Fit In The Choir Analysis

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Concepts of identity and personality can be described in various ways such as Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, James Marcia Identity Statuses and Han Eysenck’s Five Factor Model of Personality. These theories examine factors that help build and shape our identity internally and externally. To validate theories, I will be examining Martin Luther’s classic identity crisis from the article Fit in the Choir. A common question high school students get during their graduation year is ‘what are you going to major in?’ and most students will not know. Erikson’s and Marcia’s theory both support this common theme. However, I found that Marcia was more realistic because he recognized adolescents experience identity crisis differently. For …show more content…

But now our world is heavily reliant on technology which influences the development of identity by external forces such as social media. In some cases, adolescents form online personas that rarely matches real-life behaviour. This can be an act of exploring various commitments unofficially to avoid risk of disappointment. Identity is what you stand for and personality is how you represent it, which means they work as a team. Overall, Marcia’s theory is relevant to personality today because adolescences are becoming dependent on technology, which can lead to introversion. Once in a non-digital environment, adolescences can begin to exploring various commitments through trial and error. Marcia proposed four statuses of identity crisis with one carrying the most significance, Moratorium identity where an adolescent is exploring commitments but has not made a commitment (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). I believe the purpose in life is to discover who we are and to do that we must experience different opportunities to find those answers. However, these answers are not permanent because we have different identities over our …show more content…

In contrast, Erikson’s eight stages of personality development argued individuals’ motivations, aspirations and goals change with age, which fits into the idiographic approach. With that being said, psychodynamic approaches to personality like Erikson’s cannot be integrated with biological and trait based approaches. Both use methods that can only be used in a particular area of study, meaning it may not work for other studies. Idiographic methods would include interviews, behavioral observations, and self-reports to analyze uniqueness (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). The nomothetic methods would employ scientific methods such as brain scans and twin studies to assess common patterns of behaviour in people (Friedman & Schustack,