Identity synthesis and confusion in youth

I was always a fan of Erikson’s work on identity formation and was pleased to encounter two recent articles looking at identity synthesis and confusion in young people using large data samples. Identity synthesis is what we want to have happen – the individual gradually incorporates more and more complex aspects of the self into an increasingly coherent and stable personal identity. Role confusion is the painful experience of role conflict in which the individual is uncertain and unstable in relationships and roles. Bogaerts et al. (2021) published “Identity Synthesis and Confusion in Early to Late Adolescents: Age trends, gender differences, and associations with depressive symptoms” in Journal of Adolescence while Hatano, Hihara, Nakama, Tsuzuki, Mizokami, & Sugimura (2022) published “Trajectories in Sense of Identity and Relationship with Life Satisfaction During Adolescence and Young adulthood” in Developmental Psychology.

Bogaerts et al. studied 5860 Belgian teens ages 12-25, averaging age 16 with more females (56.1%) than males. They collected their cross-sectional data in 12 data sets from 2012-2019. They examined depressive symptoms in a smaller sample (2,782). They found a decrease in identity synthesis from 12-15, with an increase from 15-23, and a decrease from 23-25. Identity confusion followed the opposite pattern, increasing in early adolescence, decreasing later, then increasing between 23 and 25. As expected, identity synthesis scores were negatively related to depressive symptoms while identity confusion scores were positively associated. Overall, they found growing synthesis and declining confusion. The decrease in synthesis between 12 and 15 may reflect the transition from a naïve sense of being “fine” to realizing that navigating from childhood to adulthood is a lot trickier than they thought. Similarly, the 23-25 transition may well be the move from college or early work experience to a “real world” of work, relationships, and aspirations that is more complex than they originally thought.

Hatano et al. (2022) studied 5,047 Japanese youth, roughly half female, with ages from 12-22 in a three-wave longitudinal study. Their latent growth modeling analysis found that, from early to mid-adolescence, synthesis was higher than confusion, while the opposite was true from late adolescence to early adulthood. Not surprisingly, increased synthesis was associated with increased life satisfaction while increased confusion related to decreased life satisfaction. Latent growth class analysis identified five identity classes: high synthesis–low confusion, low synthesis–high confusion, high synthesis–high confusion, low synthesis-low confusion, and moderate synthesis–moderate confusion. What I like about their identity classes is the recognition that the high synthesis-low confusion class that we see as ideal and the high-confusion-low synthesis class that we see as troubled are not the only places to be from childhood to adulthood.

It’s always difficult to compare cross-sectional and longitudinal data, especially in youth from different cultures. Bogaerts’ 12 year olds and 15 year olds are different people, while Hatano’s are the same and there may be impacts of the context in which the data are collected and the young person’s commitment to the project. Yet, in a world in which clinicians often have very limited time with a client, this work is a nice reminder for me of the importance of including some assessment of the individual’s sense of identity as one part of the assessment process.