; Heyd-Metzuyanim no longer expected the student to make any additional progress in mathematics, and the identity position of becoming a better mathematician was no longer made available to the student. The observation and student interview data suggest that the student, in relation to how she was positioned by her teacher through the teacher’s expectations, changed the story of herself as a mathematics learner from someone who is willing and able to learn mathematics at the beginning of the school year to someone who could no longer grow as a mathematics student later on in the school year. The student’s mathematics identity appeared to be informed by the communicated teacher expectations and the student’s perceptions thereof.

Next, Bottrell’s ( 2007 ) study in which a sociological perspective is adopted was concerned with the social groups that teachers, according to students, implicitly create and the teacher expectations these groups are accompanied with. Bottrell reported, based on youth center observations and students’ interviews, stories of adolescents who shared that they experienced their teachers in formal education to distinguish, without formal differentiation, between more and less successful students. In case the adolescents thought they belonged, in the eyes of their teachers, to the latter group, they sometimes felt that their teachers did not have hopes for them at all, based on which they appeared to develop the idea that they were not worth bothering about. Again, though, this study does not provide insights into the extent to which the perceived teacher expectations correspond to teachers’ actual expectations of their students.

Then, two ethnographic studies in which no particular perspective on identity development is explicitly mentioned (Seaton 2007 ; Smith 2008 ) were not so much concerned with how (perceived) teacher expectations are reflected in adolescents’ self-understandings but with whether adolescents do or do not identify with the expectations that teachers explicitly express. In these two studies, teacher expectations appeared to be understood as making available fixed identity positions that adolescents may or may not endorse. For example, Smith ( 2008 ) studied a ninth-grade honors class at an American high school through classroom observations and student interviews and focus groups. Smith observed that teachers explicitly stressed that honors students were expected to work hard, to do more, and be more integer than other students. Yet, whereas Smith found that some students embraced this identity position, others commented, despite their being enrolled in the honors class, “I’m plenty smart, but I just don’t think I’m the type of person that the teachers think belongs in an honors class” (quote in Smith 2008 , p. 499). This finding indicates that teachers’ expectations have to be desirable and meaningful from students’ perspectives in order to become part of their identities.

Finally, what struck us in the analysis of the studies that focused on the role of teacher expectations in adolescents’ identity development was that various times it was argued (Steele 1997 ) and found, by ethnographic studies that differed in the perspectives on identity development they employed, that teachers (perceivably) have certain expectations of groups of adolescents that are distinguished by their ethnic background (Aschbacher et al. 2010 ; Bartlett 2007 ; Edwards-Groves and Murray 2008 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Wortham 2006 ), perceived academic abilities (Landers 2013 ; Jethwani 2015 ), and/or gender (Jethwani 2015 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ). Although it was recognized in these studies that adolescents’ identity development is, at least to a certain extent, an individual process, scholars found inequalities in (perceived) teacher expectations across different groups of students. This indicates that individual adolescents who share a certain characteristic may be confronted with norms and identity positions in relation to which they can and cannot develop their identities that are different from the norms and identity positions of adolescents who do not share that characteristic. For example, Aschbacher et al. ( 2010 ) found that, in the student interviews and questionnaires they collected among a group of 33 diverse high school students, the adolescents spoke frankly about ethnic/racial biases they faced in science classes at school. Aschbacher et al. ( 2010 ) reported that various Asian-American students shared that they thought their science teachers and administrators were supportive and had high expectations of them, whereas several African-American and Latino students talked about how they felt their teachers had lower expectations of them than of others. Together with other studies (Bartlett 2007 ; Edwards-Groves and Murray 2008 ; Jethwani 2015 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Landers 2013 ; Steele 1997 ; Wortham 2006 ), this suggests that inequalities may occur in (perceived) teacher expectations across different groups of students. Certain groups of students may experience to have different opportunities in relation to which they can develop their identities (as indicated by their engagement and/or self-understandings), which may either foster or hinder their identity development.

In our analysis of the literature, we identified 11 exclusively empirical studies regarding the role peer norms may unintentionally play in the development of adolescents’ identities. As is shown in Table 6 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), nine of these articles concern qualitative research, one presents a quantitative study, and one regards a mixed-methods study. Three studies in which sociocultural perspectives are adopted and that are based on various ethnographic research methods (Fields and Enyedy 2013 ; Ideland and Malmberg 2012 ; Volman and Ten Dam 2007 ) were concerned with and found that peers may deny each other access to certain identity positions through peer norms. An example is provided by Fields and Enyedy ( 2013 ) who studied a programming class in a middle school by means of observations, student interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups. Fields and Enyedy ( 2013 ) found that, even though the teacher of the programming class made the identity position of an attentive expert available to one of the students in this class, his peers refused to regard this student as such. This student’s classmates appeared to do so, because the student who was now trying to help out his classmates was better and longer known by them for his sarcasm, which they generally experienced as mean. The prevalent norm among the adolescent’s peers seemed to be that they could not start their relationship with this student from a clean slate, just because they found themselves in a new class. Fields and Enyedy ( 2013 ) analysis suggests that this made it difficult for the student to enact the identity position that he was offered by his teacher and that he tried to pursue. However, no insights are provided into whether and how this informed the student’s self-understanding. Four other ethnographic studies in which sociocultural perspectives are employed (Hall 2010 ; Hall et al. 2010 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Vetter et al. 2011 ) focused on how peers can make certain identity positions less appealing by stigmatizing these identity positions. These studies indicate that when adolescents actually do identify themselves with identity positions that are stigmatized by their peers, they may hide that they do in order to safeguard their reputation. For example, Hall ( 2010 ) found—based on observations as well as teacher questionnaires and interviews—that the teachers of a middle school offered their students three different reader identity positions: one of a poor reader (someone who is unable to understand most of what he or she reads, and who does not participate in class nor asks for help), one of becoming a good reader (a poor reader who engages in the practices of a good reader, for example by participating actively and by asking questions), and one of a good reader (someone who understands most of what he or she reads, who participates in class and who asks questions). However, students shared in their questionnaires and interviews that they felt it was not really possible to engage in class as someone who is becoming a good reader. Students mentioned to fear the social consequences of engaging in class as such, because classmates jointly reinforced the norm that it is embarrassing to have reading difficulties. Therefore, as some of the students reported, they would rather not get actively involved in class so they could hide their reading difficulties. This appeared to jeopardize these students’ opportunities to further develop their self-understandings as readers in a constructive way.

The finding that adolescents may feel restricted in taking up certain identity positions because they are stigmatized by peers is also supported by Charland’s ( 2010 ) ethnographic study—in which psychosocial perspective is adopted—as well as by two—respectively, ethnographic (Fletcher et al. 2009 ) and mixed-methods (Wilmot 2014 )—studies in which no particular perspective on identity development was explicitly mentioned. Interestingly, these three studies were concerned with the role of peer norms in adolescents’ identity development in the same way as some of the studies that are grounded in a sociocultural perspective, despite their different understandings of how identities develop. In addition to the other studies, though, Charland’s ( 2010 ) interview and focus group study indicates that adolescents’ exploration of, in this case, artist identities, may be hindered when peers reinforce the norm among themselves that visual arts is for “nerds” or “sissy’s” (Charland 2010 , p. 122).

Next, a quantitative study by Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi ( 2011 ), in which a social psychological perspective is employed, looked at the relation between a school’s perceived reputation and adolescents’ identities. To examine this, Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi ( 2011 ) asked 542 high school students in France, through surveys, about how they think adolescents from other schools would perceive the respondent’s school in terms of prestige and the quality of education. They also asked the respondents about their identification with school and learning. In this study, a positive relationship was found between the school’s image as perceivably perceived by peers and students’ identification with school and learning. This finding indicates that being a member of a group that is perceivably high in status according to peers may positively shape adolescents’ identities.

Organizing Explorative Learning Experiences: How Schools and Teachers May Intentionally Affect Adolescents’ Identity Development

In our analysis of the literature, we identified 37 articles that regarded educational processes through which schools and teachers may intentionally foster adolescents’ identity development. Most of the studies concerning the intentional fostering of adolescents’ identity development are conducted in after-school clubs, extracurricular classes provided at school, or at summer camps ( n  = 21). Even though learning experiences are often not referred to as such in the literature, our analysis of the existing body of research caused us to distinguish between in-breadth, in-depth, and reflective explorative learning experiences that all, in their own way, support adolescents in exploring who they are and want to be.

In-Breadth Exploration

In our literature selection, we found ten articles regarding learning experiences that allow adolescents to get introduced to learning contents, learning activities, and identity positions they were thus far unfamiliar with. We refer to such experiences as in-breadth explorative learning experiences. As can be derived from Table 7 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), the articles that will be discussed in this section comprise three theoretical papers and seven ethnographic studies. All the articles concerning in-breadth explorative learning experiences argued (Brickhouse 2001 ; Squire 2006 ; Stokes and Wyn 2007 ) or demonstrated (Barrett and Baker 2012 ; Bruin and Ohna 2013 ; Carlone et al. 2015 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Jones and Deutsch 2013 ; Stapleton 2015 ; Van Sluys 2010 ), irrespective of their perspective on identity development (also see Table 2 ), that providing adolescents with such experiences may invite them to adopt new interests, to identify undiscovered talents, and to try out new identity positions. For example, Stapleton ( 2015 ), who adopts a sociocultural perspective, examined a 4-week summer program in which a group of 30 American adolescents was taken to a site that was deeply affected by climate change. The adolescents visited schools, social outreach organizations, local population members, attended lectures about climate change, and examined climate change’s impact on mangrove forests. The interviews with 13 of the participating adolescents indicated that being introduced to people and sites that are affected by climate change stimulated many to become more engaged with environmental issues. The learning experiences the summer program introduced these adolescents to also appeared to inform their self-understandings. As one participant mentioned, “[The summer camp] has changed my identity, it’s changed my daily outlook, what I buy, how much I buy when I go to stores, it’s changed my transportation, my daily living habits” (quote in Stapleton 2015 , p. 105). Hence, the summer program appeared to have introduced the adolescents to a new topic that intrigued them, while providing them with insights into how they themselves could tackle environmental issues.

This body of literature suggests that introducing adolescents to unfamiliar learning contents, learning activities, and identity positions through on-site and hands-on activities especially helps adolescents to imagine the identity implications thereof. Supposedly, on-site and hands-on activities introduce adolescents to learning contents, learning activities, and identity positions in authentic, real-life ways, which can help them decide to what extent they identify with these contents, activities, and positions.

Finally, one theoretical (Brickhouse 2001 ) and various empirical studies in this group of literature (Barrett and Baker 2012 ; Bruin and Ohna 2013 ; Johnson et al. 2011 ; Van Sluys 2010 ) that differ in the perspectives on identity development they adopt examined the role in-breadth explorative learning experiences may play in the identity development of adolescents with a higher risk of marginalization. Bruin and Ohna ( 2013 ), who do not explicitly mention a particular perspective on identity development, studied alternative educational courses involving increased workplace-practice for adolescents who could not flourish in Norwegian’s regular and more theoretically oriented education. In these alternative courses, the aim was to introduce students to the requirements and expectations that they will face in their future vocations. Based on interviews with eight students, Bruin and Ohna ( 2013 ) concluded that, whereas these students previously felt that school was not for them, the alternative courses allowed them “to discover and nourish hidden talents and interests and new sides of themselves and experiencing how feeling able builds self-confidence and supports learning” (quote in Bruin and Ohna 2013 , p. 1100). Their analysis, as well as the other articles, suggests that, by acquiring new skills through hands-on activities, these students were able to adjust their self-understandings in a positive way in relation to previously unavailable identity positions.

In-Depth Exploration

We identified a group of 16 articles regarding learning experiences that may support adolescents in further exploring and specifying their already present self-understandings. We refer to such experiences as in-depth explorative learning experiences. As is shown in Table 8 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), among these articles, two theoretical, three mixed-methods, and 11 ethnographic studies can be found. One theoretical (Luehmann 2009 ) and six ethnographic (Furman and Calabrese Barton 2006 ; Polman 2010 ; Polman and Hope 2014 ; Polman and Miller 2010 ; Rahm et al. 2014 ; Rudd 2012 ) studies that are grounded in sociocultural perspectives on identity development provide insights into how learning experiences that acknowledge that adolescents may already have a sense of who they are (for example a “history person”) could facilitate the exploration of contents, activities, and positions that are closely related to adolescents’ already present self-understandings (for example, the identity position of an art historian or of a history teacher). Five ethnographic articles—of which one employs a sociocultural perspective on identity development (Liu and Hannafin 2010 ), whereas the others do not explicitly mention a particular perspective on identity development (Adams et al. 2014 ; Jones and Deutsch 2013 ; Kendrick et al. 2013 ; Russ et al. 2015 )—additionally focused on whether in-depth explorations actually inform adolescents’ narrated self-understandings and found that they did. For example, Adams et al. ( 2014 ) examined a multi-year out-of-school STEM program for adolescents with a general interest in STEM. This program offered hands-on activities, scientist talks, visits to a museum’s behind the scenes research labs and collections, and field trips. The teachers selected research topics that span the collaborating museum’s areas of expertise and that were broad enough to give youth flexibility in the themes they wanted to explore. Focus group and interview data indicated that allowing adolescents to further specify their STEM interests fostered their STEM identity development. As one girl remarked:

The good thing about [the program is that] we took so many classes on so many subjects…. I got to learn so much about everything in science… I learned what I like and what I do not like. [I] got exposed to everything. (quote in Adams et al. 2014 , p. 18)

Hence, the learning experiences provided by this program appeared to enable adolescents to try out roles and activities that were closely related to their already present self-understandings so that they could explore what it actually entails to be a specific type of STEM person. Again, this study, together with the other sociocultural or related studies that concern in-depth explorative learning experiences, stresses the importance of hands-on and on-site learning experiences to support adolescents in making identity commitments.

