James Marcia Identity Achievement

Amy Striker Child Psychology 04/11/2013 Finding Your Way Through Identity Crisis Do you remember being a high school and being overwhelmed with all the choices of colleges, majors, occupations etc.? This seems to be the most confusing time of an adolescent’s life and one they will never forget, however what most don’t realize is that there is not just a point that we are all grown up. Instead, there is a very long process and it takes a lot of effort. James Marcia delved beyond Erik Erikson’s stage of identity achievement and created four different levels of this achievement.
These levels were distinguished by crisis and commitment. Crisis is defined as a period of identity development during which the individual is exploring alternative, while commitment is personal investment in identity (Marcia, 2003). Identity achievement is obtained when an individual searches for different alternatives, explores those alternatives and makes a commitment to one of the choices. When one is identity achieved they have explored different ideals, occupations, and political views. From the exploration of each, the adolescent finds what they feel they most relate to and commit to those views and ideas.
Achievement is also associated with advanced reasoning ability seems that adolescents and adults who can take multiple perspectives on themselves and others also have a ? rmer and more ? exible sense of who they are. For this reason, successful individuals have higher intimacy in their relationships. They are able to commit and feel confident that they will be able to understand their partner’s point of view without having to change their own. However, they have to adapt and understand their own viewpoints while at the same time not experiencing the levels of despair found in less cognitively sophisticated people (Marcia 2003).

Moratorium occurs when there is a crisis being faced but no commitment has yet been made. During this phase comes the process of making standards for ourselves. Adolescents often express a conflict between their own needs and parental values, and between desire and fear of consequences. In the midst of moratorium, anxiety is likely to be the highest of all the stages, the reason being there is far more uncertainty and pressure residing in the need to make a choice that will change the course of one’s life and career (Marcia 1966).
High school students and college students are normally found in this stage. After an individual has reached this stage however, they will very unlikely be going back to foreclosure or diffusion. Foreclosure is the status of individuals who have made a commitment but have not experienced a crisis. This occurs most often when parents hand down commitments to their adolescents, usually in an authoritarian way, before adolescents have had a chance to explore different approaches, ideologies, and vocations on their own.
A Foreclosure unquestioningly accepted the standards (usually parental) with which she had been brought up, and when pressured by a significant other or their own impulses, clung to rules and authority to guide actions. Those individuals whose entire family is in a particular field may be in this group when they graduate high school and upon their freshman year may begin to go to the way of moratorium, for they are able to explore different ideals in a parent free setting. Diffusion is the status of individuals who have not yet experienced a crisis or made any commitments.
Not only are they undecided about occupational and ideological choices, they are also likely to show little interest in such matters. Those who are in the diffusion category are often weary about their life equilibrium being disrupted, they see themselves as the way they are and they are afraid of making changes. These individuals may go into a career office, scoff at the results of their aptitude tests and never end up researching into those ideas as an individual in the moratorium stage would.
Difficulty in reaching identity achievement may also come from an avoidance of facing external or internal conflicts that will disrupt our equilibrium that we were comfortable. Ways in which some cope with conflicts may be with assimilation or accommodation. Reacting with assimilation involves interpreting new information according to the schemes, or patterns of thought, we already possess. Someone may use assimilation when they are afraid of changing their major when they are not doing very well perhaps because they are in the foreclosure category and are worried their parents will be disappointed if they do not follow in their footsteps.
This person may assimilate by working harder and harder even if they do not get joy in the end. Accommodation involves changing our schemes, or patterns of thought, to better fit with new information. In this case, the student would recognize that he is working hard and isn’t succeeding, but then looking into other majors that may suit his skills better, understanding that he needs to create his own identity instead of necessarily following his parents’ occupations. (Kroger 2007). Culture a collective concept providing a common frame of reference for a human group to make sense of reality.
Culture is not a stable set of beliefs or values that reside inside individuals but it is located in society, in patterns of practices, ideas, institutions, products and artifacts. As cultural content changes, so do the self-concepts and psychological functions that mediate that culture (Markus & Kitayama, 2010). Adolescents often share daily experiences, hold common values, and face common challenges. A coherent sense of identity supported by agency and self-direction is required to be successful in one’s occupational and social life in the United States and other unstructured western societies (Markus 2010). In Western cultures, adolescents are often allowed more freedom in discovering life choices in ideology, careers, and societal interactions. While some adolescents have an easy time figuring out what they want to do with their lives and what their core ideals our, others feel at a loss. Because there is no definite answer and such an excess of possibilities, they may want to sit out of the decision process for as long as possible. This is not beneficial for them and is a consequence of our post-modern cultural goals.
Goals that are held to such importance often causes increased stress those children are not ready to deal with. Ways in which to help with these difficulties may be for a counselor to meet with each and every student, once and if it is evident that a child has no idea what they want to do with life, meet with those children on a separate occasion. Parental involvement also play a vital role in the decision making process. Since there are different attachment styles, there cannot be an evaluation of what type of parental involvement is necessary for all children.
