The Abbey

Well, the spring semester has officially started. Problem is, I’ve graduated. Not officially, mind you. I’m still waiting on the paperwork. I was sure to stop by and make sure that everything was in order, though. Now I’m just waiting for the i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed. My grad school applications are now in and recommendation letters should have been sent. I even did my taxes. Fact is, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I’m starting to get anxious because I have nothing to be anxious about. School has forced me into a habitual state of low level anxiety because I always have something going on that eats up my time. And whenever I’m out of school I feel sort of lost.

I guess I need to find a new project to absorb my time. I’m trying to get myself focussed on designing this educational software package that’s been floating around in my head, but my procrastination is getting the better of my anxiety at the moment. I’m not quite in the same rush as I was before with designing it. I mean, if I get into grad school it will most likely be put on hold or at least on the back burner, so I do have that constraint. But at the same time, if it doesn’t get done it doesn’t get done. When I first thought about creating it I was betting all my chips on it, but now it’s just a personal goal. As such, I’ve been trying to research alternate methods of creating it. My initial thoughts were of using Flash, as it would be easy to create and deploy. I’m also considering Director, as it is geared more towards desktop applications. They’re releasing a Director update later this year, so it may be a good idea. I just don’t know enough about this to decide firmly, but if I don’t decide it’ll never even get started.

I also started looking up the various cities in which the schools I’ve applied to are located to see what rent is like. I’ve been using craigslist, which may or may not be a good indicator. Seems like most of the cities are fairly expensive. I’m kind of nervous about what kind of stipend and/or financial aid I’ll get offered. Hopefully it’ll be enough to subsist on. Kelly will most likely have to go to work or at least find some source of income. If we could get the software up and running that might be a viable home business.

Oh well, I guess I should just relax. Things are going to change fast and pretty soon it’ll be all I can do to just hang on. I’ve learned my lessons well to know that lulls like these never last and should be appreciated for all they’re worth.

I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from my research over the past week.  I went to the MAPACA conference and gave my presentation, but have yet to put it together into a written paper.  At the outset, I thought I would have the paper before going off to the conference, but a few things prevented that from being the case.  My personal life has played intereference with my professional goals over the past few weeks, and I’m still pretty much trying to get them back in order.  I have, however, been asked to submit the paper to the journal for MAPACA, so I will be putting it together into a more formal format sometime very soon.  For now I’m just trying to catch up with the school work I’ve missed in getting this together and figuring out how to go about applying to graduate schools…  This is always the worst part of the semester.  I’m stuck between anxiously awaiting the end and hoping wishing for just a few more weeks to get my act together.  Stay tuned, I’ll have something pretty published shortly.  I’m probably going to post the powerpoint slides from my presentation.  I didn’t end up using a projector to show anything, as I would have liked, but I used the slides just to organize my thoughts and go over the major points, but it has some good data in it that may or may not make the final cut of my report.

i’ve been getting my feet wet with spss, which used to stand for “statistical package for social sciences” before they figured out that they could market it to others for big bucks. how big? the base package of the current version costs $1600! An educational student discount would bring it down to a measly $200, but I’m not sure what the differences in packages are. Not my concern at the moment, though…

I’m nearing the end of my data collection phase, and while I have begun writing my report, I still haven’t ironed out the details of what i’m going to report on. I apologize to everyone who took my survey. Sifting through the data I now realize just how much was in it. I am very thankful to those that actually saw it through to the end, though. This was a good learning experience for me. I didn’t want my survey to be too long, but in the end it was a bit too long. This is an exploratory study, however, so I tried to throw as many questions out there as I could, not knowing exactly what I’d get back. In the end, I will probably end up throwing out bits of data here and there where I did not get reliable results, but the bulk of it will stay.

At the moment, I’m still collecting results for the survey, and these will be added to the data for my report, but I’m nearing my original goal of 50 responses, so I’ll probably be cutting off the responses pretty soon. I’m going to leave the survey up, in case some more responses trickle in, but I will not be sending out new invitations once I reach my “quota”. Here’s a quick peak at some of the demographics of my sample so far (I don’t expect these to change too much, as only a few more responses will be counted):

n=44 (26 female/18 male)

Age = 17.32 years

Ethnicity -
Percentages in parentheses are from national census data.