The literature also indicates that—irrespective of the employed perspective on identity development and research methods—next to hands-on and on-site activities, role models may help adolescents in the in-depth exploration of their identities (Farland-Smith 2012 ; Hughes et al. 2013 ; Jones and Deutsch 2013 ; Whiting 2006 ). What is more, studies by Farland-Smith ( 2012 ) and Hughes et al. ( 2013 ) suggest that exposing marginalized adolescents to role models might help them to challenge stereotypes that would otherwise prevent them from further exploring certain identity positions. For example, Hughes et al. ( 2013 ), who combine perspectives on identity development, demonstrated—through survey, observation, and interview data—how meeting female role models in the male-dominated STEM field helped girls to develop a more detailed and knowledge-based (rather than prejudiced) picture of how they could become valuable members of a STEM community. Being introduced to female role models convinced various girls that there was enough space for them in the STEM field, which appeared to stimulate the further exploration of their STEM-related identities.

However, a mixed-methods study among 1138 American adolescents by Gilmartin et al. ( 2007 ) in which perspectives on identity are combined too suggests that adolescents only position people who are real experts in their eyes as role models. For example, in their study, it was found that the percentage of female science teachers at a school was not significantly related to adolescents’ science engagement and self-understandings. The interviews Gilmartin et al. ( 2007 ) performed indicated that female science teachers are not considered as expert role models by adolescents because of their perceived lack of “real-life science experience,” apart from teaching.

Reflective Exploration

We identified a group of 12 articles that concern learning experiences that help adolescents reflect upon their already present self-understandings. We refer to these experiences as reflective explorative learning experiences. As can be derived from Table 9 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), the articles that will be discussed in this section comprise five theoretical papers and seven ethnographic studies. One of the ethnographic studies in which a sociocultural perspective on identity development is employed, concerned an extracurricular reading club for Asian English Language Learners who attended an American high school (Choi 2009 ). This study indicates, based on student interviews and online student discussions, that stimulating self-reflection, in this case through reading and discussing a novel together with peers, may help adolescents to better understand their own thoughts and feelings and could therefore contribute to their identity development.

The Sinai et al. ( 2012 ) study, in which a psychosocial perspective was adopted, demonstrated—through classroom observations, student assignments, and student focus groups—that writing assignments may help adolescents to enter a dialogue with certain parts of themselves, such as a younger version of themselves. In some cases, this appeared to support adolescents in gaining insights into who they currently are and into who they want to become, as was reflected in their narrated self-understandings. Various theoretical articles that either do not explicitly mention a perspective on identity development (Hall 2007 ) or combine various perspectives on identity development (Harrell-Levy and Kerpelman 2010 ; Ligorio 2010 ) also argued that engaging adolescents in (internal) dialogues can help them to learn more about what their interests are, about what they value, and about what kind of persons they want to become.

Next, a theoretical study in which identity development is understood from a sociocultural perspective (Ten Dam et al. 2004 ), together with a theoretical study that does not explicitly adopt a particular perspective on identity (Rossiter 2007 ), argued that reflective explorative learning experiences are also important because they may foster adolescents’ understanding of how their identity development is influenced by their sociocultural context. The underlying idea is that this could help adolescents to consciously search for a balance in their identity development between societal norms on the one hand and adolescents’ individual dreams of who they want to be(come) on the other.

In addition, two ethnographic studies in which a sociocultural perspective on identity development is adopted (Rogers et al. 2007 ; Vianna and Stetsenko 2011 ), three ethnographic studies that do not explicitly adopt a particular perspective (Hall 2007 ; Hardee and Reyelt 2009 ; Muhammad 2012 ), and one theoretical study in which various perspectives on identity are combined (Henfield 2012 ), suggest that offering adolescents, and especially those who are at risk of marginalization, the opportunity to become aware of and critically assess societal inequalities may foster their identity development and make them more resilient. For example, Hardee and Reyelt ( 2009 ) examined how alternative arts-based education may support the identity development of adolescents in a juvenile arbitration program and of adolescents who are not succeeding in American public schools. In the arts-based workshops, adolescents were asked to question and challenge dominant ideologies by engaging in theater assignments, writing assignments, and collage-creating assignments. The analysis of the ethnographic data suggests that this helped the participants develop a stronger sense of who they are, what they stand for, and of what external barriers they might have to overcome in their further development. One student for example noted, “It helps to talk about this kind of stuff ’cause this isn’t stuff we talk about in school. I could talk about this all day. It makes me feel stronger inside, like I know me” (quote in Hardee and Reyelt 2009 , p. 33). This quote, as well as the studies mentioned above, indicates that learning about structural inequalities may help adolescents to better understand their position in society and to develop their identities while being aware of ascribed positions, in addition to chosen ones.

Conditions for Effective Explorative Learning Experiences

Next to articles on educational processes that may unintentionally or intentionally play a role in adolescents’ identity development, we identified 37 articles that focus on preconditions that are thought to be required when teachers intentionally want to support adolescents in exploring their identities.

Meaningful Learning Experiences

We found 20 articles concerning the role of meaningful learning experiences in supporting the development of adolescents’ identities. As is shown in Table 10 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), among these articles, eight theoretical, one quantitative, and 11 ethnographic studies can be found. Various of these articles argued (Brickhouse 2001 ; Cowie et al. 2011 ; Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Higgins 2015 ; Steele 1997 ; Subramaniam et al. 2012 ) or indicated (Basu et al. 2009 ; Black et al. 2010 ; Brickhouse et al. 2000 ; Cobb et al. 2009 ; Freire et al. 2009 ; Hazari et al. 2010 ; Mittendorff et al. 2008 ; Mortimer et al. 2010 ; Polman and Miller 2010 ; Skerrett 2012 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ; Thompson 2014 ), irrespective of their theoretical perspective on identity development (also see Table 2 ) and employed research methods, that adolescents regard learning experiences as meaningful when they feel there is space for their own out-of-school knowledge and experiences in class and when they can relate what they learned in school to their out-of-school daily life. Additionally, in theoretical papers that employ sociocultural (Lemke 2001 ), combined (Whiting 2006 ), or no explicitly mentioned (Higgins 2015 ; Steele 1997 ) perspectives on identity development, it is argued that learning experiences are considered to be meaningful when adolescents recognize themselves in the learning material and content.

Together, the studies mentioned in this section suggest that meaningful learning experiences may make it easier for adolescents to link their already present self-understandings to the learning contents and activities in school and vice versa. This may help them to identify with the learning content and activities, which, in turn, would stimulate them to further explore whether they want to make certain identity commitments when it comes to those contents and activities.

Some of the studies that focus on meaningful learning experiences also explored how such experiences can be organized in school. Three ethnographic studies in which a sociocultural perspective is adopted (Basu et al. 2009 ; Skerrett 2012 ; Thompson 2014 ) and an ethnographic study in which various perspectives on identity development are combined (Cobb et al. 2009 ) found that adolescents, when they are able to voice which themes and learning interests appeal to them, and when teachers take this into account in selecting (or letting the students select) the topics and assignments, may be supported in relating their education to their personal lives. Furthermore, several articles departing from different perspectives on identity development suggest that entering a dialogue with adolescents and discussing the importance and implications of what they learned in school for their personal development may help adolescents to connect what is taught in school to their out-of-school daily lives (Black et al. 2010 ; Brickhouse et al. 2000 ; Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Mittendorff et al. 2008 ).

Here, it should be noted that identity exploration, which is understood by scholars who adopt a psychosocial perspective on identity development as the questioning of already present identifications through triggering frictions and some discomfort that allow for the (re-)evaluation of childhood identifications (Erikson 1968 ; Kroger 2007 ; Marcia 1993 ; Sinai et al. 2012 ), does not necessarily exclude the possibility of relating adolescents’ personal lives to school and vice versa. Meaningful learning experiences do not have to concern experiences that perfectly suit adolescents. Rather, they are experiences that appeal to adolescents in such a way that they feel motivated to engage in identity exploration.

Supportive Classroom Climate

We identified a group of 18 articles that concern the role of a supportive classroom climate in fostering the development of adolescents’ identities. As can be derived from Table 11 in Appendix B (Online Supplement), the articles that will be discussed in this section comprise four theoretical papers, one quantitative study, and 13 ethnographic studies. Most articles, irrespective of their perspective on identity development and employed methods (also see Table 2 ), argued (Cummins et al. 2015 ; Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Hamman and Hendricks 2005 ) or found (Buxton 2005 ; Fields and Enyedy 2013 ; Hazari et al. 2015 ; Kendrick et al. 2013 ; Lam and Tam 2011 ; Olitsky 2007 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ; Van Ryzin 2014 ) that it is important to make adolescents feel respected and appreciated to warrant a supportive classroom climate. Also, some of these articles (Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Hamman and Hendricks 2005 ; Hazari et al. 2015 ; Olitsky 2007 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ), together with other theoretical (Harrell-Levy and Kerpelman 2010 ) and empirical (Archer et al. 2009 ; Carlone et al. 2015 ) studies (that vary too in the theoretical perspective on identity they adopt), focus on the importance of making adolescents feel secure enough to make “mistakes.” Additionally, various articles indicate that peers who approach each other open mindedly (Fields and Enyedy 2013 ), and recognize each other for who they are and want to be (Cummins et al. 2015 ; Harrell-Levy and Kerpelman 2010 ), are essential aspects of a supportive classroom climate too.

The factors listed above are suggested by the literature to stimulate adolescents’ identity development, because these factors are thought to make adolescents feel confident in trying out new roles (whether broadening or deepening adolescents’ self-understandings), in reflecting on their own thoughts and feelings, and in critically assessing societal inequalities. Discovering who you are and want to be is understood to require some courage, because it may involve risks and discomfort; it is accompanied by new experiences and change (Erikson 1968 ; Kroger 2007 ; Marcia 1993 ; Sinai et al. 2012 ). A supportive social climate may help adolescents to feel safe enough to take these risks and deal with such possible discomfort. In the group of literature that focuses on the role of a supportive classroom climate in supporting the development of adolescents’ identities, we found several suggestions to foster a supportive classroom climate. First, two theoretical (Hamman and Hendricks 2005 ; Lam and Tam 2011 ) and two ethnographic (Robb et al. 2007 ; Rudd 2012 ) articles that differ in the perspectives on identity development that they employ indicate that teacher compliments (Hamman and Hendricks 2005 ; Robb et al. 2007 ) and warm teacher-student relationships (Lam and Tam 2011 ; Rudd 2012 ) may contribute to a supportive classroom climate. Some of these articles argued (Hamman and Hendricks 2005 ) or demonstrated (Robb et al. 2007 ; Rudd 2012 ) that this is the case, because teacher compliments and personal teacher-student relationships make students feel recognized and valued.

Second, other articles (again differing in the perspective on identity development they employ) focus on how teachers can communicate to their students that they are allowed to make mistakes (Archer et al. 2009 ; Hazari et al. 2015 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ; Rudd 2012 ). For example, Hazari et al. ( 2015 ) found, in their ethnographic study on physics classes that is grounded in a sociocultural perspective, that when teachers share their own doubts and make mistakes every once in a while, this may help to reassure students, as comes to the fore in the following quote:

Well, like I do not know if he does it on purpose but sometimes he makes mistakes like in the problems and stuff and like the whole class laughs and then it makes us feel more comfortable because like he, our own teacher is making mistakes. (quote in Hazari et al. 2015 , p. 749)

Together with the ethnographic study by Tan and Calabrese Barton ( 2007 ) that is grounded in a sociocultural perspective too, the study by Hazari et al. ( 2015 ) indicates that adolescents, when they do not continuously feel the pressure to perform, may feel more supported to freely explore their identities. Additionally, the study by Rudd ( 2012 ), in which perspectives on identity development are combined, suggests that when teachers approach their students open mindedly—in the sense that they offer students second chances and chances to reposition themselves on a regular basis—students may feel less judged and restricted and may therefore feel more invited to explore their identity.

Finally, several ethnographic studies differing in their adopted theoretical perspectives on identity development demonstrated how mutual recognition among peers could be stimulated by engaging adolescents in learning activities that invite mutual encouragement (Carlone et al. 2015 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ) or by making adolescents aware of what they have in common (Hardee and Reyelt 2009 ; Jones and Deutsch 2013 ; Parker 2014 ; Tan and Calabrese Barton 2007 ). For example, in an art program studied by Hardee and Reyelt ( 2009 ), adolescents were asked to create art pieces. Subsequently, the adolescents discussed their personal interpretations of the art that was made, which, based on observation and interview data, appeared to make them aware of the experiences and views they shared that seemed to foster adolescents’ bonding processes.

School, a place where adolescents spend a lot of time and are introduced to new ideas and activities, is an important context where adolescents’ identity development can be supported (e.g., Flum and Kaplan 2006 ; Kaplan and Flum 2009 ; Kaplan and Flum 2012 ; Rich and Schachter 2012 ; Schachter and Galili-Schachter 2012 ; Schachter and Rich 2011 ; Silseth and Arnseth 2011 ). Yet, due to a scattered research field, it was difficult to establish how schools and teachers can foster adolescents’ identity development and what knowledge gaps should be addressed to further support schools and teachers in doing so. Therefore, the present literature review aimed to present an overview of what insights the existing literature provides into the role of school in adolescents’ identity development.

We found that three groups of literature could be distinguished in the existing literature. The first group concerns articles that focus on educational processes through which adolescents’ identity development may unintentionally (and often negatively) be informed by schools, teachers, and peers: selection practices and differentiation, teaching strategies, teacher expectations, and peer norms. The second group of articles regards educational processes through which schools and teachers can intentionally organize experiences that support adolescents’ identity development: namely, through in-breadth exploration, in-depth exploration, and reflective exploration. The third group of articles comprises studies on two preconditions that are required to intentionally support adolescents’ identity development in school: meaningful learning experiences and a supportive classroom climate.

What struck us is that a fair share of studies on educational processes that may unintentionally play a role in adolescents’ identity development were performed in formal educational settings, whereas most of the studies on how schools and teachers can intentionally organize experiences that support adolescents’ identity development were conducted in extracurricular and out-of-school settings. The absence of studies on explorative learning experiences in adolescents’ identity development in formal education suggests that explorative learning experiences are currently not well integrated in the formal curriculum. We think this is worrisome, as introducing students to new learning contents and activities is the main purpose of formal education. Furthermore, the literature on educational processes that may unintentionally play a role in adolescents’ identity development shows how schools and teachers may significantly impact adolescents’ identities in a negative way. Yet, neither in educational practice nor in educational research, enough attention is paid to how adolescents’ identities can be influenced in a constructive manner in formal education.

