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The study of emerging adulthood—the prolonged transition to adulthood extending into the 20s—is a rapidly growing area of research. Although identity issues are prominent during this period, the role of personal agency and individualization in the identity formation process during these years is not well understood. This study examines three psychological aspects of identity formation (style, status, and process) in relation to personal agency associated with the individualization process. Structural equation modeling analyses suggest that higher levels of agency are positively related to exploration and flexible commitment, unrelated to conformity, and negatively related to avoidance. Cluster analysis was used to examine and support a theorized polarity between developmental and default forms of individualization. Replicated across three U.S. ethnic groups, the results suggest that emerging adults utilize agentic capacities to varying degrees, and that the degree of agency utilized is directly related to the coherence of the emerging adult's identity.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.-Thomas Szasz (1973, p. 54) Two of the least contested issues in contemporary adolescent psychology and youth studies are that (a) important aspects of identity formation, one of the pillars of human development, take place during the transition to adulthood, and (b) the transition to adulthood is now taking far longer than in the past, delayed until the late 20s for a significant proportion of the population. In this chapter, I deal with these two issues simultaneously, examining what is known about the changes in identity formation during the now prolonged transition to adulthood, with a focus on research examining identity changes during the period designated as emerging adulthood. 1 This task goes beyond the conventional view that most identity formation occurs primarily during adolescence to deal with contemporary realities where key identity issues are not resolved for many people until well beyond the teens, during what is referred to in this volume as emerging adulthood.The theoretical basis of this chapter is Erik Erikson's identity theory and his proposal that, as part of the transition to adulthood, societies can offer their young people institutionalized moratoria-structured contexts for working through identity confusion and resolving an identity crisis. After reviewing 'According to Snarey, Kohlberg, and Noam (1983), emerging adulthood is a cultural age, like adolescence, because there is an emphasis "on quantitative changes in age, mastery, performance, knowledge, rights, and responsibilities" (p. 328). Erikson's identity stage constitutes a functional phase because there is both a qualitative change in identity structure and a quantitative change in social status (from adolescence to adulthood) upon resolution of the stage. The fact that the identity stage now takes longer does not mean that emerging adulthood is a functional phase, because in a functional phase qualitative changes must take place if subsequent development is to take place.

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