Just as every child has a different way of making these decisions; parents have different comfort levels of involvement as well. However, it is still essential a parent does not force their ideals and occupation choices onto their children in an authoritative manner; for their children will have an impossible time exploring alternatives if they are frightened they will be scolded when taking their own path. In addition, our culture is often pessimistic about certain careers, causing a child who really feels that that is the career or them to instead choose what their parents want or some other popular occupational choice. Regarding pessimism towards ideals and politics, a person whose parents strictly prohibit all homosexuality may be less likely to stand up for what they believe because they fear negative sanctions from society. Currently, this issue is being addressed by many people coming together to share their own views, making it a simpler task of addressing these alternative ideals. In this way, the excess of possibilities is not as problematic in the discovering of one’s identity.
Religion though, is a different story; parents in our culture and around the world expect their children to retain the religion they were centered in. A failure to do so is viewed as disrespect. Seeing that America is a melting pot of cultures, a family strives to maintain their culture for many generations, and waning from the path prevents this cultural harmony. Similarly, it is difficult in our culture to change political views when a family’s viewpoints have been quite close minded.
From experience, if a father is republican, they are weary when their son or daughter develops democratic views that oppose their own. Upon discovering such information, parents may say such things as “I did not raise my children to grow up a liberal” or “with those views you are taking away all my hard earned money”, sayings that attempt to force the individual to temporarily adapt to their parents demands. Although culture is more far reaching, adolescents spend the most time within their family’s culture, leaving the biggest mark on their identity.
Technology holds an important role in post modernism. With technology, individuals who are going through the identity achievement process have many resources at their disposal. They are able to look into different careers with information on the internet being readily available. However, for some adolescents this causes an increase in anxiety because there are again so many choices, and the fear of making the wrong choice deters them from looking. The benefits of technology though, outweigh the cons for there are hundreds of academic sites that are at our disposal for discovering our identity.
Cell phones, although sometimes too readily available, allow individuals to feel as if they are more accepted and emotionally supported by many different people at the same time. This aspect is important to identity achievement for when one feels as if they do not have anyone who is emotionally attached to them, they may feel lost and have a more difficult time finding themselves. In counseling, Knowing about how adolescents can more easily go from diffusion to identity achievement can help a counselor make things a bit easier by suggesting ways of going about finding their calling.
Also, parents must have a way in which to hear about how perhaps their children may need different outlets to find out what interests them. A counselor for an adolescent who is striving to find their self-definition must discover ways in which to facilitate the motivation aspect of wanting to be identity achieved. A beneficial discussion would be in self-esteem, social relationships and anxiety levels. In addition, just hearing the client talk about who they feel they are, can help them make a major discovery.
Research tactics in counseling that would benefit discovery, may be discovering defense tactics to prevent regression from identity achieved state to diffusion. Those who have many conflicts that they feel as if they cannot overcome may have lowered self-efficacy as well as having regressed, causing them to not be motivated to try new things (Kroger 2000). They see themselves as already trying many different things, failing when they made a commitment, and not wanting to look into other alternatives that they may also fail at.
Some adolescents who go to counseling may feel as if their parents’ divorce or another family event has hindered their ability to progress through achievement. These individuals would benefit greatly from counseling only if they are not focusing solely on the problems caused by divorce but ways in which they are not at fault, allowing a feeling of freedom to find their own self. After this realization by these certain individuals, multiple sessions discussing ways in which they can get involved and discover different fields of occupation and ideals may greatly help their identity achievement path.
In addition to these circumstances, those in moratorium are often seen by counselors. When in the moratorium stage there is a greater feeling of anxiety from the uncertainty of the future and stress of making a decision. In a counseling setting, there is a person who is able to be nonattached and give an honest opinion, something that a moratorium individual may have a hard time finding in their daily life. Counseling is the most beneficial for adolescents when they are in their senior year of high school and their freshman year of college.
From personal experience observing others, I have found that an individual in senior year feels as if they have reached identity achievement. They have job shadowed during the summer, talked to different teachers and friends about occupation choices and been to see their academic counselor to discuss any problems with their decision. What I see happening to many students is, when they get into that major, they feel as if they do not want disappoint themselves or their parents if they do not feel like it was the right choice.
Although there are many people that they see have changed their paths, the thought of themselves not making the right choice in the beginning frightens them. After all, they may have put forth a lot of effort to find the major they thought was their destiny. These students in particular are the most at risk for regressing from identity achievement to moratorium and perhaps back to diffusion. A counselor’s importance in this point in time is to make the student feel more calmly about changing their major; that it will not upset any other people and if it does the counselor is there to diffuse the situation.
Identity achievement is not an easy accomplishment, it is one that takes immense action, contemplation and the biggest decision an adolescent has made so far in their life. Just as there are many ways in which to facilitate the identity achievement process, there are the same about of ways to hinder it. The individual has the ball in their court and it is up to them to make a move or stay where they are in development. uccessful achievement of identity is a requirement of maturity, for within the achieved status, one must have control over their emotions, a need for intimacy, regarding friendship or marriage, be comfortable with their happiness and know what ways they can foster their own development. Counseling is beneficial when a crisis has been experienced and the adolescent is weighing their different options. When an individual has achieved identity and feels confident with most aspects of their being, they are very unlikely to regress.
The older one is the less likely regression will occur. References Kroger, J. (2000). Ego identity status research in the new millennium. International Journal Of Behavioral Development, 24(2), 145-148. doi:10. 1080/016502500383250 Kroger, J. (2007). Why is identity achievement so elusive? Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 7(4), 331-348. Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558. doi:10. 1037/h0023281 Marcia, J. E. (2003).
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