What Schools and Teachers Can Learn About Their Role in Adolescents’ Identity Development

One of the contributions of this review is that it invites schools and teachers to look at educational practices in new, critical ways: The review shows how educational processes that may be considered as unproblematic could unintentionally shape how adolescents’ come to understand themselves and provides suggestions for how learning experiences that support adolescents’ identity development can be integrated in the curriculum.

First, this review makes clear that educational processes that unintentionally play a role in adolescents’ identity development are ubiquitous. The literature identified the following educational processes through which messages are communicated to adolescents concerning who they should or can be: selection practices and differentiation , teaching strategies , teacher expectations , and peer norms . It is in relation to such messages that adolescents’ develop their identities; These messages can be internalized by adolescents. Moreover, the identified educational processes involve practices that tend to be considered as normal, unproblematic, and—in the cases of selection processes, differentiation, and certain teaching strategies—efficient, yet were found to often inform adolescent’s self-understandings in a negative way. Based on the literature, it can be recommended that becoming more aware of and reflect more upon the messages that these practices may communicate could help to prevent adolescents’ identity development from being influenced in a negative manner.

Second, this review showed that different types of explorative learning experiences can be organized to foster adolescents’ identity development: in-breadth , in-depth , and reflective explorative learning experiences . Adolescents can be stimulated to explore new identity positions through in-breadth exploration or be helped to explore and further specify already existing self-understandings through in-depth exploration. Alternatively, schools and teachers can foster adolescents’ understandings of their own thoughts and feelings through reflective explorative learning experiences. Schools can ask themselves how they can restructure the curriculum in such a way that it enables these different types of explorative learning experiences, and teachers can ask themselves how they can redesign their classes so that they become explorative learning experiences. No matter what the specific identity development purpose is, and while acknowledging that this may be difficult to arrange, the literature suggests that explorative learning experiences should be meaningful to adolescents and situated in supportive classroom climates in order to be successful.

We would like to stress, though, that the provision of explorative learning experiences in formal education to support adolescents’ identity development does not necessarily entail an extra task for teachers and schools. Introducing adolescents to new ideas, activities, and possibilities is what teachers and schools are supposed to do anyway. Providing explorative learning experiences is a way of fulfilling this task through a pedagogical approach that stimulates adolescents to connect what they are taught in school to who they are and want to be (Biesta 2014 ; Vianna and Stetsenko 2011 ).

Directions for Future Research

In our selection of literature, studies that are grounded in sociocultural, psychosocial, social psychological, and sociological perspectives on identity development can be found. Currently, the great majority of these studies looks at adolescents’ identity development from a sociocultural perspective and provides insights into how available norms, values, tools, and identity positions in schools may impact how adolescents come to understand themselves. Yet, studies grounded in a psychosocial, social psychological, or sociological perspective on identity development are less prevalent (also see Table 2 ).

In this review, it has become clear—by primarily grouping the selected studies based on the identified educational processes and preconditions, instead of based on the theoretical perspectives on identity that are adopted—that when scholars, who differ in their adopted theoretical perspectives on identity, would combine their strengths, this could make a large difference in moving this body of research forward.

So far, only the role of selection practices and differentiation, peer norms, and supportive classroom climates in adolescents’ identity development have been studied from different theoretical perspectives. For example, when it comes to the educational process of selection practices and differentiation, studies using a sociocultural perspective showed the impact ability grouping may have, through the different identity positions that are available to different ability groups, on adolescents’ engagement with school (as an indication of adolescents’ school- and learning-related identities). Yet, without studies that employed a social psychological perspective, we would not have known as much about the more negative behavioral and personality characteristics that are attributed to students from lower status educational tracks compared to students from higher status tracks. Next, psychosocial studies have found indications for differences in the process of identity development (in terms of exploration and commitment) between students in different academic tracks, although the direction of the differences remains still unclear. Hence, when studies examine the role of educational processes in adolescents’ identity development from different angles, this may provide us with invaluable and complementary insights (also see Lewis and Valle 2009 ). Yet, as the articles on the role of peer norms and supportive classroom climates show, studies that differ in the theoretical perspective on identity they are grounded in can also approach the role of certain educational processes in adolescents’ identity development in a similar way, consequently validating each other’s research findings. To illustrate, articles in which a sociocultural perspective is employed, as well as articles in which a psychosocial or no explicitly mentioned perspective on identity development is adopted, all suggest that peers may restrict each other’s access to certain identity positions by refusing to recognize each other in certain ways or by stigmatizing particular identity positions which makes these positions less appealing to publicly identify with.

For the majority of the educational processes that are identified in the existing literature, it still remains to be seen to what extent research grounded in different theoretical perspectives on identity development would complement and/or validate each other. However, the findings that are derived from articles on selection processes and differentiation, peer norms, and supportive classroom climates promise that research on the other identified educational processes, when studied from different angles, will add to the current research field. Furthermore, by bringing research concerning particular educational processes and preconditions together, based on different theoretical perspectives on identity, this literature review allows scholars to see how their research may complement research performed by scholars who employ other theoretical perspectives, and vice versa, while supporting them in identifying research gaps when it comes to particular educational processes or preconditions.

To date, studies that are grounded in psychosocial, social psychological, and sociological perspectives tend to be less occupied with whether and how educational processes and preconditions in day-to-day school-based experiences and interactions may impact adolescents’ identities than studies in which a sociocultural perspective is employed. This is a limitation of the existing body of research that points to a direction for future research and, moreover, that cannot be easily substituted by findings from other strands of research. Although psychologists do study the identity-related phenomena of self-concept (people’s perceptions of themselves; Marsh 1990 ) and possible selves (people’s positive and negative images of their selves in a future state; Oyserman et al. 2006 ) in education, these phenomena are generally studied in a quantitative manner to examine respectively their relation to adolescents’ academic achievements (e.g., Marsh 1990 ) and goal-related actions (e.g., Oyserman et al. 2006 ). These strands of research too tend to be less concerned with how daily interactions and experiences in school inform adolescents’ self-concepts or possible selves.

With regard to more circumscribed identity dimensions, the existing research was highly skewed towards studies on the development of adolescents’ STEM identities. Research on schools’ role in the development of, for example, adolescents’ history identities or geology identities is non-existent, and studies concerning the role of school in adolescents’ literacy identity are scarce. It remains to be studied whether these identity dimensions—as well as identity dimensions not covered in this review study, such as gender and ethnic identities—are subject to the same educational processes as the identity dimensions that are prevalent among the articles included in this review.

We would like to conclude our literature study by emphasizing that this review demonstrates, more than anything, that even though we know that schools and teachers in formal education may unintentionally impact adolescents’ identity development, there are only a few studies on how adolescents’ identity development can intentionally be supported in formal education (referred to as “identity education” by Schachter and Rich 2011 ). Moreover, the body of literature on learning experiences that can intentionally be organized to support adolescents’ identity development suggests that learning experiences outside of school may impact the identities of adolescents too. This is something to take into account in future research, as adolescents participate in learning experiences in various contexts (home, sports clubs, side jobs), and the communicated identity messages and explorative learning experiences of each of these contexts may interact. The bottom line is, though, that, currently, research (irrespective of its perspective on identity development) cannot sufficiently support schools and teachers in the intentional fostering of adolescents’ identity development in formal education: The strategies that are identified by the literature on extracurricular and out-of-school settings may not simply be transferable to formal school settings. Therefore, we argue that, to support adolescents’ identity development in our contemporary society, future research’s first priority should be to map to what extent identity exploration is encouraged in current formal curriculums and to provide insights into how adolescents’ identity development can successfully and intentionally be fostered in formal education.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research [grant number 405-15-716]. Special thanks to Janneke Staaks (information specialist at the University of Amsterdam) for her assistance in the selection of the databases and the development of our search strategy. We would also like to thank Desiree Berendsen, Carla van Boxtel, Lenie van den Bulk, Hanoch Flum, Avi Kaplan, Thea van Lankveld, Sarah Leker, Piet Post, Ati Raban, Floor Rombout, Marloes Schrijvers and Wim Wardekker (a group consisting of researchers, teacher educators, teachers, and principals) for their helpful comments on our first draft.

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Monique Verhoeven & Monique Volman

Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Astrid M. G. Poorthuis

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Verhoeven, M., Poorthuis, A.M.G. & Volman, M. The Role of School in Adolescents’ Identity Development. A Literature Review. Educ Psychol Rev 31 , 35–63 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-018-9457-3

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10 Who is behind the mask? Identity in literature

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In literature, we can find all aspects and dimensions of identity: identity through time, the mind–body problem, the identity of words and things, gender boundaries, identity crisis, divided loyalty, mistaken identity, split identity, and the demands of modernity for individuals to have a national, social, and gender identity. ‘Who is behind the mask? Identity in literature’ provides a range of illustrative examples. In addition to substantial questions of identity, the art of literature is also concerned with identity in two formal ways. Style expresses the identity of fictitious characters as well as of writers. Finally, by creating fictitious worlds, literature constructs identity puzzles in its own right.

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Fostering Inclusivity in College Counseling

Recent posts, subscribe here, more expert advice, let's get existential: how to write a college essay about identity.

When you’re a teenager, you’re probably too busy to sit down and think about your own identity. No one exactly assigns you “introspection time” as homework (though, if you’re my student, this has very likely happened). So when you start working on your college essays, it might be the first time you truly start thinking about how you can express who you are in a way that will help a group of strangers understand something about you. Let’s be honest—it feels like a lot of pressure to sum up your identity in 250 words or less. But we’re here to help.

There are many different types of application essays you’ll need to write, as my colleague Annie so perfectly laid out here . But we’re going to talk about one type in particular: the essays about identity and diversity. These are powerful college essays that give admissions officers an opportunity to glimpse into your daily life and understand your unique experiences. For some students, though, these essays can be daunting to think about and write.  

Ever wonder why colleges are asking these questions? Well, the simple answer is that they want to get to know you more. Aside from your academic interests, your activities, and your accomplishments in the classroom, there really isn’t that much space to talk about things like your ethnic background, religion, gender identity, or local community. And these are things colleges want to know about you, too!

How Do You Write a Good Identity and Diversity Essay?

Before you start writing, let’s define a few terms you might run into while drafting your college essays about identity and diversity.

Who are you? I know what you’re thinking—it’s way too early in the morning to get this existential. I hear you. But let’s break this down. Identity is made up of many qualities: personality, culture, ethnic or racial background, sexual orientation, gender, physical ability, and linguistic background, among others. Maybe you identify really strongly with the religion on Mom’s side of the family, but not Dad’s. Maybe you speak a language not typical of folks from your culture. Maybe you have recently come into your gender identity and finally feel like yourself. Why is that identity important to the way you define who you are? Think of it like this: If you’ve met someone new, and your goal is to help them get to know you in the shortest amount of time possible, how would you be able to accomplish this? What’s your tagline? That’s how you’ll want to tackle this type of college essay.

Diversity  

One individual person can’t be diverse. But when a college is referring to diversity, they’re usually looking to their student body and asking how you, as an individual with your own identity, can add to their diversity. What experiences have you had in your life that might help you make the student body more diverse? Have you dealt with dyslexia and come to terms with how best to learn, keeping your abilities in mind? If so, how can you contribute to other students who might learn differently? Did you grow up as the oldest of 10 siblings and have to take care of them on a daily basis? What kind of responsibilities did you have and how did that influence you? These don’t need to be visible qualities. The goal of the diversity college essay is to understand how these identifying factors can help you contribute to a school in a way they haven’t seen before.  

Let’s define community. You may associate it with the city or neighborhood you live in. But a community doesn’t have to be geographical. It doesn’t even have to be formal. Community can come from that sense of connection you have with like-minded people. It can be built with people you’ve shared experiences with. So, when we think of community in this sense, we could be thinking about the community that exists within your apartment complex. We could be thinking about the youth group at your mosque. We could be thinking about your little group of artists within your science and tech magnet school. Think about what communities you are a part of, and be prepared to talk about your place within them.

You might think that these questions are only being asked by small liberal arts schools—but that’s not true. Bigger schools and colleges also want to get to know all of the thousands of students they’re bringing to campus as part of their class.

Big Name Colleges that Care About Diversity

To give you a glimpse of the variety, here are a few examples of college essays where these identity and diversity may come into play:

University of Michigan

“Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.”

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

“Expand on an aspect of your identity (for example, your religion, culture, race, sexual or gender identity, affinity group, etc.). How has this aspect of your identity shaped your life experiences thus far?”

Pomona College

“Tell us about an experience when you dealt with disagreement or conflict around different perspectives within a community.”

Sarah Lawrence College

“Sarah Lawrence College's community places strong value in inclusion and diversity. In 250-500 words, tell us about what you value in a community and how your perspective, lived experiences, or beliefs might contribute to your College community.”

Remember what these colleges are trying to understand: who you are and what has influenced you to become the person you are today (identity), where you come from (community), and how you might be able to add to the diversity of their college campus. Once you really get to the core and understand the intent of these types of college essays, you’ll absolutely be able to write in an earnest and genuine way. We say this frequently at Collegewise, but it’s worth repeating here, especially when it comes to essays about identity and diversity. Just be yourself.

About Us:  With more than twenty years of experience, Collegewise counselors and tutors are at the forefront of the ever-evolving admissions landscape. Our work has always centered on you: the student. And just like we’ve always done, we look for ways for you to be your best self - whether it’s in the classroom, in your applications or in the right-fit college environment. Our range of tools include  counseling ,  test prep ,  academic tutoring , and essay management, all with the support of our proprietary platform , leading to a 4x higher than average admissions rates. 

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Research: What Is American Identity and Why Does It Matter?

Why Does the American Identity Matter?

The most important reason for understanding American identity is related to white racial identification. It may not be prevalent in U.S. political attitudes, but it’s still an issue. A survey from 2012 asked white respondents to indicate if whiteness represented the way they thought of themselves most of the time, as opposed to identifying themselves as Americans . One fifth of the survey’s white respondents said that they preferred the term white to American when identifying themselves.

