We review three traditions in research on identity. The first two traditions, which stress (a) the internalization of social positions and their meanings as part of the self structure and (b) the impact of cultural meanings and social situations on actors' identities, are closely intertwined. The third, the burgeoning literature on collective identity, has developed quite independently of the first two and focuses more on group-level processes. Unlike previous reviews of identity, which have focused on the sources of internalized identity (e.g., role relationship, group membership, or category descriptor), we focus here on the theoretical mechanisms underlying theories of identity. We organize our review by highlighting whether those mechanisms are located in the individual's self-structure, in the situation, or in the larger sociopolitical context. We especially attempt to draw connections between the social psychological literature on identity processes and the distinct, relatively independent literature on collective identity.
Our analysis focuses on the implications of social status characteristics for children's psychological well-being. Drawing on social evaluation theories and stress-based explanations, we hypothesized that disadvantage cumulates across statuses (the double jeopardy hypothesis) and over time as children move into the adolescent years. To test this hypothesis, we estimated the independent and interactive effects of socioeconomic status, gender, and race/ethnicity on the latent growth curves for four outcomes, from preadolescence to early adolescence, using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data set. Our results were consistent with the double jeopardy hypothesis for the interaction of race/ethnicity and poverty, but not for the other interactions we estimated. In the case of gender and poverty, the strength of the evidence for the double jeopardy hypothesis varied by outcome: evidence was more consistent for scholastic competence and self-esteem than for depression and hyperactivity. In the case of gender and race/ethnicity, our results consistently refuted the double jeopardy hypothesis.
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