Asian - 2.3% (3.6%)
Black - 4.6% (12.3%)
Hispanic - 18.2% (12.5%)
Hawaiian/Pac Islander - 2.3% (0.1%)
White - 72.7% (75.1%)

Education Level - 11.3 years completed

Marital Status - 68.2% Single
We ran a factor analysis for the IDEA scale with the data that I have. It’s really neat to examine the way it factors it out. At least one or two of the factors were dead on matches for the data that they got in the original study, although there are some differences. It gives me some hope that my data is actually valid I don’t know how much verification I’ll be able to do with that scale within the scope of this study, but I’ll hopefully be able to go back and do some more work to validate the scale with this sample.

My age group is pretty small, so I don’t know if there will be much of a difference in scores for the identity scales across age, although I will be looking for sucha difference. Ideally, there should be an increase in identity exploration and other factors as age increases, although other factors (such as employment, marital status and living situation complicate it a bit).  The ethnicity data, while somewhat matching overall census data, may also be invalid in a group of this size.  I can’t really count 2 “Black” responses as representative, even if the percentages fit.  This data will most likely just be for demographic interest.

One of the data points that I’m really hoping to get something interesting out if is the number of friends, which is taken directly from MySpace profiles.  I’m not quite sure yet how well this will correlate with anything, but I’m very interested to find out.  I think it will help to answer a number of questions concerning social networking when correlated with other data.  Who scored higher on the loneliness scale? Those with many friends or only a few?  Do the number of friends correlate well with how many of those friends you have met?   I think it’s an important piece of data because the friend list is really the crux of social networking sites.

Anywho,  I’ve still got a ways to go from here.  The pieces are starting to come together, though, so I should be able to start posting some final data to the site soon and writing a draft of the report.  The report itself will not be all-inclusive of those data, as there is just way too much to write about.  Seeing as the presentation I’m doing is only 20 minutes, I’m going to have to do some editing of this report, nevermind one that includes all of the results I’ve gotten.  I’m hoping to keep going with this and produce more results as I dig deeper into the functions of SPSS, learning and producing at the same time.

I gave up on my spamming.  Not on the scraping of profiles, mind you, but just on the attempts to send messages programatically.  I figured it wasn’t worth all of the hassle in the tim eI have left to create it.  So instead I started doing a little research, planning for my future and all.  My professor has been urging us to check out the career center website and a few of the links on it.  To be honest, I was a bit pessimistic about it because I think that my interests are a bit off the beaten track.  As it turns out, I was justified in my pessimism.  While providing vague notions of possibilities, it doesn’t really give me any of the meat I’m looking for.  It’s like a letter from home after the government censors have gotten through with it, just enough information to leave me wanting more.

I am currently in a BA program for Psychology.  My plan is to go to graduate school next year.  The programs I am currently looking at, and planning on applying to shortly, are variously labelled as “Human Computer Interaction” or “Human Centered Computing”, with HCI being the most popular.  Probably one of the largest hurdles I’ve had to face with gathering information or trying to explain to folks what it is that I’m interested in is the fact that everyone assumes that “psychology” is an exact synonym for “therapist”.  Even those who take a broader view of the term generally tend to assume some sort of therapy related activities.

As with most things, you reach a tolerance point after which you are no longer willing to explain yourself to yet another person who just doesn’t know.  So most of the time when people presume that I wish to be a therapist and go on to tell me what they think about that, I just nod and smile.  It’s kind of ironic, really.  Let me provide an illustration to prove my point.

At my last job, I had the esteemed pleasure of working for low wages, without benefits, in an illegal work environment inside of my boss’s home.  He liked to tell me little things about life that he learned in all his years of living it.  When he asked my about my major and I told him Psychology, he told me about his ex-wife who was a therapist.  He was sure to tell me all about therapy and his wife’s practice and why I didn’t want to go into that.  I tried to explain that I wasn’t really interested in therapy, but research, computers, and teaching.  He wasn’t really interested in hearing that.  Or, if he was, he promptly forgot about it.

