Summary Of James Marcia's Approach To Identity Development

Identity is a crucial aspect of adolescence development. Identity is defined as how a person describes who they believe they are in terms of their own self-perception (Santrock, 2014). Erik Erikson’s theory states that there are eight developmental stages from birth to late adulthood. The fifth stage takes place around 10 years old till 20 years old, and this stage is for identity versus identity confusion. During this stage, adolescents ask questions about answering who, where and what they vision for the future as an individual (Santrock, 2014). Erikson states that during this stage, adolescents go through a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ which refers to the gap between childhood security and adult autonomy (Santrock, 2014). To build off Erikson’s theory, James Marcia’s approach to identity development talks about 4 steps which consist of identity diffusion, moratorium, identity foreclosure and identity achievement (Santrock, 2014). Marcia argues that adolescents tend to move between the moratorium and identity achievement stage. With the uprising use of social media and it being multifaceted, it was found the adolescents tend to fluctuate between the moratorium and identity achievement stage more than usual. The primary objective here is to speculate whether social media has the potential to alter …show more content…
The study consisted of 219 freshman students, of which 74% were female, with the average age of 18.29, for the first questionnaire, that took place at the beginning of the fall semester (Yang, Holden, & Carter, 2018). The second questionnaire took place at the beginning of the spring term, where there were 136 participants, of which 74% were female and the average age was 18.29 (Yang, Holden, & Carter, 2018). The questionnaire focused on social media social comparison, identity processing styles, global self-esteem and identity clarity. Each section was measured using the 5-point Likert scale (Yang, Holden, & Carter,