A Critical Discursive Approach to Identity 167or society that the psychologist can measure and use as a predictive or
explanatory variable. Second, identities are treated as demographic facts
about people (i.e., ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘American,’ ‘Catholic’) that are
internalized, which purportedly have predictable associated behaviors. And
third, these theories are realist as they assume a correspondence between
one’s self-concept and some aspect of social reality (Widdicombe, 1998).
This motivates experimental work that seeks to find the objective means of
correlating class membership with other personal/social variables. The
findings are used to make causal predictions (e.g., the ‘Social Identification
Scale’) about the attitudes and behaviors of certain real identities that are
‘out there,’ so to speak, in society.
As a way of broadening these theories, some neo-Eriksonian
psychologists have argued for a multifaceted view of identity that goes
beyond the personal/intrapsychic realm to consider the importance of
social contexts and social interactions (see Côté, 1993, Côté & Levine,
1988; Schwartz, 2001). Neo-Eriksonian researchers have raised questions
about the extent to which identity is an individual/internal project or a
function of interacting in social and cultural contexts, or a combination of
both (see Adams & Marshall, 1996; Côté, 1993; Côté & Levine, 1988;
Grotevant & Cooper, 1985). Although this work continues to proliferate,
critical empirical work that details the relationship between social
contexts/interactions and identity development has been scarce. In
Schwartz’s (2001) meta-review of the first half century of neo-Eriksonian
work, there is a conspicuous lack of influential work mentioned that
critically addresses identity by studying social contexts/interactions. The
lopsided prioritization of internal processes over the ideological/contextual
realm remains as an unsurprising predilection of a discipline that continues
to privilege the measurement of interiority.
When social contexts and interactions are discussed, they are typically
conceptualized as extant factors like ‘schools,’ ‘families,’ or ‘peer groups,’
and social interactions are often coded and transformed into ‘interaction
variables’ that are treated as ‘factors’ or ‘forces’ that individuals must
integrate and differentiate from as part of their identity development.
While contexts and social interactions are ingredient in a range of current