The topic came up a few times after that, where he would disdain the field of psychology (of course, having nothing at all to do with his disdain for his ex-wife).  He told me about how his ex would ask for his advice on patients, and with his great knowledge of human nature, through years of being in sales, he was able to give the proper diagnosis even when she couldn’t.  Here’s the ironic bit… One day, as he was giving one of his sermons on the office chair, he told me that I would not be a good psychologist because I just didn’t have what it took.  He, now he had what it took, but he didn’t like psychology.  Sales and business were his thing.  He went on to tell me all about it for I don’t know how long before I finally found a way to sneak out of there and actually try to get some work done.  I bit my tongue on the whole thing for two reasons: One, I learned a long time ago not to argue with people who have their minds made up about the way things work.  You won’t change them, only anger yourself.  And two,  it’s bad form to get into philosophical debates with your boss.  Unless you’re both drunk, then it’s generally excusable.  Or, at least, you have something to blame it on.

The reality of the situation is, while I am very verbose when it comes to writing lines of text in this little box here, and while I have every confidence in myself to be able to babble on in front of a room of sleepy eyed college kids for hours on end, I am also a good listener.  Now, provided, this guy liked to talk.  He could spin yarns for hours, possibly days with a little bit of prodding.  That’s probably why he was good in sales. It’s one of those requirements of the job.  You don’t talk, you don’t sell.  Nothing sells itself, well, except maybe crack.  But the fact is that he never really learned too much about me, other than the few bits I divulged here and there.  I know quite a bit of his personal history, however, stretching back at least 30 years.  I know his personality and his life history.  If I had taken notes, I’m sure I could build a nice profile on him.  If I was crazy or malicious, oh the things I could do…
Oh, but I don’t want to dwell on that old coot.  My main point is, well, just a gripe really.  People have such narrow focus on college majors, as if the kid who’s going for “Business” can just go get a job in “Business”.  What the hell is that supposed to mean? People have an easier time grasping what that means though.  It means you’ll put on a tie and let some mid-level manager hold it while he rides you like a pony, at least until you can FUMU and be the rider instead of ridee.  Not that I’m cynical about the modern corporate slaveow… uh, shareholders.  Yeah, it’s getting late. I’m letting my true colors start to show.  Better tuck those back in under my clothes before I get myself in trouble. You know, since I’m a big time publisher now.  There is no such thing as posting a free-speech diary for public access anymore, but that’s a story for another night…

Goodnight, posterity,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Probably the biggest ethical issue I have with the research I’ve been doing to date is that I am sending unsolicited messages to people I don’t know in hopes that they will participate in my survey.  I’ve tried to think of alternative ways of gathering the data or finding people willing to participate, but I can think of nothing better in the time frame I am currently under.  It wouldn’t do me any good to try to capture a zeitgeist of an ever evolving culture over a course of years anyway, unless I had a steadily large pool of data to pull from.  but anyway…

my dilemma now is this.  my survey has been running for about a month now.  I had a pretty good response rate, but it has started to decline lately.  It’s a numbers game, really.  The more invites I can get out, the more responses I can get.  I feel that the work I am doing is honest, ethical, and important.  I’m asking questions that I haven’t found answers for elsewhere, at least in this particular context.  So, I have no problems with the subject matter, but the methods I need now take are the problem.  They are exactly the methods used by junk emailers.  I know how to  copy the methods of spammers, and I’m going to use them to send out invites, hunting for the participants I need to pull of this project.

In my mind, it feels right to use these methods, as my goals are ethical.  I’m not trying to sell anything or scam anybody, and I don’t have any other method of gaining participants.  Personally, though, I hate unsolicited emails, so it makes me wary.  Now, the caveat here is that I don’t really ever get this kind of unsolicited mail.  I’ve been randomly invited to take a psych survey maybe once or twice in my time on the internet, but most unsolicited mail is advertising of one sort or another.