How to Analyze American Identity

• There’s no such thing as a universal identity, especially for an omni-cultural country such as the USA.
• Everyone has their own understanding of what it means to be American today, as citizens come from different religious, ethnic, ideological, and geographical backgrounds.
• Explaining the concept of American identity calls for an inclusive approach based on solidarity.
• Depending on how you discuss the concept, an academic essay may require arguments on modern-day immigration and immigrant policies. How do they fit within the common understanding of American identity?

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How to Write an Essay about Your Identity

If you’re looking for a simple way to write an essay about your identity, then you’ve found the perfect tutorial!

Writing an essay about your identity can be a great way to highlight who you are as a person and explore your values, experiences, and characteristics. So, in this tutorial, I will show you how to write such an essay in five simple steps effectively. We’ll also work on a sample essay so you can see how to put these steps into practice.

Let’s get started!

Step 1. Plan the word count for your essay’s paragraphs.

Doing this first step is important if you want to make things simpler for you while writing an essay. You’ll get to know exactly how many words each paragraph will have, which makes the process quicker.

Note that essays have three parts you must include:

• The introductory paragraph
• Three body paragraphs
• The concluding paragraph

For example, suppose you need a 300-word paragraph. How would you distribute 300 words across five paragraphs? Here’s a simple way to do that:

That’s all you need for your essay — short introductory and concluding paragraphs and three concise body paragraphs.

Step 2. Select your main idea and supporting points.

You need to come up with a central idea that will give you a frame of reference for the rest of your essay. To do this, you can first consider what your identity is. Then, determine what shapes this identity. 

For example, are you an artist? Maybe you’re imaginative and creative! Do you have a unique perspective on things? Do you like expressing yourself visually?

Or maybe, you’re a doctor? Do you have extensive knowledge and expertise in the field of medicine? Do you possess strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills?

Whatever they are, you will use them as your basis — your essay’s thesis .

For our sample essay, we can use this as our main idea: “My identity as an educator has been shaped by my faith, parenthood, and my inborn creativity.”

Next, we will use the Power of Three to divide this main idea into three supporting points. 

The Power of Three is a three-part structure that helps you produce your body paragraphs.

Let’s see how it works for our sample essay. In this case, we will use three things that could shape someone’s identity as an educator:

• My faith is an integral part of my identity.
• Parenthood has had a significant impact on my identity.
• Creativity has been a part of my identity for as long as I can remember.

Now we have what we need to start writing our essay. Let’s go to the next step!

Step 3. Write the introductory paragraph.

To write an introductory paragraph , you can follow the diagram below:

First, you need an introduction — an opening sentence that briefly sets the essay’s context. Next, you will include your thesis and three supporting points.

Here’s an example:

Introductory Paragraph

“Different factors, including beliefs, experiences, and innate qualities, shape our identities. For me, my identity as an educator has been shaped by my faith, parenthood, and my inborn creativity. My faith guides my values and principles in teaching. My experiences as a parent have also helped me develop empathy and understanding toward my students. And my inborn creativity allows me to come up with innovative ways to present lessons, engage my students, and foster a positive learning environment.”

As you can tell, the introductory paragraph proceeds from general to specific , starting from the introduction, followed by the thesis and three supporting points.

Step 4. Write the body paragraphs.

Our essay will contain three body paragraphs that expound our supporting points. Here’s how to structure a body paragraph in any essay:

Body paragraphs start with a topic sentence that briefly summarizes the entire paragraph. Next, you will explain and illustrate your point using example/s .

Paragraph 1

“My faith is an integral part of my identity. My faith guides me in creating a safe and positive learning environment for my students. I strive to make my classroom a safe space where my students feel welcomed and valued. I model kindness and compassion, which I hope inspires and encourages my students to treat each other with the same level of respect and understanding.”

Note that the topic sentence gives context to the entire body paragraph. The following sentences explain the supporting point, and the rest illustrates it with an example.

Paragraph 2

“Parenthood has had a significant impact on my identity as an educator. It has taught me to approach teaching with compassion and empathy. As a parent, I learned that everyone has unique needs and struggles that require understanding and, if possible, a personalized approach to teaching. I apply this principle in my classroom by taking the time to get to know my students and understand their personal learning styles and circumstances. I schedule one-on-one meetings with students and offer them encouragement and resources to help those struggling to catch up.”

Paragraph 3

“Creativity has always been a part of my identity, especially as an educator. It is essential in creating engaging learning experiences for my students. I constantly look for fun and innovative ways to present lessons that will help them foster a love for learning. I incorporate hands-on activities and projects in my lessons to challenge my students creatively and critically about the material. For example, when I taught animal classification last academic year, I organized a field trip to a local zoo where the students observed and learned firsthand about the animals and ecosystems they were studying.”

Like paragraph 1, body paragraphs 2 and 3 follow the exact same structure outlined in the diagram above. It proceeds from the topic sentence to the explanation and example.

Excellent! Now we’re ready for the final step.

Step 5. Write the concluding paragraph.

The most time-proven way to write a concluding paragraph for any essay is to simply paraphrase all the points you’ve already mentioned in the introductory paragraph. Don’t copy and paste it! Instead, you can check your introductory paragraph and write the concluding paragraph based on it.

Let’s try this method to write the concluding paragraph in our sample essay:

“A combination of our beliefs, experiences, and characteristics shape our identities. As an educator, my identity has been shaped by my faith, parenthood, and creativity. My faith guides me in modeling important values in my classroom. Parenthood has taught me to approach teaching with empathy. And my creativity enables me to present material in innovative and engaging ways, which helps foster a love for learning in my students.”

We only restated the points in the introductory paragraph but used different words. Doing so makes writing the concluding paragraph pretty quick and simple.

And now we’re done! I hope you find this tutorial helpful.

Now it’s time for you to write your essay about your identity!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity

Jennifer Whiting, First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity , Oxford University Press, 2016, 261pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199967919.

Reviewed by David O. Brink, University of California, San Diego

This is the first of three volumes of Jennifer Whiting's collected papers and focuses on issues about personal identity and friendship. The volume's eight essays are all previously published, but in disparate venues, so the volume allows the reader to see the cumulative force of ideas developed piecemeal and recurrent themes. Whiting herself identifies three such themes. First, she focuses on psychic contingenc y and variability , which is sometimes a symptom of pathology but often a reminder that familiar assumptions of moral psychology are neither universal nor necessary. Second, she explores Aristotle's conception of the friend as another self and its significance for our understanding of intrapersonal and interpersonal relations and concern. Her third theme emerges from the second and involves a non-egocentric perspective on self-love and love of others. She treats the interpersonal case as prior in explanation and justification to the intrapersonal case.

Her outside-in strategy contrasts with the inside-out strategy that goes with an egocentric assimilation of the interpersonal case to the intrapersonal case. This leads her to defend an ethocentric , or character-based, conception of both prudential concern and friendship. There are important kinds of historical influence and inspiration in these essays, including Whiting's exploration of Aristotle's conception of friendship, her discussion of Platonic love, and her discussion of Plato's conception of the soul in the Republic . However, most of the essays concentrate on systematic, rather than historical, issues and debates. Apparently, the other two volumes of essays will be more historical, focusing on the metaphysical and psychological basis of Aristotle's ethics.

These essays are long and densely argued, defying easy summary. But they are extremely rewarding and repay careful study. They display philosophical imagination and give expression to an independent voice. Whiting's essays are also deeply personal, reflecting ongoing conversations with her philosophical mentors, colleagues, and friends. Whiting is engaged in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Sydney Shoemaker, Derek Parfit, Annette Baier, and Terence Irwin, among others, and one comes away with a strong sense of her as a philosophical interlocutor . Her essays on personal identity and friendship are among the most important work on these topics in the last three decades. Her defense of a broadly psychological reductionist conception of personal identity is a worthy successor to the contributions of Shoemaker and Parfit, and her ethocentric conception of friendship and self-love is an important and original contribution to the literature on love and friendship. Anyone interested in these philosophical topics will profit from reading these essays together.

In what follows, I summarize the contributions of individual essays and then turn to raising some questions about her claims about personal identity and friendship.

In traditional debates about the nature of personal identity, Locke, Bishop Butler, and Thomas Reid agree that personal identity is a forensic concept, tied to backward-looking normative concerns about responsibility and desert and forward-looking ones involving the special concern one has for one's own future that is different from the sort of concern one has for others to whom one stands in no special relationship. In "Friends and Future Selves" Whiting explores the worry that Butler and Reid raise that Lockean conceptions of personal identity cannot explain and justify special concern, because they recognize identity in only a "loose and popular," not a "strict and philosophical," sense.

Though she raises questions about whether personal identity is sufficient for special concern, her main claim is that it is not necessary. Interpersonal relationships, such as friendship, also display a form of special concern that does not presuppose personal identity. In fact, friendship allows us to stand the normal assumption that special concern requires personal identity on its head -- it's not just that special concern does not presuppose personal identity but rather that personal identity presupposes special concern. Just as special concern for one's friend is part of what makes that person a friend, so too special concern for oneself is part of what establishes psychological continuity within one's own life. Presumably, special concern involves not only positive affective regard for its target but also a suite of behavioral dispositions to make various investments and sacrifices for the sake of that person. Whiting's claim is that special concern is not the product of personal identity so much as an essential constituent of it.

Friendship is the focus of "Impersonal Friends," where Whiting examines Aristotle's claim that the friend is "another oneself" ( Nicomachean Ethics 1161b 19, 28-35, 1169b4-6; Magna Moralia 1213a2-23) and defends her ethocentric interpretation that the ground of the best sort of friendship is the friend's virtuous character. She defends this kind of impersonal friendship for another's virtue against Gregory Vlastos's objections and against an egocentric interpretation defended by Irwin and myself, according to which friendship makes the beloved's interests an extension of the agent's own interests. [1] Both the egocentric and ethocentric interpretations agree that friends stand to each other in psychological relations much as a person stands psychologically to his own future self and that friends should care for each other as they care for themselves. But whereas the egocentric interpretation reads these claims from the inside-out -- extending claims from the intrapersonal case to the interpersonal one -- Whiting's ethocentric interpretation reads these claims from the outside-in -- drawing lessons for the intrapersonal case from the interpersonal one. She thinks that the outside-in strategy is to be preferred, in part because she thinks the egocentric approach supports a "colonial" attitude toward friends. [2]

In "Trusting First and Second Selves", Whiting examines Baier's claims about the importance of trust among friends. She subjects Baier's claims to friendly amendment in which she argues that a certain amount of distrust or at least a willingness to distrust is a mark of healthy relationships to friends and to oneself. She leverages Virginia Woolf's concerns in Three Guineas to raise questions about whether we ought to trust ourselves fully. Presumably, these forms of distrust are also justified in response to blindspots and implicit bias. We can't imagine theoretical or practical reasoning without some substantial degree of trust in our earlier selves, but that trust needs to be balanced with a healthy dose of fallibilism. Presumably, these reasons to adopt a fallibilist attitude toward ourselves apply to friends and others. Common projects won't succeed without considerable trust, but that trust should be leavened with a willingness to question the assumptions and commitments of our friends.

In "Back to 'The Self and the Future'" Whiting revisits a debate between Shoemaker and Bernard Williams over the possibility of "body swaps" of the sort discussed by Shoemaker in the famous Brownson case, in which Brown's brain is transplanted into Robinson's body. [3] To separate psychological continuity and sameness of brain, we might modify the Brownson case so that Brownson is psychologically continuous with Brown without having Brown's brain. We could do this by scanning Brown's brain states and then reconfiguring Robinson's brain so as to realize Brown's psychology. Brownson would then be psychologically, but in no way physically, continuous with Brown. Even Williams initially agrees with Shoemaker that Brownson seems to be Brown, because he inherits Brown's mental life. But Williams thinks that our intuitions here are unstable. If we re-describe such a case in terms of psychological changes that will be induced in you prior to the person in your body being tortured, Williams claims, we will find that we still experience special concern for the psychologically discontinuous person who will be tortured, revealing that our criteria of identity are physical or bodily.

Whiting does a nice job of reconstructing the dialectic and pointing out ways in which Williams begs the question against Shoemaker and psychological continuity. Moreover, she invokes her comparison of friends and future selves to motivate the idea, which Williams must deny, that personal identity can be indeterminate. Interpersonal associations come in degrees, with the result that some associations are clearly friendships, some are clearly not, and some have an indeterminate status. If intrapersonal relations are relevantly like friendship, we should be receptive to the idea that some forms of psychological continuity are sufficient for personal identity, some are insufficient, and some have an indeterminate status.

"Personal Identity: The Non-Branching Form of What Matters" is an excellent exposition and defense of a broadly psychological reductionist claim that personal identity consists in non-branching psychological continuity. Whiting usefully distinguishes two strands in this tradition -- a reductionist strand, which she associates with Parfit, and a non-reductionist strand, which she associates with Shoemaker and defends. This distinction might also be understood as a contrast between two different kinds of reductionism with different objects. Shoemaker and Parfit both accept psychological reductionism about personal identity insofar as they both think that persons P1 and P2 are identical insofar as the later one is related to the earlier one by non-branching psychological continuity. [4] Notice that the definiens of reductionism about personal identity invokes the concept of a person. Parfit and Shoemaker part company over whether to accept reductionism about persons, with Parfit embracing reductionism about persons and Shoemaker denying it. Parfit thinks that persons can be reduced to (or perhaps eliminated in favor of) mental happenings that need not be ascribed to a person or thinker ( Reasons and Persons §81), whereas Shoemaker thinks that mental states should be understood functionally as states of a system -- a person -- with characteristic inputs, outputs, and relations to other internal states of the system. Whiting plausibly suggests that the debate between Shoemaker and Parfit can be traced to two different strands in Locke's views about personal identity. Parfit's reductionism about persons fits best with the passive dimensions of Locke's focus on experiential memory, whereas Shoemaker's non-reductionism about persons fits best with Locke's emphasis on the forensic role of persons and the connection between persons and agency.

"One is Not Born but Becomes a Person: The Importance of Philosophical Mothering" engages some of Baier's reflections about the limitations in traditional rationalist conceptions of persons as anti-naturalistic, individualistic, and intellectualist. Whiting wants to endorse many aspects of Baier's naturalism about persons and her emphasis on the way in which normative maturation is dependent on proper nurture from another. But she wants to embrace these claims while rejecting Baier's critique of the method of cases and thought experiments prevalent in the literature on personal identity.

