The author of this article, Alan S. Waterman, from Trenton State College, goes over people’s development of their identities and how and why they may try and change it over the course of their journey into adulthood. The foundation of the theory he is looking at is E.H. Erikson’s and then using a number of other research projects done to build off of Erikson’s findings. The author discusses the ideas and findings of when one’s identity will begin to change and the hypothesis that over time people’s progressive shifts as they get older will bring them to start thinking of what beliefs, social status, etc., that they want to commit themselves to. The piece focuses on the direction, timing of identity development, sex differences, and the identification of antecedent conditions that may have influenced the developmental pathways.

The overall topic of the article is the developmental process of one’s identity as they reach adulthood, but the question posed in it is whether or not the transition into adulthood involves a progressive strengthening in the sense of identity. Waterman is looking at whether or not direction, timing, sex, and antecedent conditions that perhaps have a hand in effecting the progression of one’s identity as they come into adulthood; to do this he gathered several studies together and in the way of meta-analysis he looked at shallow opinions & attitudes as well as deeply held opinions & attitudes (survey’s and in-depth interviews). This data was of previously done research so the author would have gotten this information from public records, then to analyze this data he would have used thematic analysis which allows him to find any themes raised in the set of texts, interview transcripts, etc.

The research was at times a bit hard to follow because of the intricate wording of the author but the overall points that he was making in each section came through and was very insightful. Something that I found quite interesting was when Waterman went over the idea that if one is given a greater range of identity alternatives in their childhood the more likely that person will undergo an identity crisis which before I may have thought the opposite.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alan_Waterman2/publication/232489351_Identity_development_from_adolescence_to_adulthood_An_extension_of_theory_and_a_review_of_research/links/0fcfd50c25968422e2000000/Identity-development-from-adolescence-to-adulthood-An-extension-of-theory-and-a-review-of-research.pdf