MySpace is now starting to become overrun with spam.  Even though I have hardly any friends on my research account, I randomly get invites from skinny chicks in skimpy bathing suits telling me how they get paid to take surveys or where I can meet horny, young housewives.  And then there are all of the semi-legit bands just looking for fans.  I’ll add the odd one here and there, but I’m not really into that anymore.  It’s just too much for me to keep up with.  I’m growing to old to listen to every band who thinks they’re the next best thing and wants me to add them on MySpace (except for atomictom, of course…)

I’m going to go forward with this mass mailing campaign.  I’m kind of nervous that if I push it to hard, I’ll end up getting TOSsed from MySpace, but I’m running out of options, and time.  I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the junk mail I’ve received, but I still have this slight trepidation about it.  I hereby declare my official apology to all of those kids out there who receive a message from me on MySpace and were in any way put off by it.  Sorry, man.  It was my best way out, and it’s all in the name of science…

Now just take the damn survey!  Would it really kill you? You’ve already got like a hundred of them bogging down your profile… I know, this one won’t get you laid, but take one for the team!

sometimes art makes me feel inferior, screaming from it’s canvas “and what have you done lately?!”.  sometimes i delude myself into thinking that writing is art, and that i am a writer.  i can never quite seem to get around to proving it, though.  i tell myself it’s just my age, and that eventually it will come.  a temporary, localized madness. but the madness that will not go away is that urge, clawing its way to the surface every now and then, to create.  i have an artist’s soul, you see.  i keep it locked away and buried in a little box, but every so often it finds its way out.  upon release it does not find itself to be happy.  it wants to splatter the walls with paint, piss on christ himself, and tear holes in reality itself like trendy blue jeans.  the artist as destroyer, the destroyer as artist.  trying to find some thing that is worthwhile in these tiny little lives, or to show just how tiny they are.  what is this thing inside of us that wants out?  how do we put a finger on it? i think art is as raw as that message can come.  that’s what real art does, passes on a raw piece of data, relays a message that no other form of communication could transvey other than feeling it yourself.  real art is like vomiting.

not quite the idea you usually have in mind when seeing some art, but that’s the closest physiological explanation I can give you about art.  It’s not like smoking a pipe or having sex or climbing a tree.  It’s more like vomiting.  “Ah! Why vomiting is a beautiful symphony of coordinated activity.” (yuckiest)  Vomiting requires the coordination of many different muscles, moving in reverse of their normal operation.  It is a long chain of events happening mostly out of our control.  Oh, you can try to keep it down for as long as you can.  You can play all sorts of tricks.  But when your body says out with it, it comes out.  Streaming, tearing, pouring.  Your life drains from you, not dreamy post-coitus, not long jog in the park, but one more shovel of dirt coming out of your grave.

we have strange habits, in this country.  we want to be so sanitized, so safe from our environments.  we’d rather have dangerous and deadly chemicals in an aerosol spray than risk ants.  we are all constantly in a biosphere, but here i’m surrounded by nothing but concrete.  small patches that we allow to grow.  one day we’ll sterilize the universe.  but we are not alone.  we require those ants if we want this planet to support us as it has.  bacteria in our intestines help us to digest food.  millions of tiny little creatures, in our moths, our eyebrows, crawling across skin.  but what would we be without them?  could we even survive without them?

while one may survive, what about later generations?  for us to have any hope at all of ever getting off of this planet, we’d have to be able to.  otherwise we would have to either create some biosphere-in-a-rocket or find a method of faster than light travel. stuck to our homeland like a vampire, needing to bathe in the dirt of our homeland.

all these thoughts just to amuse myself.  but that’s just it.  once the piece is writ, you’re wasted.  but there’s a peak, a runner’s high buried in the act of creating art.  just before that vomiting, that ejaculation of pieces of your soul, you lose yourself.  you become the art, it becomes the burning white light of pure thought beaming forward, your consciousness pulled away in the downflow.  thoughts flow past like clouds in the sky and you can almost hear the buddha laughing in your ear.   you think this is the real shining white light, but then the wheel turns and you’re heading back down again.