"Love: Self-Propagation, Self-Preservation, or Ekstasis?" looks at the analysis of interpersonal love in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus , comparing three different kinds of readings -- Irwin's egocentric conception, Harry Frankfurt's identificationist conception, and her own ecstatic conception, in which the lover literally transcends himself. Whiting thinks the ecstatic conception is necessary to explain the claims the beloved makes on the lover and the reciprocity that one finds in the best sort of love.

"Psychic Contingency in the Republic " is a discussion of Plato's claims about the human soul in the Republic . Whiting contrasts a realist reading that takes seriously Plato's talk of parts of the soul and identifies the person with the rational part of her soul with a deflationist reading that understands parts of the soul to be simply different aspects of an agent. This debate seems bound up with how many parts of the soul Plato recognizes and which parts these are. Some commentators think that Book IV's understanding of akrasia requires a deflationist conception of the parts of the soul so that we can understand the agent acting against her own better judgment, but they also think that the discussion of deviant constitutions and souls in Books VIII-IX requires taking seriously the idea that different parts of an agent's soul act as independent agents. Both realists and deflationists tend to assume that we need a consistent reading of the soul and its parts throughout the Republic and that Plato accepts a tripartite division of the soul throughout.

Whiting questions these assumptions. She argues that when Plato talks about the relations among the parts of the soul in virtuous and non-virtuous people the number and identity of the relata and the nature of the relation can vary. In the virtuous person, there is a reason-responsive harmony between reason, emotion, and the appetites, so that it is misplaced to think of faction and rule of one part by others. By contrast, in non-virtuous persons there is psychic conflict, and the number and identity of the factions will depend on the ways in which the individual is reasons-responsive or not. This leads Whiting to defend a hybrid reading of Books II-IV and VII-IX in which deflationists are roughly right in their treatment of the appetites in II-IV and the realists are roughly right about the parts of corrupt souls in VIII-IX. Her case for contingency and variability in Plato's moral psychology in the Republic is exceptionally rich and interesting and repays careful reading.

Any reader should find these essays rewarding and stimulating. Different readers will be drawn to different themes and will assess Whiting's claims differently. I'll close by raising some questions about Whiting's contrast between egocentric and ethocentric conceptions of intrapersonal and interpersonal unity, and her defense of the ethocentric conception.

Both intrapersonal and interpersonal unity are matters of psychological continuity, and what separates intrapersonal and garden-variety interpersonal cases is a matter of degree, not kind. The egocentric conception adopts an inside-out approach, claiming that interpersonal psychological continuity extends the person's interests, even when it does not extend her life. Fission in which Tom's psychology is transferred to two persons -- Dick and Harry -- is the limiting form of interpersonal psychological continuity, because the degree of continuity is, by hypothesis, maximal. Here, Tom does not literally survive fission, because identity is a one-one relation and psychological continuity is a one-many relation, but nonetheless we can see Tom's interests preserved in the lives of Dick and Harry. Tom has posthumous interests in the lives of Dick and Harry. Of course, fission is a thought experiment. But there are real forms of interpersonal psychological continuity all around us, notably in relationships between friends and loved ones who share experiences and discussion with each other, influence each other psychologically, and care about each other. We often talk about the interests of the beloved as part of the interests of the lover, and the egocentric conception asks us to take this seriously.

By contrast, the ethocentric conception adopts an outside-in approach, claiming that self-love should be understood on the model of love of another. In particular, the ethocentric conception claims that the basis of interpersonal love is love of the character -- in particular, the virtuous character or perhaps the capacity for virtuous character -- of another. This is a kind of impersonal love. When we extend this conception to the intrapersonal case, we see that even love of one's future self is not egocentric but is or should be an impersonal love of the virtuous character of one's future self. Rather than loving another as myself, I should love myself as I love another.

As we have seen, Whiting defends her ethocentric conception both as an interpretation of Aristotle's conception of friendship and as a systematic proposal in part because she thinks that the egocentric approach imparts an objectionably colonial attitude toward interpersonal love and friendship. I am skeptical of both claims. I think that Aristotle's eudaimonism commits him to the egocentric conception, that his claims about the friend as another self conform to the inside-out approach ( EN 1170b6-9), and that treating the good of another as a complete, but not unconditionally complete, good can avoid taking a colonial attitude toward others. [5] I have argued for these claims elsewhere but don't want to re-litigate them here. Instead, I want to raise a concern about Whiting's ethocentric conception and mention an alternative to both egocentric and ethocentric conceptions that she might find congenial.

The basis of ethocentric concern for another is the other's valuable traits. This explains one's reasons for becoming friends with another on account of the other's traits. But it seems more problematic as the ground for concern for another who is already one's friend. If my reason for caring for my friend consists in her virtuous or valuable traits, then it seems that I care about her virtue, rather than herself. The ethocentric conception has difficulty explaining why I should care more about my friend than other virtuous people with whom I am not friends or why I shouldn't be willing to "trade up" from my virtuous friend to a still more virtuous stranger. Whiting does offer pragmatic reasons for privileging one's virtuous friends over virtuous strangers -- epistemic and causal factors allow one to better promote virtue with those one already knows and associates with (p. 61). But like Henry Sidgwick's similar pragmatic utilitarian justification of special concern and special obligations and John Perry's impersonal justification of personal projects, these pragmatic rationales for special concern may seem insufficient to underwrite robust special concern for oneself and one's friends. [6]

We can avoid these worries about ethocentric special concern by claiming that it is the shared history with the individual who is a friend that grounds an agent-relative form of special concern for her that one doesn't have for a stranger, however virtuous. One form of agent-relative concern is egocentric. But we can make sense of agent-relative concern that is not egoistic. Let us stipulate that prudence and egocentric concern presuppose personal identity, inasmuch as both assume that reasons are grounded in self-interest. Fission teaches us that we can have agent-relative special concern in the absence of personal identity, provided there is psychological continuity. But then we can formulate agent-relative concern that presupposes continuity, rather than identity. Taking a page from the Lockean reply to Butler's circularity worry, we might call this special concern quasi-prudence and treat it as a quasi-egocentric conception. Once we see that there is interpersonal psychological continuity to be found outside of fission cases in more familiar forms of association, we can see how we might defend a quasi-egocentric conception of friendship. This quasi-egocentric conception would be different from the egocentric conception in not viewing the friend through the lens of self-interest, but it would also be different from the ethocentric conception in assigning intrinsic, and not just pragmatic, significance to the shared history between friends.

We might compare the quasi-egocentric conception of special concern with C.D. Broad's doctrine of self-referential altruism in his unjustly neglected essay "Self and Others." [7] Broad was reacting to the reductionist tendencies in Sidgwick's two methods of ethics -- egoism and utilitarianism. Broad thought that egoism cannot do justice to our duties to others and that utilitarianism cannot do justice to our special obligations. So, he introduced an agent-relative alternative between these extremes that he thought better reflected ordinary views about special concern for others. Self-referential altruism recognizes non-derivative reason to benefit others but it says that

each of us has specially urgent obligations to benefit certain individuals and groups which stand in certain special relations to himself , e.g. his parents, his children, his fellow-countrymen, etc. And it holds that these special relationships are the ultimate and sufficient ground for those specially urgent claims on one's beneficence. ("Self and Others," 279-80).

Self-referential altruism is a hybrid of two non-derivative elements: an agent-neutral concern for anyone it is in one's power to affect for better or worse and an agent-relative special concern for those to whom one stands in special relationships. The quasi-egocentric conception stands to egocentric and ethocentric rivals much as self-referential altruism stands to egoism and utilitarianism. Because it is a hybrid of inside-out and outside-in elements, a quasi-egocentric conception may have virtues that its purebred rivals don't. Perhaps the take-home message from "Friends and Future Selves" should be a hybrid conception, rather than the ethocentric conception we find in "Impersonal Friends."

[1] See Gregory Vlastos, "The Individual as Object of Love in Plato" in Platonic Studies (Princeton University Press, 1981) and Terence Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles (Clarendon Press, 1988), ch. 18. I have defended the egocentric interpretation in "Rational Egoism, Self, and Others" in Identity, Character, and Morality , ed. O. Flanagan and A. Rorty (MIT Press, 1990); "Self-love and Altruism" Social Philosophy & Policy Social Philosophy & Policy 14 (1997): 122-57; "Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community" Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999): 252-89; and "Eudaimonism and Cosmopolitan Concern" in Virtue, Happiness, and Knowledge: Themes from the Work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin , ed. D. Brink, S. Meyer, and C. Shields (Clarendon Press, forthcoming).

[2] I find it puzzling that Whiting thinks that I badly misread her "Friends and Future Selves" (1986) in my "Rational Egoism, Self, and Others" (1990) as presupposing a form of rational egoism (pp. 9, 198). I explicitly acknowledge that we come to the intrapersonal/interpersonal comparison from different perspectives: "On the surface, her position is just the reverse of mine; she wants to model the justification of self-concern on concern for one's friends, whereas I want to model the justification of concern for one's friends (and others more generally) on self-concern. I'm less clear that our different routes to this comparison between self-concern and concern for one's friends require us to disagree on the substance of the comparison." ("Rational Egoism, Self, and Others," 373). So not only do I not presuppose that she is a rational egoist, I deny it, but nonetheless wonder if we could agree on the substance of the comparison. To put it in terms of the metaphors introduced here, I acknowledge that while my approach is inside-out and hers is outside-in, I wonder if we could nonetheless meet somewhere in the middle.

[3] See Sydney Shoemaker, Self-knowledge and Self-Identity (Cornell University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 22-25 and Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future" reprinted in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973).

[4] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, 1984), Part III and Sydney Shoemaker, "Personal Identity: A Materialist's Account" in S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne, Personal Identity (Blackwell, 1984).

[5] See my essays mentioned in note 1. However, as Whiting points out (p. 10), Magna Moralia 1212b18-20 can be read so as to support the outside-in reading.

[6] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics , 7 th ed. (Macmillan, 1907), esp. pp. 431-39 and John Perry, "The Importance of Being Identical" in The Identities of Persons , ed. A. Rorty (University of California Press, 1976). Interestingly, Whiting's pragmatic rationale for special concern in "Impersonal Friends" seems in tension with her criticism of Perry's pragmatic rationale for personal projects in "Friends and Future Selves" (pp. 35-38).

[7] C.D. Broad, "Self and Others" in Broad's Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy , ed. D. Cheney (George Allen and Unwin, 1971).

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The negative effects of social media on the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work

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The aim of this study was to understand the social identity levels of adolescents and to analyze the negative effects of social media on their social identity from the perspective of social work. The researcher used a descriptive-analytical technique in this study. The study's sample consisted of 200 adolescents (male and female) in the secondary stage at age group (15–18 years). The researcher designed a questionnaire based on the four main levels of James Marcia's theory of social identity. The results showed a variety of negative effects of social media on the social identity of adolescents in terms of "achievement - postponement - closure - dispersion", this requires taking serious measures from the family, the school, and other institutions to care for the family and the child to strengthen how to face these risks to protect the identity of adolescents from violating their privacy and negatively affecting their intellectual principles.

Negative Effects; Social Media; Social Identity; Adolescents; Social Work.

1. Introduction

Adolescence is the stage of cultural and social formation, it is the most critical juncture for children and youth. If there is no guidance, care, and follow-up from the adolescent's family and his school, the adolescent, in his quest to develop a sense of social identity, spends most of his time thinking, reviewing, and reflecting on the general values and behaviors he observes ( Bakkar, 2010 , p55). He must decide how to succeed in friendships with his peers, exercise his social roles as appropriate, and choose between multiple beliefs, ideas, and options that will give him a sense of distinct and independent existence working towards building his own future. In this light, adolescents are exposed to what is known as an identity crisis ( Levesque, 2011 , p.109, p.109).

The crisis of social identity is the main problem people must tackle during adolescence. The crisis starts with the beginning of the formation of a personality where the adolescent asks a number of questions to himself such as: Who am I? What is my role in society? How do I prove my existence? How do I succeed? Here, the adolescent finds himself faced with multiple questions, contradictory demands, and ideas, which force him to deal with multiple conflicts, especially in light of physical, mental, social, psychological, emotional, and family changes. If these changes are negative, it will result in the failure of the adolescent to successfully form his identity, in addition to facing many problems such as social role disorder, identity confusion, or the adoption of negative identity, harming the adolescent's life and future ( Salima and Fayza, 2014 . p.384).

1.1. Definition of social identity from the perspective of social work

The thinker Alex Mitchell considered that identity is an integrated system of physical, psychological, moral and social data involving a pattern of cognitive integration processes ( Mitchell et al., 2016 , pp12-16). It is characterized by its unity, which is embodied in the inner spirit, and has the characteristic of the sense of identity and intelligence ( Mitchell et al., 2016 , pp127-138). Identity is the unity of internal feelings ( Asiri, 2004 , p.122), which is the unity of physical elements, differentiation, permanence, and central effort. This means that identity is a unit of integrated physical, social and psychological elements, which makes a person distinct from others, and enables him to feel his own unity ( Dawaq, 2016 , p.26).

Erik Erikson believes that the identity of an individual is formed during a long struggle, which begins in adolescence, and focuses on the composition of two element ( Erikson, 1994 , p15). The first is the acquisition of the ability to create a relationship with the surroundings, and the second a sense of integration into a suitable moral world. We believe that both elements are necessary and complementary to each other because the individual needs to identify himself within his society. When people ask us who we are, they do not usually mean the name we carry, but our position in the social network, that is, the small circle that we belong to within the great social circle, and the job that we do within this circle ( Salima and Fayza, 2014 , p.390). Therefore, the individual does not just mention his first name, but adds to him the last name, and then the functional definition, which refers to occupation, hobby or status. This leads us to the second element, namely, the need for an individual to have a meaningful world in which to enjoy his or her abilities and receive the appropriate reward for what he does. This is why all people seek to build relationships with a group, because much of the pleasure of life, or happiness, is achieved through interaction between individuals. Hence, it is said that those who dispense with people lose the sense of beauty of life ( Al-Shammasi, 2006 , p.23) because in fact they lose the need for the daily challenge posed by the physical and moral interaction between the individual and his environment ( Cillessen and Rose, 2008 , p.143). It is the need for integration that imposes on the individual a pattern of personal choices and descriptions that may not necessarily be the best for them but are necessary to make their way into the community. On the other hand. groups may vary in their susceptibility to the integration of new individuals, in the sense that they may set difficult conditions, require the individual to give up his own choices in return for enjoying the virtues of social living, or simply refuse to integrate any new individual unless they are fully identical with them in psychological and social growth ( Al-Hafian, 2004 , p.30).

