Assessing Diachronic Reasoning: Exploratory Measures of Perceived Self-Change in Young Adults

Abstract

Personal persistence, the subjective perception of self-sameness through time, is implied or explicitly asserted in nearly all modern theories of self and identity. Recently, personal persistence has become the subject of inquiry and argument, most directly due to Galen Strawson, who recently described himself as experiencing a distinct series of non-defective and non-pathological selves, each phenomenologically independent of the other. Using a combination of previously published, modified, and newly constructed measures, the present study, in an attempt to provide empirical information relevant to the theoretical treatments of personal persistence, assembled an assessment battery of assumptively intercorrelated personal persistence measures, which collectively provided dichotomous, linear, quantitative, and qualitative information about the experience of self-persistence in a sample of 177 mostly female college students between the ages of 18 and 44 years.

The Postmodern Self

“…More significantly though, it was altered so that personal persistence is asked about rather than assumed: As can be seen in a reprinted version of the instrument above, the unnumbered routing statement attempts to categorically separate participants. The quantitative results of this dichotomization were presented previously (Hertler et al, 2015), showing that 63% of the sample classified themselves as diachronically disunified. Some eight participants incorrectly processed the routing statement and mistakenly presented themselves as diachronically disunified although they were not.…”

“…Nearly every young participant reflected on maturational forces and perspectival change, but only those who apperceived the moorings of personality and morality weathered the developmental storm. To be sure, change is divisive; change and diachronicity were inversely related across and between measures in the two studies that simultaneously measured change and personal persistence (Hertler et al, 2015; Lampinen et al, 2004). The present narratives reinforce this view, as many explanations of diachronic disunity begin by recalling change: All the changes affected my life .…”

“…As first described in Hertler, Krauss, and Ward (2015), the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview alters the original most obviously by converting it from a structured interview to an open-ended self-report measure. This facilitates mass administration.…”

“…The Adapted Personal Persistence Interview was presented in a bound packet on 5½ by 8½ pieces of paper, each of which contained the statement followed by some lines in which responses were to be recorded. This was presented along with other measures, the results of which can be found in Hertler et al (2015). A demographic form and two other measures of personal persistence were completed before the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview and the Time Reference Inventory as well as a personality measure (NEO-FFI) were completed afterward.…”