rota.

working, music going, consciousness humming along with the thousand rythyms my room is heir to, and my child sleeps. across the room, around corners, nestled in the quiet, dark bed. Do you I hear him crying? Was that him moving around? No, just a noise. But my brain thinks it might be him, cries for attention to that one burning thought, forcing my focus to that precise point of attention. It tricks me into thinking I’m hearing what I’m listening for, when really I’m just hearing something outside of the spectrum my subconscious mind has grown accustomed to. A cat bats some loose matter across the floor with its paw and I see, literally see, in my “mind’s eye”, my son walking across the floor towards me. I have to look to see that it is really just the cat.

The amazing thing about consciousness is not it’s ability to think. It’s the filter, the ability to focus attention on patterns, to actively seek patterns, even within ourselves. How much freedom, and how much molecular destiny? Aye, there’s the rub.

Music changes, sends a blast through my thought waves. The glacier of my thoughts not melted, but shattered. Attention shifts. New noises, unexpected sonic interference. Light shifts, and the thought fades.

well, it’s been a long day. eventful. but that doesn’t say much. every day is eventful, unless you’re in a coma or just sleep through it. even then there are events, just not one’s you’re conscious of. i was sitting here peacefully at my computer. the speakers were turned up to watch a quiet movie and all of a sudden this loud doorbell goes off.
now mind you, we have no doorbell. well, we do somewhat. we live in a basement apartment and it came with no doorbell. i bought a cheap remote doorbell off ebay, so when the batteries work it sounds like chirping birds or something. what was this loud bell threatening to wake a sleeping child and where was it coming from? my addled brain searched for the button to push to shut it up and saw that it was a “hello” from some random person on (take a guess who, i’ll give you three chances) instant messaging. my girlfriend is logged into her account. we use it to talk while i’m away. but she, by virtue of being female, often gets unsolicited “hellos” in the middle of the night. it’s not enough that you get catcalls going down the street, you’ve also got to worry about lonely people in the middle of the night. that’s what happens when you leave your line open. the party line of the damned. there is a cat attacking my foot. oh, no. she was cleaning it. cats are strange.

my mind is a strange place to wander through at times. i often wonder if other minds are similarly strange for others. i know wandering through their minds would be strange, because i’m so used to my own. but do you also feel like a stranger within your own head at times? we take our consciousness so much for granted at times. the greatest sin is to forget the wonderment of childhood. to understand what it was like to see things for the first time. every day, without realizing it, we are seeing a brand new world that never existed before. that’s the way it is with time. at least according to some primates in a small part of this local universe. but that’s a thought for another time.

i’ve been trying to write this paper, you see. not the research study i’m doing, but another paper. i’ve been dredging up the very base of my philosophic beliefs. it doesn’t help me to pull out little chicken for the soul tidbits. to be, ser, etre, all the irregular states to say that we exist. whatever that may mean.

“Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?”
So says “the” bard. You know, that one you were forced to read back in high school. imagine for a moment that
Richard Brodie is correct about memetics.
Not that I’ve read his ironically viral book about not catching viruses of the mind, but just imagine that thoughts were like a virus. Well, not a virus really, that’s a bad metaphor. Imagine instead that this “God” (or however you wish to translate this notion) that everyone is running around shouting about is really something more like Jung’s “collective unconscious”. All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel… It’s always the same story isn’t it? Still haunted by the ghosts of Freud and the ghosts before him that he was haunted by. Shake out these ghosts. I excise you in the name of Progress! Or whatever God it is that we pray to these days. Wait, let me Google it.