1.2. James Marcia's theory and levels of social identity

The theory of Marcia is based on a significant assumption that a well-defined and independently determined identity exists for the mature and well-adjusted person. This presumption expresses an implicit collection of shared principles, with a putting great emphasis on human interests, rights, and freedoms. Therefore, maturity in terms of a highly developed sense of an individual self is only natural, and maturity is characterized by the willingness to subjugate individual pursuits and desires in the service of the greater good of the group ( Morelli, 2020 , pp.12–24).

There are four key points or milestones that James Marcia's theory has descriptively defined along the continuum of identity growth. Such stations or points describe very different states of identity, ranging from a diffuse and indeterminate individual identity to a precise and extremely specific individual identity. Marcia assumed that such conditions and events (called 'crises') act as catalysts for movement along this continuum and through the different status of identity. These crises cause internal tension and emotional upheaval, forcing teenagers to analyze their values, beliefs, and aspirations and doubt them. They can develop new beliefs, accept different values, and make different choices as they explore new possibilities. Every identity status is a basic configuration of the progress of an adolescent with regard to identity exploration and dedication to the values, beliefs, and goals that contribute to identity ( Marcia, 1966 , p 551), Marcia used the concept of identity status to identify four stations or points of unique developmental identity as follows:

Social identity achievement: This status of identity reflects both a high degree of experimentation and a high level of dedication. It is said that teenagers have achieved their identity through an active discovery phase and a deep commitment to a clear set of values, beliefs, and life goals that have resulted from this active exploration and analysis. Adolescents will have determined what ideals and priorities are most important to them at this identity status, and what purpose or task will drive their life. individuals at the status of identity achievement may prioritize what is relevant to them and have sorted who they want to be by the many possibilities. They would have experimented and examined their journey in life with several different convictions and values. Young people need to feel optimistic and secure in their choices and beliefs to truly achieve this form of identity ( Marcia James, 2011 , p101). In addition to achieving a goal as a result of the individual's experience after a temporary period of exploration, including testing values, beliefs, goals, and roles, selecting what was meaningful or personal and of social value, and then demonstrating a true commitment to what was chosen to implement it ( Al-Ghamdi, 2001 , p.86).

Social identity postponement: This identity status reflects a high level of experimentation but a low degree of dedication. At this point, teenagers are in the midst of a crisis of identity that has prompted them to explore and experiment with various values, beliefs, and goals. They have not, however, made any definitive decisions as to which principles and beliefs are most important to them, and which values should guide their lives. Therefore, they are not committed to a specific identity yet. They keep their choices and alternatives open ( Marcia, 1966 , p 550). In addition to continuing to try and test the available options without reaching a final decision and without making a real commitment to specific options, which causes the individual to change his choices from time to time in an attempt to reach what is appropriate ( Abu Arad, 2008 , p.18), including but not limited to changing the field of study, profession, identities or friends ( Steinberg, 2002 , p.33).

Social identity closure: This status of identification indicates a low level of discovery but a high degree of dedication. Adolescents do not consciously seek to decide what is important to them in this identity status. The principles and beliefs they have been taught are not questioned. Instead, by clearly embracing the ideals and values of their families and community culture, these teenagers obtain their identity. In a way, the personality given to them is passively embraced by them. Although these young people are committed to their assigned ideals and life goals, they do not ask why they should be, nor do they suggest any alternatives ( Marcia, 1980 , pp.159–187), in addition to their avoidance of any subjective attempt to reveal beliefs, goals and social roles of meaning or value in life, but they are contented with satisfaction of the roles as determined by external forces such as family and society ( Al-Zu'bi, 2001 , p.477).

Social identity dispersion: This identity status describes adolescents who have neither explored any real identity nor committed to it. This status of identity thus reflects a low level of experimentation and a low level of dedication. These teenagers have not at all considered their identity, and have not set any goals for life. They are reactive, floating through life passively, and dealing with every situation as it arises. Their main motivation is hedonism, avoiding discomfort, and gaining pleasure ( Marcia James, 2011 , p101), in addition to the lack of individual sense of the need to form a philosophy, goals, or specific roles in life, on the one hand, with the absence of commitment to the roles which led by chance on the other. This happens with the aim of avoiding the individual researching and testing to preferring compatibility with problems or solving them by postponing and disrupting ( Khader, 2018 , p.89).

In light of the above, the individual's identity is formed solely by the interaction of the individual with others, and the individual's view of others is partly shaped by the way others view that individual. According to the theory of symbolic reactivity (role theory) ( Al-Murshidi, 2007 , p.27), people continue to possess their individuality but are not entirely distinct from society ( Ali, 2007 , p.83), and identity acts as a bridge between the individual and those around him ( Mohsen, 2018 ), for this reason, we must work hard to monitor and follow up our children in their way of life especially after the recent boom in electronic means of communication and the spread of social media which has become a remarkable presence all over the world, especially among children and young people and despite the positive effect of some social media, but the social media can also have a destructive influence on social relations between adolescents and their families, in addition to the negative effect on the academic achievement of adolescents.

1.3. Definition of social media

The phenomenon of social media began in 1997, and the site "Six Degrees.com" was the first of these sites providing the opportunity for users to create profiles, comment on news, and exchange messages with other participants ( Mohamed, 2019 , p.6). Although the site "Six Degrees.com" is the pioneer of social networking, "My Space.com" has opened wide horizons and achieved tremendous success since its inception in 2003 ( Hayaty, 2018 , p.3). Then successively began the emergence of social media, but the milestone is the emergence of ‘Facebook.com’ which enables users to share information among themselves and allow friends to access their profiles ( Al-Shareef, 2014 , p73), for this reason, the use of various social media has become a daily occurrence in modern times ( Mashaal, 2018 , p.56).

Some scholars define social media as virtual places where communication through the means of dialogue, chat, comment, photography, and interaction between users can take place without borders or breaks ( Al-Jazi, 2018 , p.14). So, the internet is described as a virtual space because it is considered a liberating place where no one party owns it ( Asur and Huberman, 2010 , p.40), and defines social media as services that are created and programmed by major companies to gather the largest number of users and friends who share activities and interests, searching for more friendships and the interests and activities of other people with whom they share one of the intellectual contributions ( Bailey et al., 2009 , p. 10 & Salim, 2008 , p.56). These social media provide features such as instant messaging, public and private messaging, and multimedia sharing of voice, video, image, and files ( Rajah, 2019 , p.86), which has attracted millions of users from around the world. ( Mansour, 2014 , pp.287–288), and also social media are an electronic social structure made from individuals, groups, or institutions, the basic composition (such as an individual) of which is called a term (node) where these nodes are connected to different types of relationships ( Al-Mu'ti, 2016 , p.93). Such as supporting a specific sports team, belonging to a company or nationality of a country in the world and these relationships may reach deeper degrees ( Ali, 2019 , p.102), such as social status, beliefs, or class to which the person belongs ( Salima and Fayza, 2014 , p.391), and there are many types of social media used by children and adolescents such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc ( Hamed, 2018 , p.7).

1.4. Advantages for children and adolescents of using social media from the perspective of social work

Provide the opportunity to connect with friends, family, and colleagues who share the same interests, and share pictures, ideas, and fun moments with each other ( O'Keeffe and Clarke-Pearson, 2011 , p127).

Provide an opportunity to join in community service projects through what is known as “e-volunteering”.

Developing individual and collective creativity through exchanging technical projects and benefitting from innovative experiences ( Muzayd, 2012 , p.42).

Promoting educational opportunities developing ideas and raising intelligence through the creation of blogs, videos, and game sites ( Ito et al., 2008 , p.15).

There are ways to regulate and control privacy and confidentiality rules not based on reparation or compulsion but rather on choice, and users can block or report inappropriate or unacceptable interventions and materials.

Provide an opportunity to learn, to exchange respect, tolerance, and constructive dialogue on global humanitarian issues to promote human identity and social skills ( Abdul Jalil, 2011 , p.247).

1.5. Risks for children and adolescents of using social media from the perspective of social work

Threat and harassment through the Internet: through the dissemination of false information, embarrassing or hostile interaction from others. This is one of the biggest risks of using the internet for adolescents, it is a risk from peer to peer and can cause profound social and psychological consequences such as depression, anxiety, isolation, and tragic suicide ( Nomar, 2012 , p.193).

Send sexual messages (sexting): through the sending and receiving of sexual messages and images through mobile phones, computers, and other digital receivers where images become rapidly spread via mobile phone and the internet. This phenomenon can be seen in recent research which has shown that 20% of adolescents published pictures of their own showing themselves naked or semi-naked, with some of them having been accused and convicted on charges of felony publishing porn ( AL-Oubli, 2011 , p.826).

Facebook depression: which occurs in adolescents as a result of spending a lot of time on social media sites such as Facebook and then beginning to show symptoms of depression through social isolation from their environment and their families, with some resorting to using dangerous sites and blogs, which may promote addiction or sexual relations and/or destructive, self-aggressive behaviors. Social media sites lead to the isolation and destruction of family relations ( Hosni, 2011 , p. 101).

The collapse of the idea of the reference group in its traditional sense. The virtual society is not determined by the place, but by the common interests that bring people together, who did not necessarily know each other before meeting electronically. They are sleepless societies; one can find a contact with another around the clock. Virtual societies are highly decentralized and gradually result in the dismantling of the concept of traditional identity. The disintegration of identity is not confined to national or resident identity, but also to personal identity, because those who use social media often use pseudonyms and avatars, and some have more than one account ( Al-Obaidi, 2019 , p.18).

Digital Footprint and Privacy concerns: This is related to the lack of privacy for adolescents, due to a lack of experience in the safe use of social media sites, who exchange a lot of private information or disseminate false information related to them or others putting their privacy at risk. In addition, the presence of the property is collected and user information recorded on the internet resulting in something called a "digital fingerprint." ( Zain Al Abdeen, 2013 , p.2).

1.6. Previous studies

Several studies have indicated that one of the most significant difficulties experienced by adolescents is a conflict of values linked to their continuous search for identity and belonging ( Bouchey and Furman, 2013 , p.319). This is compounded with a desire to achieve self-direction by going into the unknown; interacting with strangers on social media sites and entering into a network of virtual relationships via the internet. This corresponds with the study ( Laith, 2011 ) on “The Impact of Using Social Media site "Facebook" on Youth Self-Esteem” which demonstrated the role Facebook plays in modern upbringing through providing a platform for children and young people to discover ideas and convictions that greatly shape their future character values and determine their life trends. Traditional upbringing institutions lack the ability to monitor new behavioral patterns resulting from friction with the outside world caused by social media. The study also noted that a large number of young people have become isolated from their communities, hiding behind computer screens to connect with the virtual community instead. The study recommended the need to regulate the method and hours of social media use, while determining the quality of permitted sites and programs, and considering the increasing need for periodic supervision on children by their families. In this context, according to recent statistics, 22% of adolescents access their favorite social sites more than ten times a day and more than half of adolescents enter these sites more than once a day 75% of adolescents have a mobile phone, 25% of them use their phones to access these sites. and 54% use it to send SMS, whilst 24% use it for instant messaging. Thus, much of the social and emotional development of this generation takes place online via mobile phone ( Zain Al Abdeen, 2013 , p.2). And study ( Safar, 2017 ), entitled “The role of social networks in the consolidation of the values of citizenship from the perspective of the Omani youth,” This study aimed to identify the role of social networks in establishing the values of citizenship from the viewpoint of the university youth in Oman, The study used the descriptive-analytical approach and relied on the questionnaire tool, It was applied to a random sample of 477 students from Sultan Qaboos University, The study concluded several results, including The social networks, reinforced the value of brotherhood among citizens and emphasized the cohesion Patriotism among community members, Social networks were used to promote solidarity, cooperation and assistance to the needy, The results showed that many social media sites were the most used among the sample members They are in order Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter. And study ( Hamdi, 2018 ), University Youth Dependence on Social Media for Access to Information, “A Survey Study at the University of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia”, The main objective of the study is to know the degree of dependence of Saudi youth on the communication sites Social In knowing the information and news they are looking for, and the study relied on the descriptive method and the questionnaire tool, It was applied to a sample of 401 students from the University of Tabuk in Saudi Arabia. The most important results of the study were the most important motives for the use of social networking sites by Saudi youth is entertainment and leisure time, then get news and information, then for social relations with friends and relatives.

