Sharpening my focus (Part II)

I ended my last post with two questions, which, in my view, are currently understudied and to which I'd like to contribute. Those questions are

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

Later it occurred to me that interviews, which I plan to have with women about the cultural expectations and standards attached to the roles of mother, wife, daughter, and sister and about their own ways of performing those roles, can be approached as identity verification discourses. That approach justifies the use of individual interviews and adequately positions my project within the body of the existing literature, but also obscures its connection to the listed above questions.

Reading McCall and Simmons's (1966) Identities and Interactions helped me to clarify those connections. McCall and Simmons insist that each role-identity of each individual has two aspects: the conventional and the idiosyncratic. They distinguish between what they call "social roles," which are the set of expectations associated with occupancy of a given social position, and "interactive roles," which are not specified by the culture but are "improvised to deal in some variable fashion with the broad demands of one's social position and one's character" (p. 67). According to McCall and Simmons, these "interactive roles" are rather idealized and imaginative views of individuals as they like to think of themselves being and acting as occupants of certain positions. The reactions of other people, some of whom are specific known persons, are an integral part of these imaginative performances. As a result, a given role-identity continuously changes as persons and institutional contexts (e.g., a particular company office) come in and out of one's life. Many of individuals' best performances take place in fantasy and imagination, but they are not simple musings; they are also rehearsals and plausible ways of action. Similar to Burke and Stets (whom I discussed in my previous post), McCall and Simmons stress the importance of identity verification, but they use a different word (namely, "legitimation") to describe that process. They argue that "as a creature of ideals, man's main concern is to maintain a tentative hold on these idealized conceptions of himself, to legitimate his role-identities" (p. 71), which is done through role-performances that solicit role-support from the audience.

How all this helps me. First, since my main concern is not so much with the factual accuracy of interviewees' self-reports, but with learning about their "interactive roles," which can be accessed better through individual interviews, than through participant observation or any other method. I tried to touch upon some of the issues surrounding that point in my second question: What (if anything) can be learned about that interplay of identities from individuals' accounts of relational history and from individuals' self-reports of behavior? Then, what needs further clarification is the connection between "interactive roles" and the "interplay of identities." What precisely do I mean by the latter? As McCall and Simmons explain, role-identities of an individual are not completely distinct from each other, "but are woven into a complex pattern of identities" (p. 76), and "they can be separated only analytically" (p.130). I argue that this "complex pattern of identities" is not limited solely to role-identities, but also includes personal identities, which come into play as a result of the idiosyncratic aspect identities of role-identities, and social identities, which come into play as a result of the conventional aspect of role-identities.

Since, according to Tajfel and Turner (1979), the size of a group doesn't affect functioning of social identities, belonging to a family or to a nation can be equally viewed as social identities, which shape other identities of an individual. For, as discussed in my previous post, any social identity both depicts and prescribes one's attributes as a member of that group, and, even more importantly, when a group identity gets activated, perceptions and conduct of an individual become in-group stereotypical. “Belonging to a family” is also part of "relational history" mentioned in my second question, which, in turn, is connected to McCall and Simmons's claim that one's "interactive roles" change as people come in and out of his/her life. Moreover, McCall and Simmons talk about the life history of an individual as “a reflexive sequence of interactions in which any given interaction is influenced by the sum of past interactions and in turn influence the sum of future interactions" (p. 203). The notion of life history, which is larger than “relational history,” reminded me of Hormuth’s (1990) approach to the self as a part of the ecological system that consists of people, things, and environments which “provide, mediate, and perpetuate social experience” (p. 2). I thought about all the interconnections involved in identity processes and decided to replace the phrase “relational history” with “interactional history.”

After all this reading and pondering, I gradually came to drop my first question and revise the second one. Now I have one question that describes “intellectual goals” of my dissertation project. According to Maxwell (2005), “intellectual goals” are different from personal or practical, and they focus on understanding something and/or answering some question that hasn’t been adequately addressed by previous research. My new question still needs additional tinkering, but here it is in its current form:

·         What can be learned about the interplay of multiple identities of an individual from her self-reports of behavior and accounts of interactional history?

What are some of your intellectual goals? How did you work to clarify them

References:

• Burke, P. J., & Stets, J. E. (2009). Identity theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Hormuth, S. E. (1990). The ecology of the self: Relocation and self-concept change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (2^nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• McCall, G. J., & Simmons, J. L. (1966). Identities and interactions. New York, NY: Free 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.