Tick tock goes the clock on the wall. Thoughts are not a virus, but imagine for a moment that all the ghosts were real. Do a little window shopping of the soul. Let me paint the picture. There is no conspiracy with a capital con. This god that we search for, this hole we want to fill, this ever urging need to learn and know and absorb is driven by our thoughts. If these thoughts had something like a genetic imperative to survive, they would try their best to transcend this bodily form. the soul is the wish of thoughts to free themselves of bodies, to transcend. in comes transhumanism and we download our thoughts into condensed matter, or we disperse into intelligent gases. form doesn’t matter. hmm, a funny set of words. would we still be ourselves if we weren’t within our own skin? then we have to ask the question of where it stops, where we can draw the line between human and something new. we won’t draw the line though. this sort of thing would just happen over time. new generations are more accepting of change because they don’t know any different. they learn and then they try to hold on to the world as if it’s not revolving, as if they hold tight enough nothing will ever fall off. all of this would make for a nice piece of speculative fiction, but i wouldn’t pray to it on a Sunday morning. and i mean that, it now being a Sunday morning and me having no intentions of praying.

how can you have faith without believing in anything? i’ll tell you how. faith is what makes the world go around. no, i’m not talking about those psychotically happy (or was it psychotic and happy?) soapbox preachers (i heart jack chick!) that show up on your doorstep selling salvation (cheap! act now!). i’m saying the kind that makes you take another breath because you think you have a right to. the kind that trusts wood to not crack and fall and cave in on us, killing us instantly. the kind of faith that trusts a train isn’t going to go off its tracks while you ride it horribly mangling you and all the other passengers. the kind of faith that agoraphobics don’t general have an abundance of. think of all of the endless possibilities, and now imagine that you are a part of them. the chances against that have to be astronomical. and yet it is. we’ll never truly know. we’ll never have all of the answers. we will either go on looking or retreat from it, but we will never find what rests right before our eyes.

there is no answer that we will ever find. we make our own answers to fit the situation before us. we build upon old ideas, shifting them, changing them. sometimes we have an evolutionary shift in thought and out pops change. sometimes we go through a whole paradigm shift of thought, a revolution of the mind where changes come on rapidly and then smooth back out to their slow patterns. like everything else, there is an ebb and flow to thought.

of course, aren’t all these patterns also a symptom of our own minds? we see patterns everywhere because it is our wont to do so. the things we measure and understand things by, our sense perceptions and signal interpreting nerve clusters are all programmed by a series of complex patterns. of course we see patterns everywhere!

consciousness has a signal-to-noise ratio. sleep seems to help regulate this, letting bursts of random noise to fire in our dreams, a filter for uninhibited though. in our waking hours we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of stimuli, but we block out all this incoming data. thoughts float in and out before even reaching full conscious awareness. all sorts of things upset the balance, and in doing so, give us a glimpse into the man behind the curtain. psychedelics, sleep deprivation, psychoses… when we begin to see beyond the veil waking life we see the carefully maintained world take on strange new forms. for the day tripper, this is a stroll in an altered state of mind, but for those experiencing a psychotic episode it is a strange and frightening collapse of the walls of reality that once left them secure. either way, i believe that they give a view into unfettered thought. we start to hear all the “voices” that are normally kept quiet. we begin to be notice things we never did, like the noise in the signal. all the rest is just how you interpret that noise. … if you’ve made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. that’s how one version of that tale is told.

always searching for a new story. that’s our way, isn’t it? and if the story is written you, well by hell or high water we’ll write it. diversity is the key. genetic, cultural, evolutionary. that’s the only way to survive. why survive? come on, what else are you going to do?

So much for writing here on a daily basis. Or weekly, basis at that. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, somehow, and I’m feeling rather beat up. And this is my “vacation” time, as school starts in a matter of weeks. I’m trying to choke down my trepidation about going back to school with the knowledge of the fact that this is my last semester. I seem to recall certain halcyon days of summers in my youth wherein the days would drag themselves into a rarefied state of boredom that would have me clawing at the walls in hopes for Fall’s arrival, and with it the return to school.

Of course, a few weeks into classes I’d be clawing at the walls wondering why I’d ever wanted to return, but my point is that I would actually look forward to it. Over the years, that period in which I felt I had had enough vacation time and wished for school’s return slowly slipped forward into the future, like the sun getting ahead of a calendar without leap years. Now it feels like I never have enough free time, no matter how much I am given. I think I’m beginning to understand why time seems to move more quickly as you grow older. With so little time to reflect on the day’s passing before the next one begins, the all start to fade into one another and trail off into the past in quick succession.