Several studies have indicated there are the effects of social media on an individual's life, his academic achievement, and his progress in life such as study ( Awad, 2013 ) entitled: “The effects of the use of social media sites on the educational attainment of children in Tulkarm governorate from the point of view of housewives”, which stressed the importance of the role played by mothers of teenage children who use social media sites. The study reached the important conclusion that social media sites have a negative impact on the educational attainment of children, especially in cases where mothers worked more hours. Therefore, it is necessary to target mothers with awareness campaigns and workshops, to raise the level of awareness of how they can monitor their children's use of these sites, and advise them of the need to establish rules and controls to monitor banned and destructive sites, so users cannot access pornographic sites. And study ( AL-Aag, 2013 ) entitled: The use of the Internet in the study and its relationship to motivation for learning in adolescents (12–14 years). The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the use of the Internet and motivation for learning among teenage pupils, the researcher used the descriptive method, and relied on a simple random sample, the sample size represents 110 pupils. One of the most important results of the study, the proportion of males who use the Internet is estimated at 50% of the total sample, while the percentage of students who are highly motivated to learning 91.81%, and students with low motivation to learning 9.19%. And study ( Hattat, 2014 ), entitled (psychosocial problems of school-age adolescents internet users), This study aimed at detecting the prevalence of psychosocial problems in terms of internet addiction, social isolation, lack of concentration, and depression in a sample of adolescents studying “internet users in Ouargla”, the sample of the basic study consisted of 406 students using the internet who were chosen intentionally among the students studying during the 2013–2014 school year, one of the most important results of the study was that the prevalence of psychological and social problems was low, where the percentage of Internet addiction was 2.95 %, 0.73% for social isolation and 2.70% for the problem of alienation. And study ( Zawana, 2015 ), entitled ‘The degree of using social networks as a tool for learning among Jordanian university students and the achieved satisfaction’, the aim of this study was to investigate the degree of use of social media by Jordanian university students as a learning tool, the study used the descriptive approach in the field survey of the study community consisting of the University of Jordan as a public university and the Universities of the Middle East and Petra as private universities, the questionnaire was applied to a total sample of 400 students, they were asked closed questions on the five axes of the tool on the degree of use and the satisfaction of saturation, the results include: YouTube ranked first, followed by Facebook and Twitter respectively, students resort to the university's website in the first degree to learn the dates of the quarterly and monthly tests. In addition to studying ( Bu-Abdullah, 2016 ), entitled " Internet uses and their impact on students Adolescents "Secondary Field Study of Khadr Ramadan Omash-Biskra", this study aimed to identify the uses of the Internet and its impact on teenage pupils and this study is descriptive, and selected the sample was random, Where included 26 students in high school, the questionnaire was used as a study tool, the study reached the following results: It was emphasized that the use of the internet leads to delayed level of academic achievement in adolescent pupils, the availability of the Internet inside the home increases the duration of use of the teenager, it was also emphasized that parents should know the programs which watching their teenage child is on the Internet to guide to the useful things on this network. And also study ( Hinnawi, 2016 ), entitled " Uses of Middle Teen Students for Networks Social networking in Nablus city schools in Palestine, this study aimed to investigate the reality of the use of students adolescence to social networking, the study used the descriptive method and the sample of the study was 217 singles, one of the most important findings of the study is that the majority of students have at least one subscription on social networking sites by 97%, And 63% of them use smartphones as the main device in the use of social networks. And study ( Kehinde and Adegbilero. 2016 ), entitled "Use of social media by science students in public universities in Southwest Nigeria", this study aimed to identify the extent of the use of social media in academic activities by students of the State University in southwestern Nigeria, The study was based on a descriptive curriculum and a purposive sample of 140 students from three educational institutions in southwestern Nigeria, the results of the study indicated that the students are a user of social networking sites in high rates, with 93.48% use Facebook, then Google by 63.77%, In addition, two-thirds of users use it for staying informed about events/news, then for leisure and entertainment, the most important obstacles facing them in the use of social networks are receiving unsolicited messages and power outages.

1.7. The present study and it questions

The present study is concerned with studying the negative effects of social media on the social identity of adolescents in terms of "achievement - postponement - closure - dispersion" from the perspective of social work, and this is a new aspect not addressed before. In order to do so, this research asks the following research questions:

Q1: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "achievement" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

Q2: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "postponement" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

Q3: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "closure" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

Q4: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "dispersion" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

Q5: Does the degree of awareness adolescents of the negative effects of social media on levels of their social identity vary according to gender, adjective, age, number years of using, and favorite app?

2. Methodological procedures

2.1. sample.

The study community is represented by all adolescent students in the secondary stage, an estimated (3836) students "males - females". As for the research sample, the sample was chosen randomly. The researcher used a simple random survey (a representative sample of the study population of adolescent students in secondary school), and the sample size was estimated (200) "males - females" adolescent student. The researcher used Cochran's Equation to calculate a sample size as shown in Eq. (1) ( Cochran, 1963 , p.75, p.75):

Where n is denotes the sample size in limited communities, which applies to the study population, n 0 is denotes the sample size in infinite communities (open communities), and N is denotes the size of the study population, where the researcher identified the study population from the official data issued by the department of student affairs at the secondary school, which is estimated from the reality of records of 3836 adolescent students.

The researcher used Smith's Equation to calculate a n 0 as shown in Eq. (2) ( Smith, 1983 , p.90, p.90):

Where n 0 is the sample size, z is the abscissa of the normal curve that cuts off an area α at the tails and the researcher determined it by 99% at the level of significance of 1%, which is estimated at ± 2.58., e is the desired level of precision (in the same unit of measure as the variance) which was determined by the researcher as only one degree, and σ is the variance of an attribute in the population.

By doing the calculations it was→: n 0 = ( 2.58 ) 2 × ( 5,63 ) 2 = 211 ( 1 ) 2

The sample size in the study population can be calculated as follows: -

In the present research, the sample consisted of 200 adolescents (males 98 and females 102) form students the secondary stage. (see Table 1 , Figure 1 shows the demographic information on participants).

Table 1

Demographic information on participants.

In light of these results, it is clear that the percentage of females represents the highest rate at 51%, and followed Male at 49%. This converges with study ( AL-Aag, 2013 ) which indicated that the proportion of males is less than or equal to females who use the internet is estimated at 50% (Any half of the total users). This may be justified because most of the girls in the Arab world after the end of their school day spend their spare time for long periods at home because they do not have the same space of freedom as the boys to spend fun time with their friends. This may be why girls are more attracted to using social media as an outlet to entertain themselves and socialize with many people online. The majority of adolescents are those in the age group of 15 years at 36%, followed by 16 years at 33.5%. It is clear that the majority of adolescents are users of social media on a large scale of 95%. This resulted from the ease of use and access of the internet, indoors, and outdoors through the various systems offered by telecommunications companies that are commensurate with the nature of the material possibilities of each individual. That corresponds with the study ( Hinnawi, 2016 ), which confirmed the majority of students have at least one subscription on social media at the rate of 97%. besides, it is clear that the number years of using social media sites of adolescents is (7–10 years) by 40.5% of a user, followed by (4–6) by 34%. This is a significant indicator since these two stages represent the stage of early and middle childhood from the age of 8 years and above. Once the child reached adolescence, he was already addicted to the use of social media because he has spent most of his leisure time using it. In addition to, it turns out that the most popular social media sites frequented by adolescents are Facebook, at 39.5%, followed by WhatsApp, at 18.5%, followed by Instagram, at 18%. This is because these sites offer multiple features that increase the interaction between subscribers at no cost to the user, and it corresponds to the study ( Kehinde and Adegbilero, 2016 ) the indicated that the adolescents are using Facebook in the rate of 93.48%, and also it corresponds to the study ( Zawana, 2015 ) and study ( Safar, 2017 ) which showed that a number of social media sites were the most used among the members They are in order: Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter.

2.2. Ethical approval

This study was approved by the Scientific Research Ethics Committee of Ajman UAE. In addition to that, all participants provided informed consent before beginning the survey, besides, confirmation that the researcher complied with all relevant ethical regulations to maintain the confidentiality of the participants' information.

2.3. Study instrument

2.3.1. questionnaire.

The researcher designed a new and innovative questionnaire that reflects the four main axes of James Marcia's theory of social identity (see 1.2. in 1. Introduction) in order to evaluate the impact of social media sites on the levels of social identity for adolescents. The questionnaire consists of 40 phrases, and the researcher managed the sincerity and reliability of the questionnaire as follows:

Validity of the questionnaire: The research tool was confirmed by the virtual validity method for the questionnaire by presenting it in its initial form with a list of study questions, to ten members of the teaching staff of universities, all of whom were doctorate holders in social work, sociology, psychology, and education. The content was adjusted according to their recommendations.

Reliability of the questionnaire: The researcher verified the reliability of the questionnaire by using the test-retest method. The questionnaire was applied to a small random sample consisting of 30 adolescents in secondary school, and fifteen days after the test was reapplied to the same sample of adolescents. After that, the Spearman correlation coefficient between the two applications was calculated, it is worth noting that the reliability coefficient was calculated according to Spearman's law of correlation coefficient as shown in Eq. (3) : -

]In light of these results, the total reliability coefficient of 0.80 was considered appropriate for the purposes of this study as shown in Table 2 , and the stability of the questionnaire is evident with a high confidence degree = 0.80 = 89%, It is a high coefficient, so the questionnaire has its validity, reliability and a high level of internal consistency.

Table 2

Shows the stability of the questionnaire and its variables.

2.4. Data analysis measures

To find out the views of adolescents about the degree of the negative effects of the means of social communication on levels their social identity, a three-dimensional Likert scale is adopted as follows: agree (3), neutral (2), and disagree (1), as shown in Table 3 with the options used to evaluate counting periods.

Table 3

The evaluation of scale data based on the options of scale and score intervals.

2.5. Methods of analyzing

The researcher used descriptive analysis to collect, analyze, and interpret the data for the study methodology, this is because this study falls under the descriptive research pattern aimed at describing and analyzing the variables of the study so that the researcher can obtain accurate data ( Mohammed, 2012 , p.48) and information depicting the reality of the situation ( Mowaffaq, 2006 , p55). Descriptive analysis is defined as a method of study and a systematic and objective way to explain and measure phenomena ( Sandelowski, 1995 , pp 372, 374). The description is then linked by comparison and interpretation to reach accurate results as to the nature of the dimensions of the social identity of adolescents and the extent of the negative effects of social media on them and determine the most popular social media used by adolescents, in addition to determining the differences between users and non-users of the areas of social identity associated with each of its four dimensions. This is in light of the monitoring, analysis, and interpretation of the data that was accessible from the study sample, extracting accurate conclusions and recommendations.

2.6. Analysis of statistics

The researcher used the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) analytical software for conducting the descriptive statistical analysis of data to analyze and interpret the data, in addition to some statistical coefficients were used to answer the study questions, which were (frequencies, percentage, arithmetic mean, and standard deviation) to characterize sample data. in addition to (T-test) and was used to study gender differences in social identity, as well as differences in the use of gender communication networks, as well as differences in the levels of social identity in terms of (achievement - postponement - closure - dispersion). and one-way ANOVA test to find out the significance of the differences between averages.

3.1. Study findings related to RQ1

The question was: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "achievement" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

The total weights, weighted relative weight, percentage of the negative effects of social media on the level of " achievement " in the social identity of adolescents were calculated by using the Questionnaire instrument and then arranging the negative effects of social media on the level of "achievement" according to their total weights, weighted relative weight, and percentage from High to low (see Table 4 , Figure 2 ).

Table 4

The negative effects of social media on the level of "achievement" in the social identity of adolescents.

We note from the results that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "achievement” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4020), weighted relative weight of (67%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. It is clear from the analysis that the phrase (I believe that the future depends on the intelligence of the individual in how he uses the benefits of social media to delight himself more than serve society) showed the highest percentage of all the negative effects of social media on the level of " achievement " in the social identity of adolescents, with total weights (454), Weighted relative weight (75.67), percentage of 11.3 % and Ranking (1).

3.2. Study findings related to RQ2

The question was: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "postponement" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

The total weights, weighted relative weight, percentage of the negative effects of social media on the level of "postponement " in the social identity of adolescents were calculated by using the Questionnaire instrument and then arranging the negative effects of social media on the level of "postponement" according to their total weights, weighted relative weight, and percentage from High to low (see Table 5 , Figure 3 ).

Table 5

The negative effects of social media on the level of "postponement" in the social identity of adolescents.

We note from the results that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "postponement” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4076), weighted relative weight of (67.93%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. It is clear from the analysis that the phrase (I learned from my friends through social media that achieving a self does not require logic in thinking and does not require speed in decision-making for any reason) showed the highest percentage of all the negative effects of social media on the level of " postponement " in the social identity of adolescents, with total weights (456), Weighted relative weight (76), percentage of 11.18 % and Ranking (1).

3.3. Study findings related to RQ3

The question was: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "closure" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

The total weights, weighted relative weight, percentage of the negative effects of social media on the level of " closure " in the social identity of adolescents were calculated by using the Questionnaire instrument and then arranging the negative effects of social media on the level of " closure " according to their total weights, weighted relative weight, and percentage from High to low (see Table 6 , Figure 4 ).

Table 6

The negative effects of social media on the level of "closure" in the social identity of adolescents.

The negative effects of social media on the level of " closure " in the social identity of adolescents.

We note from the results that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "closure” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (3897), weighted relative weight of (64.95 %). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. It is clear from the analysis that the phrase (The presence of my family members on my social media account is imposed on me, and I am inside me I don't agree on it) showed the highest percentage of all the negative effects of social media on the level of " closure " in the social identity of adolescents, with total weights (507), Weighted relative weight (84.5), percentage of 13.01% and Ranking (1).

3.4. Study findings related to RQ4

The question was: What are the negative effects of social media on the level of "dispersion" in the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work?

The total weights, weighted relative weight, percentage of the negative effects of social media on the level of " dispersion" in the social identity of adolescents were calculated by using the Questionnaire instrument and then arranging the negative effects of social media on the level of "dispersion" according to their total weights, weighted relative weight, and percentage from High to low (see Table 7 , Figure 5 ).

Table 7

The negative effects of social media on the level of "dispersion" in the social identity of adolescents.

The negative effects of social media on the level of " dispersion " in the social identity of adolescents.

We note from the results that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "dispersion” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4065), weighted relative weight of (67.75%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. It is clear from the analysis that the phrase (I don't have close friends on social media, I just want to be among the participants on the social media pages in order for me to feel the importance me of being in life) showed the highest percentage of all the negative effects of social media on the level of " dispersion " in the social identity of adolescents, with total weights (449), Weighted relative weight (74.83), percentage of 11.05% and Ranking (1).

3.5. Study findings related to RQ5

The question was: Does the degree of awareness adolescents of the negative effects of social media on levels of their social identity vary according to gender, adjective, age, number years of using, and favorite app?

In order to answer the fifth research question of the study, the investigator measured the mean scores and standard deviations. In order to find out the importance of the variations between averages, the investigator then conducted an independent T-test and a one-way ANOVA test. In the following section, the findings are detailed.

3.5.1. Gender

An independent sample test (T) was used by the researcher to determine the importance of the discrepancies between averages of adolescents' awareness of the negative impact of social media on their social identity levels. The results were measured by gender (see Table 8 ).

Table 8

Mean and SD by gender of the adolescent's responses.

