No abstract

Activity participation provides a unique context for adolescents and emerging adults to explore interests, talents, and skills and for identity work to occur. Research has found consistent gender differences in the types of activities in which males and females participate. The current study drew on Eudaimonistic identity theory to examine the subjective identity‐related experiences of personal expressiveness, flow experiences, and goal‐directed behaviour [Waterman, 1984; Waterman, 2004. Finding someone to be: Studies on the role of intrinsic motivation in identity formation. Identity, 4, 209–228] within a special type of activity, self‐defining activities, or those activities that participants identify as being important to who they are as a person. This study also tested for gender and country differences in a sample of 572 adolescents and emerging adults from the United States, Italy, and Chile. Findings indicate gender and country differences in the types of self‐defining activities for males and females, but no gender differences in the reported identity‐related experiences within those activities. This finding held across the three countries. Results from Multivariate Analyses of Variance also indicate that identity‐related experiences differ significantly across seven broad activity classes. Findings are discussed in the context of the growing literature on adolescent activity involvement and time use, gender, and their relations to identity exploration.

Using seven waves of data, collected twice a year from the 8th through the 11th grades in a low-resource community in Cape Town, South Africa, we aimed to describe the developmental trends in three specific leisure experiences (leisure boredom, new leisure interests, and healthy leisure) and substance use (cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana) behaviors and to investigate the ways in which changes in leisure experiences predict changes in substance use behaviors over time. Results indicated that adolescents’ substance use increased significantly across adolescence, but that leisure experiences remained fairly stable over time. We also found that adolescent leisure experiences predicted baseline substance use and that changes in leisure experiences predicted changes in substance use behaviors over time, with leisure boredom emerging as the most consistent and strongest predictor of alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use. Implications for interventions that target time use and leisure experiences are discussed.

The developmental processes of identity exploration and formation in adolescence often take place within the context of leisure activities. The discovery model of identity formation proposes that these processes are reflected in part by adolescents' subjective identity-related experiences including personal expressiveness, flow, and goal-directed behaviour (Waterman, 1990, 1993). This model, however, has not been tested with cross-national samples. The purpose of this study was to examine the applicability of this general model of identity-related experiences within self-defining activities for a sample of 493 adolescents from the United States, Chile, and Italy. Confirmatory analyses of a three-factor model showed strong invariance across countries. Findings indicated that most adolescents reported high levels of identity experiences within self-defining activities. Results from Multivariate Analyses of Variance indicated considerable commonalities and a few significant differences in these experiences across the three countries and across five broad activity classes. Findings are discussed in the context of the growing literature on adolescent activity involvement and the relation of activities to identity exploration.