A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Identity Development: South Africa and the United States

The relevance of identity style and professional identity to academic commitment and academic achievement in a higher education setting

“…Previous research indicates that adolescents in three different cultural contexts (American, Czech and, Finnish) draw on the same pattern of self-elements regardless of cultural context (Berzonsky, Macek, Nurmi, 2003). Granted that these three cultural contexts represent the global north, and there is little evidence of the transferability of these findings to countries in the global south, we agree with Lee, Beckert and Goodrich (2010) and Low et al (2005), and more recently Szabo et al (2016), that western models of identity development, and particularly Berzonsky's social-cognitive model of identity processing styles can be applied reliably and validly to non-western populations. Nevertheless, there would be some value in future research to establish whether the patterns reported by Berzonsky et al (2003) also hold in South Africa, where students tend to be influenced by parental and societal views (Low, Akande & Hill 2005).…”

How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion

“…Perhaps additional studies can consider locus attributions for specific, individual emotions instead of for emotions as a set with two different emotions typology scales (Machleit & Mantel, 2007). Thirdly, the present study was cross-sectional, rather than longitudinal, whilst the latter could have substantiated the findings of the study along certain structural changes (Low, Akande & Hill 2005). Future studies may contribute finer grained understanding of other forms of analyses and exploring ways of grouping countries and geopolitical locations in terms of mood states and cultures.…”

National and Gender Measurement Invariance of the Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS)

“…contrasts involving the United States and only one other country, did not conduct any test of invariance (e.g., Graf et al, 2008;Jensen et al, 1998;Low et al, 2005) or failed in establishing this . In contrast, studies using the U-MICS yielded consistent findings showing that these various levels of invariance could be established also in two-nation (Crocetti et al, 2010) and seven-nation (Dimitrova et al, in press) studies conducted with European adolescent samples.…”

“…Moreover, the few available ones present a number of shortcomings. First, extant cross-national studies on identity are mainly based on pairwise comparisons, in which youth from the United States are compared with their counterparts from another nation (i.e., India: Graf, Mullis, & Mullis, 2008; Norway: Jensen, Kristiansen, Sandbekk, & Kroger, 1998; South Africa: Low, Akande, & Hill, 2005; Sweden: Schwartz, Adamson, Ferrer-Wreder, Dillon, & Berman, 2006; and Turkey: Eryigit & Kerpelman, 2011). An exception to reliance on pairwise comparisons has been provided by Berman, You, Schwartz, Teo, and Mochizuki (2011), who compared identity in youth from the United States, China, Japan, and Taiwan.…”