The results in Table 8 show that the computed value of (T) was (-3,017), which is greater than that of the table of (T). This implies that at the significance level of (0.000), which is less than the required statistical significance level (0.05), there are substantial differences between the mean value of male and female, where females are preferred over males.

3.5.2. Adjective

An independent sample test (T) was used by the researcher to determine the importance of the discrepancies between averages of adolescents' awareness of the negative impact of social media on their social identity levels. The results were measured by adjective (see Table 9 ).

Table 9

Mean and SD by an adjective of the adolescent's responses.

The results in Table 9 show that the computed value of (T) was (-4.019), which is greater than that of the table of (T). This implies that at the significance level of (0.000), which is less than the required statistical significance level (0.05), there are substantial differences between the mean value of Users of networks and Non-users of networks, where the User of networks are favored over the Non-user of networks.

Table 10 . Shows the ANOVA one-way test results to evaluate the responses of the adolescent according to age.

Table 10

One-way ANOVA of the responses of adolescents by age.

∗Statistically significant at (α 0.05).

In Table 10 . There are no statistically significant variations in the viewpoints of teenagers according to the age variable at 0.178, which is greater than the required statistical significance level of 0.05.

3.5.4. Number years use of social media

Table 11 . Shows the ANOVA one-way test results to evaluate the responses of the adolescents according to number years use of social media.

Table 11

One-way ANOVA of the responses of adolescents by number years use of social media.

In Table 11 . There are no statistically significant variations in the viewpoints of teenagers according to the number years use of social media variable at 0.142, which is greater than the required statistical significance level of 0.05.

3.5.5. Favorite app

Table 12 . Shows the ANOVA one-way test results to evaluate the responses of the adolescents according to favorite app.

Table 12

One-way ANOVA of the responses of adolescents by favorite app.

In Table 12 . There are no statistically significant variations in the viewpoints of teenagers according to the favorite app variable at 0.123, which is greater than the required statistical significance level of 0.05.

4. Discussion

This study aimed to identify the negative effects of social media on "levels" the social identity of adolescents in the secondary stage from the perspective of social work, the results showed that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "achievement” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4020), weighted relative weight of (67%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. The obtained results, are shown in Table 4 , and concern the extent negative effects of social media on the level of "achievement" of the social identity of adolescents. We have noticed that most adolescent responses are indicating a lack of interest in the effective role in normal life, and rather transforming themselves into being united with an electronic world where the quality of values and principles are different from that of previous generations. Here we see that some teenagers are trying to have an entity and a role but many of them cannot because of the dangerous and influential role of the internet which depends on dazzling and attracting the longest number of hours in front of social media. Although, James Marcia believes this level is the most mature level of identity because it integrates and develops the growth of the personality of the teenager through the development and identification of tasks and pledges clearly and specifically. However, the adolescent cannot reach a strong level due to the fact that many of them are driven towards the negative impact of these sites. This corresponds with a study ( Bu-Abdullah, 2016 ) which indicated to emphasized that the use of the Internet leads to a lack of interest in the effective role in their life and Delayed level of academic achievement in adolescent pupils as well, the obtained results, are shown in Table 5 , and concern the negative effects of the social media on the level of "postponement” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4076), weighted relative weight of (67.93%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. We note from the results and It is clear from the analysis that the negative effects of social media on the level of "Postponement" of the social identity of adolescents indicating the inability of an adolescent to come up with a clear idea of the things he wants. Besides, his goals in life are almost clear but he cannot make decisions about them, he is a person whose character is fluctuating and contradictory for fear of taking responsibility or committing to specific promises to himself or the community around him. This agrees with James Marcia's opinion that the teenager in this rank is in a period of exploration and has unclear and vague commitments. and has not set his position on many of his life issues This corresponds with a study ( Bu-Abdullah, 2016 ) which indicated to emphasized, the availability of the Internet inside the home increases the duration of use of the adolescent to a social network, and this too leads postponing adolescents for many of the goals in addition to the Fluctuation in opinion and inability to make clear decisions.

Results also showed in Table 6 , that the negative effects of the social media on the level of "closure” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (3897), weighted relative weight of (64.95 %). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. Moreover, the obtained results, as shown in Table 5 , and concern the extent the negative effects of social media on the level of "closure" of the social identity of adolescents indicating that the adolescent is ineffective and awaits solutions and results from others, whether power, friends or society. This result reflects the extent of the turbulence experienced by adolescents with their lack of self-confidence due to lack of ability to choose and lack of self-confidence, whether at the future social level or at the religious level and that he cannot make a decision or take responsibility. James Marcia expresses this rank that the teenager does not have clear and specific commitments, but takes them ready from his parents or those around him. This contradicts the study ( Hattat, 2014 ) which indicated that social networks reduce the degree of social isolation, but, the exact scores and percentages reached by the current study prove that social networking sites have a significant negative impact that leads to more of closure with their lack of self-confidence due to lack of ability to choose and lack of self-confidence as well, the obtained results, are shown in Table 7 , and concern the negative effects of the social media on the level of "dispersion” in the social identity of adolescents obtained a total weight of (4065), weighted relative weight of (67.75%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average. We note from the results and It is clear from the analysis that the negative effects of social media on the level of "dispersion" of the social identity of adolescents, indicating the adolescent is less accepting of himself and his community. He sees himself as "inferior", making his thoughts and behaviors immature. In addition, he is also closer to the character of aggressiveness and may evolve to be psychopathic. This is consistent with James Marcia's assertion in his theory that the rank of "dispersion" of the lowest ranks of identity and it characterized that teenager does not have clear commitments and does not try to discover other options or alternatives and fails to adhere to a fixed ideology. This contradicts the study ( Hattat, 2014 ) which indicated that social networks reduce lack of concentration but the accurate scores and percentages reached by the present study prove that social media have a significant negative impact that leads to more distractions, anxiety, lack of concentration and dispersion.

On the other hand, the obtained results, as shown in Tables 8 and 9, ​ 9,10, 10 , ​ ,11, 11 , and ​ and12 12 pertained to whether the degree of awareness adolescents of the negative effects of social media on levels of their social identity vary according to gender, adjective, age, number years of using, and favorite app. The results indicated that the degree of adolescent's awareness varies according to gender and adjective, with females being more aware of the negative effects of social media than males. maybe due to the fact that females' adolescents are more fearful and cautious about themselves as a result of socialization since childhood started and keener because the amount of accountability of parents to their daughter in the Arab world for the mistakes she makes is more severe and violent than the boy, which is why the girl is more cautious in her relationships with others through social media. It is also worth noting no statistically significant differences in adolescent's awareness were found based on the variables of age, number years of using, and favorite app.

5. Conclusions

From the results above, we can conclude that the value of all negative effects of social media on "levels" the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work came to a total weight of (16058), weighted relative weight of (66.9%). This indication is a medium, indicating that the level of impact is average for all negative effects of social media on the levels of social identity in adolescents. It ranked first "Postponement level" at 25.4%, It is followed by the ranked second “Dispersion level" at 25.31%, Then came third place "Achievement level" at 25.03%, Finally in fourth place "Closure level" at 24.26% (see Table 13 , Figure 6 ).

Table 13

Ranking levels of the social identity of adolescents after all negative effects of social media on it.

5.1. In light of this, we reach an important conclusion, which is that

It is necessary taking serious measures from the family, school, and institutions that care for the family and children to pay attention to how to face negative effects of social media on social identity to children and adolescents. Besides working to encourage children and adolescents do not get lost their time and take the largest part of their free time in practicing sports and cultural activities. That corresponds with the study ( Hamdi, 2018 ) which was emphasized in it that the most important motives for the use of social networking sites are entertainment for loss of time.

In addition to another important conclusion is train parents to help their children to make the best use of these sites so as not to be exposed to problems resulting from open communication without restrictions. and this corresponds to a study ( Bu-Abdullah, 2016 ) which was emphasized that parents should know the programs which watching it their teenager child is on the Internet to guide them to useful things on social networks. Hence, the researcher presents her following recommendations.

6. Recommendations

Urge parents to follow their children continuously and guide them in the use of social networking sites.

Educating children about the need to observe the privacy of their information and data, so that it is not accessible to everyone, including strangers.

Educating the awareness of children not to accept video conversations or written conversations or requests for friendship from strangers.

Educating children's awareness of the need to not display their own pictures in public so as not to be copied by strangers and exploited inappropriately.

Urge children to inform their parents of any threat or blackmail they may face from anyone on the internet.

Urge parents to fill the leisure time of their children by encouraging them to practice a hobby or sport they love.

Urge parents not to excessively pamper their children or give them extra money so as not to spoil them.

Increase educational institution awareness seminars for students, giving information on the pros and cons of social networking sites.

Urge parents to establish a bridge of communication between them and their children and follow the method of persuasion, and not intimidation, when adapting their child's behavior on the internet.

Declarations

Author contribution statement.

W. Elsayed: Conceived and designed the experiments; Performed the experiments; Analyzed and interpreted the data; Contributed reagents, materials, analysis tools or data; Wrote the paper.

Funding statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data availability statement

Declaration of interests statement.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

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• Cultural Norms, Language, and Personal Identity
• Socialization, Personal Identity, Gender Identity, and Terrorism
• Personal Identity: Bundle and Ego Theory
• Society and the Importance of a Unique Personal Identity
• Political Issues Through Personal Identity
• Conflict Between Personal Identity and Public Image
• Difference Between Personal Identity and Online Identity
• Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and Personal Identity: Ethical Consideration
• Personal Identity and Psychological Reductionism
• Bodily, Psychological and Personal Identity
• Memory Role in Personal Identity
• Unique and Different Types of Personal Identity
• Capabilities and Personal Identity: Using Sen to Explain Personal Identity in Folbre’s ‘Structures of Constraint’ Analysis
• Genetic Memory and Personal Identity
• Does Group Identity Prevent Inefficient Investment in Outside Options?
• Does Student Exchange Program Involve a Nations Identity?
• How America Hinders the Cultural Identity of Their Own Citizens?
• Are Education Issues Identity Issues?
• Are Persons With Dissociative Identity Disorder Responsible for Bad?
• How Do Advertisers Shape the Identity, Values, and Beliefs of Any Culture?
• What Factors Affect the Development of Ego Identity?
• Can Social Identity Theory Address the Ethnocentric Tendencies of Consumers?
• How Are Adolescents Responsible for Their Own Identity?
• Did the Mongols Create a More Diverse Islamic Identity?
• Why Corporate and White Collar Crimes Rarely Dealt in Criminal Courts Culture and Identity?
• What’s the Relationship Between Communication and Identity?
• Does Globalization Affect Our Culture Identity?
• What Does Ethnicity Affect a Person’s Identity?
• Does Trauma Shape Identity?
• What Does Identity Tell Us About Someone?
• How Beauty Standards Have Shaped Women’s Identity?
• How Has Bisexuality Been an Ambiguous Sexual Identity?
• What Does Identity Mean?
• How and Why Does Ethnic Identity Affect the Idea of ‘Beauty’ Cross-Culturally?
• Can Consumption and Branding Be Considered a Part of a Person’s Identity?
• What Has Caused Britain to Lose Its Sense of Identity?
• How Antidepressants Affect Selfhood, Teenage Sexuality, and Our Quest for Personal Identity?
• Does Identity Affect Aspirations in Rural India?
• Do Identity Contingencies Affect More Than Just One Race?
• Does Identity Incompatibility Lead to Disidentification?
• Does Social Inequality Affect a Person’s Identity?
• Why Is Identity Important in Education?
• Can People Choose Their Identity?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . "93 Personal Identity Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/personal-identity-essay-topics/.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Race and Ethnicity — American Identity

Essays on American Identity

Hook examples for identity essays, anecdotal hook.

Standing at the crossroads of cultures and heritage, I realized that my identity is a mosaic, a tapestry woven from the threads of my diverse experiences. Join me in exploring the intricate journey of self-discovery.

Question Hook

What defines us as individuals? Is it our cultural background, our values, or our personal beliefs? The exploration of identity leads us down a path of introspection and understanding.

Quotation Hook

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." These words from Ralph Waldo Emerson resonate as a testament to the importance of authentic identity.

Cultural Identity Hook

Our cultural roots run deep, shaping our language, traditions, and worldview. Dive into the rich tapestry of cultural identity and how it influences our sense of self.

Identity and Belonging Hook

Human beings have an innate desire to belong. Explore the intricate relationship between identity and the sense of belonging, and how it impacts our social and emotional well-being.

Identity in a Digital Age Hook

In an era of social media and digital personas, our sense of identity takes on new dimensions. Analyze how technology and online interactions shape our self-perception.

Identity and Self-Acceptance Hook

Coming to terms with our true selves can be a challenging journey. Explore the importance of self-acceptance and how it leads to a more authentic and fulfilling life.

Losing Whiteness: Personal Reflections on Race and Identity in America

John winthrop's "city upon a hill": review, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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What Makes Someone an American

The way an american identity is created, characteristics that shaped an american identity, an overview of the evolution of the american identity, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Questioning The Identity: The Meaning of Being an American

What does it mean to be an american citizen, the rising of american identity, what america means to me, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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The American Identity and The Role of The Foreigner in American Nation and Other Nations

An analysis of native american identity as a result of colonialism in sherman alexie's novel the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, a discussion on latin americans developing their american identity, the view of frederick douglass on american identity, what it means to live in america, what it means to be an american today, the impact of class in social identity, representation of the american family in the works of roth and miller, my cultural identity: who i am, understanding the concept of the american dream, freedom as the root of what it means to be an american, what america means to you: education, rights, and equality, tocqueville on the toxicity of american ideals, american dream as an integral part of american ideals, the evolution of native american identity in joy harjo's poetry, establishment of american ideals during american revolution, the great gatsby: what it means to be an american in a negative connotation, italian-american identity in stallone's rocky, exploring america’s identity subjugation in "americanah", representation of toxic american masculinity in slaughterhouse-five by kurt vonnegut.

National identity can be defined as an overarching system of collective characteristics and values in a nation, American identity has been based historically upon: “race, ethnicity, religion, culture and ideology”.

Relevant topics

• Social Justice
• Effects of Social Media
• Media Analysis
• Discourse Community
• Sociological Imagination
• Cultural Appropriation
• Social Media
• Sex, Gender and Sexuality

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