I’m trying my best now to keep my chin up, to ford the current of this river one last time before finding another to cross. If I can just hold things together until the end of the year, I feel I’ll be able to take a deep breath, relax, and begin the next phase of this journey we call living. It makes things easier to look months ahead when I have nothing else planned and to yearn for that as yet unscheduled time, but there are so many things to do between now and then. And by the time I’ve reached that point I’m sure there will be plenty of things to fill my plate with.

My biggest concern for now is completing this study I’m working on. I’m hoping to use the next few weeks of relative quietude to make some headway on the report side of it. I also need to start assembling all of the paperwork I’ll need for graduate school applications. As usual, things are rather nebulous and undefined in my realm about now, so I need to start pulling these things in toward the center and pinning them down. It’ll all come together, eventually, I keep reminding myself. There is a slacker and an obsessive-compulsive control freak battling it out in my head right now, but I’m too busy to pay attention to either of them.

Continuing my research into social networking, I have been reading a few papers on psychosocial identity exploration and formation. This work follows in the footsteps, and expands upon, the work of Erikson. His theories still hold ground in current thought, but have been expanded upon to include more subtleties and modified to allow for easier empirical research. I have yet to get a copy of Marcia’s thesis, but it appears to be the first operationalized version of Erikson’s theories. He interviewed teens/students about various aspects of identity, and following research even through today quotes him as a premier authority on the subject.

Probably the most interesting thing I have run across so far is the so-called “emerging adulthood” theory of identity. According to this view, in the past affluent adolescents were more often given the opportunity to explore various aspects of identity before committing to one. That is, they were allowed to flounder a bit before becoming full-fledged “adults” and expected to assume the responsibility of being one. Emerging adulthood says that in many modern post-industrial cultures this effect has diffused into the general population. It is no longer only the affluent who are afforded the luxury of identity exploration. It is not exactly the same, though, as this state between adolescence and adulthood has changed in its diffusion.

Support structures that were once available to adolescents may no longer be available and these “tweeners” may not have made the transition to a place where they can get more “adult” support. For instance, as a recent high school graduate the counselors that I once relied upon for support may no longer be available, and being at the bottom rung of the career ladder may preclude me from health insurance that includes some kind of counseling or similar support. As such, this period can be a very vulnerable one as those in it try to work out identity issues on their own and try to define both their personal identity and where they fit within society.

What I like most about this theory is that it recognizes the changing face of identity exploration in the modern world and differentiates between different styles of individualization. There are those who will follow prescripted rules set down by parents or other authority figures when designing their own identity, and then there are those who will create their own identity through exploration. Even those who are more explorative will either follow the “popular” route of their peers, or truly forge a new path to form an identity. We are always like other people, being social creatures, and yet have idiosyncratic differences that differentiate us, and any theory of identity has to take this into account.

What I need to figure out now is exactly how to measure these ideas. There are a few different measures that I’ve found that might be a good fit, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on a few of them. The problem is, identity is such a nebulous subject area that it’s hard to pin down which aspects of it to measure and how well those measurements will match up against the other data I’m collecting. This would all probably be easier if I had more time to put all of this together, then I could read more papers before coming to any decisions, but unfortunately I’m put to the task of assembling my research and writing conclusions at the same time.

My goal is to have my user survey completed by next weekend. Of course, next weekend is also my GRE exams, so I have to juggle studying for a very important test with writing a very important paper… along with my job and family. I think once I’ve really gotten a good idea of what I want to measure and ironed out what data I want that isn’t already covered, the survey will pretty much write itself. At this point, I’m not afraid of too much information, but too little. If I forget to ask some important question it will hurt a whole lot more than trying to find a needle in a haystack. In fact, if I can squeeze this survey into a small enough size, I may tack on some extra questions just to have the data. Even if it isn’t used in my current study, it will certainly be good for future use. Somewhere in the back of my head I’m already writing a followup study to this one, but I’m trying my best to muster those forces to concentrate on the study at hand.