The formation of identity is a key feature of adolescence according to several theories. For example, Erikson’s psychosocial theory of personality development, adolescence involves a ‘crisis’ resulting in either identity formation or role confusion. This concerns the adolescent having to establish who they are and what they will do with their adult life. The theory suggests that, in childhood, people incorporate the values of those who are most important in their life, and in adolescence some of these values are retained but some are abandoned.
All of this is a process of the development of an individual identity, which, albeit applicable to modern individualist cultures where individual identity is valued, may not be temporally or culturally valid. That is, in most collectivist cultures, group identity is much more valued than individual identity, and often choices are limited as to what will happen in the future. This used to be similar in many Western cultures: it was often a given that men would continue their father’s career and women would get married and look after the house and children.
This implies that, in such cultures, there are not many decisions with regard to life in the future as there are in modern individualist cultures. The population validity of Erikson’s explanation of adolescent identity formation can also be questioned since, much like other psychoanalysts, his theory was grounded on case studies. Although they provide a deep insight into how the human brain may work, using case studies in the development of theories may be open to misinterpretation on the part of the researcher, as the majority of people studied are psychologically abnormal.
It could therefore be that the adolescents that Erikson encountered had higher levels of stress, causing him to overemphasise the idea of a crisis. This emphasis of crisis is disputable. Some would say that it is a time of stress, such as Smith & Crawford (1986) who found that more than 60% of secondary school students reported at least one instance of suicidal thinking, and Csikszentmihalyi* & Larson (1981), whose experiment involving ‘bleeping’ through pagers found mood swings of adolescents to be much more rapid than those of adults.
Others, however, argue that it is not, such as Larson & Lampman-Petraitis (1989) who found no link between the onset of adolescence and increased emotionality. However, the stress as described in the above studies may not be an indicator of a crisis in adolescence, and even then the crisis may not be that of identity formation as suggested by Erikson.