Lecture
SG - Finding Out Who You Are
As a child you want to be like mom and dad, but during puberty that suddenly changes. This marks the start of a very important task in adolescence and young adulthood.
About Finding Out Who You Are
Between age 13 to 20, adolescents are becoming more independent and begin to explore the roles they will occupy in adulthood and their place in society, trying to find out who they are and what they want to do in their lives. The development of one’s identity is one of the most important tasks in adolescence and young adulthood.
During this interactive meeting, pedagogy professor Susan Branje addresses questions like: What exactly is identity, and which stages in the development of identity can be distinguished? How does the discovery of one’s own identity relate to ‘fitting in’ the peer group? How do socio-cultural changes in society affect identity? And at which moments in life is a clear sense of identity most important or salient?
About Susan Branje
Susan Branje is a professor at the Pedagogical Sciences program and the division of Youth and Family at Utrecht University. With her research group, she conducts research into development of the self and relationships with parents and peers in adolescence. Her work generally focuses on understanding the developmental changes in adolescents’ relationships with parents, siblings, friends, and romantic partners and the associations with development of adolescent personality, identity and adjustment. She studied developmental psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen (RU) and received her PhD cum laude at the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2003. She has been affiliated with the UU since July 2002.
About series Identity
Who am I? Where do I fit in? Who are ‘we’? Can I have multiply identities? What does all this mean for my well-being? In this series we dig into these questions, and more, from a psychological perspective. In an upcoming series we will will dive deeper into the politization of identity.