Life Stages

When I began undergraduate school in 1996, I was trying to pursue a degree in Elementary Education with a minor in Psychology. I actually thought Elementary Education was the major that I wanted to pursue. In my residential area, throughout my childhood/adolescent years, many adults, especially my parents, stressed that I would only have a guaranteed source of employment with an education degree. However, once I moved farther into my elementary education studies, I felt uncomfortable with the major. I was undergoing identity vs. identity (role) confusion which is one of the Psychosocial Stages of Development created by Erik Erikson (1902-1994).

Psychosocial Development is an issue that had much importance to Erik Erikson. It is the social context of an individual. Erikson found that “each stage poses a unique development task and simultaneously confronts individuals with a crisis that they must resolve” (Crandell, 2009, p.39). In my late adolescent years, I definitely had identity confusion. I needed to resolve. Before I could resolve the issue, I had to find a way to defeat it.

As stated earlier, I was also pursuing a Psychology minor during that timeframe. With that minor, I was beginning to learn about many psychologists/theorists. These psychologists/theorists had developed theories about several stages of life. One stage that caught my attention besides psychosocial development was known as adolescent identity statuses. Therefore, I began research more on it.

According to the eighth edition of the Psychology Applied to Teaching text (1997), James Marcia created the view of identity statuses as a scientific way to test Erikson’s observations on identity formation. There are four identity statuses that can help adolescents overcome identity factors which are diffusion, moratorium, achievement, and foreclosure. These statuses are “processes for handling the psychosocial task establishing a sense of identity” (Waterman & Archer, 1990, p.35). Interviews...