Sharpening my focus

Two weeks ago I participated in the teleseminar, Setting Out on Your Journey: Finding Your Topic. I felt that I had already decided on my dissertation topic but would benefit from sharpening my focus and better articulating my interests. The seminar was free; the conversation, interesting. I learned that, in some universities, making positive social change is one of the dissertation requirements.  Dr. Sally Jensen and Dr. Kat Malinsky, who led the teleseminar, discussed several important issues (e.g., what constitutes a contribution to the discipline, how to find gaps in the literature,  etc.). I liked the exercises that were offered. I completed the first three of them ("The Dissertator's Vision Inventory," "Choosing a Preliminary Focus," and "Topic Goodness Criteria") before the teleseminar. In the handout, the fourth exercise, "Topic Challenge: Generating Original Topics,"was filled with an example, and I didn't work on it until yesterday.

That exercise asks to make a list of interesting questions that have been asked about your dissertation topic area and, in another column, provide answers for each of these questions. I thought about the literature I have read and came up with the following questions:

1. How do identities affect behavior?
2. How do multiple identities of an individual interact?
3. Why do identities change?

Looking at  the teleseminar example, I noticed that two of their questions began with "what" ("What factors influence teachers' responses to bullying?" and "What prevents teachers from reporting bullying in schools?")  while two of mine, with "how," and started to wonder whether I was doing something wrong, but continued with formulating answers to those questions. Here are the answers I came up with.

1. (a) According to identity theory (Burke & Stets, 2009), each identity contains a set of meanings that define that identity and are called the identity standard. Individuals continuously verify their identities by altering their behavior to align their perceived meanings about oneself in a specific situation  to the meanings in the identity standard. That verification process may function at both conscious and unconscious levels.  (b) According to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner, 1982), any social identity both describes and prescribes one's attributes as a member of that group, which may include what one should think and value and how one should behave. When a  social identity gets activated, perceptions and conduct of an individual become in-group stereotypical.
2. (a) According to identity theory,  in some situations where multiple identities of an individual are activated, their identity standards may become mutually exclusive, thus preventing the simultaneous verification of all these identities. Then, the identity, which is higher in the hierarchy of salience, is more likely to be verified, and the identity standard of the other one is likely to be modified. In addition, some scholars advance the concept of master identity. Master identities (e.g., race, gender, etc.) are supposed to be more stable and consequential than role identities  and help set the standard of other lower level identities (Tracy, 2002). (b) Critical scholars (hooks, 1990; Trinh,1989; etc.) insist that cultural identities are nonsummative and that one cannot simply quantify and separate which aspects of his/her identity are due to race, class, gender, or sexuality; instead qualities of experience are rooted in the multiplicity of overlapping and colliding cultural identifications.
3. According to identity theory, identities change because of the changes in their identity standards. In fact, identity theory assumes that identity meanings are always changing but at a very slow pace, so that change is noticeable only over longer periods of time. In addition,  Burke and Stets (2009) outline four sources of  identity change: (a) changes in the situation that alter meanings of the self, putting them out of congruence with the identity standard; (b) conflicts between two (or more) identities of an individual; (c) conflict between the meanings of one's behavior and the identity standard; (d) adaptive strategy inherent in identities that works to establish mutual verification contexts and achieve desired and shared meanings.

In my opinion, the current identity literature doesn't sufficiently address the following questions.

• How do multiple cultural identities and role identities intersect and interact?
• What (if anything) can be learned about that interplay of identities from individuals' accounts of relational history and self-reports of behavior?

I understand the necessity of contextualizing those questions and focusing my research on a certain group of people at a specific cultural-historical conjuncture, and I''ll talk about that in my future posts. However, overall I'm interested in bringing into a dialogue different traditions of identity research and getting a better insight into how an individual experiences his/her identity in its multifaceted totality.

If you are familiar with identity research, please let me know whether that makes sense to you. I would also like to know what do you think about the "Topic Challenge: Generating Original Topics" exercise and how you approach narrowing your dissertation topic.


References:

• Burke, P. J., & Stets, J. E. (2009). Identity theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press
• hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics.  Boston, MA: South End Press.
•  Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole.
• Tracy, K. (2002). Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
• Trinh, T. M. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
•  Turner, J. C. (1982). Towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group. In H. Tajfel (Ed.), Social identity and intergroup relations (pp. 15-40). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University press.