Monday, 20 October 2014

Theories of Identity - Key Points

Sheldon Stryker's Theory

  • We get out expectations of what our identity should be from others.
  • The interactions between people are structured.
  • The identity we show depends on our surroundings, both the physical and social aspects of them.
  • The scale of importance of your individual identities is called the salience hierarchy.
  • We confirm our identities through their validation from others.
  • Role performance tests the suitability of your identity.
  • People who perform similar roles to you are more likely to confirm your identity.
  • Validation builds your self-esteem, which in turn effects your salience hierarch.
  • You emotions and self-esteem are markers of the adequacy for your role.

Application in Graphic Design

Stryker's theory can be applied to graphic design in the sense that it can help us understand what is important to a specific demographic by seeing what gets validation, and this helps us successfully communicate with that demographic.

McCall and Simmons' Theory

  • Your role identity is how you see yourself doing a specific role, not how society sees you doing it.
  • Motivation is the want to fulfil your role your way.
  • Validation from yourself is more important from validation from others.
  • Others support is only important in terms of their support of your right to do something.
  • When a group of people don't support your role identity, rather than changing your role identity, you won't fully reveal your role identity to similar groups of people.
  • Interaction between people is a negotiation between people agreeing what peoples every person in the role identity is (altercasting).
  • Interaction between people is unstructured.

Application in Graphic Design

McCall and Simmons' theory can be applied in the sense that it helps us understand and appreciate that everyone with have different needs, and that because of this there's no right or wrong way to do anything, and so just because something has already been done, there's nothing wrong with doing it again as the outcome will probably end up being slightly different as your personal opinions are going to be different from the personal opinions of those who've done it before.

Similarities and Differences

Both theories are similar in that they work on the basis of people adopting different identities in different scenarios, and that some form of validation is needed to re-enforce those identities, be it from yourself or others.

However Stryker's theory is based more around the individual wanting to feel part of society by slowly working towards a set of identities that society accepts, whereas McCall and Simmons' works the other way. Their theory more suggests that people want to shape society in their own image. 

My Thoughts

I feel that both theories make sense, and can both be applied, not only to different people due to their different personalities, but to the same person in different situations. Using myself at the beginning of university as an example, I started off by conforming to Stryker's theory as I wanted to be sure I wasn't going to be stuck on my own all year. When, subconsciously, I felt I had achieved this to a reasonable extend, I started changing to McCall and Simmons' theory, as I think that there came a point where my identity within uni had changed enough to the point that I'd noticed it, and I wanted to address that. What I think is particularly interesting in this example is that within the context of an Art College, being an individual such as in the McCall and Simmons' theory is arguably the norm, which suggests that within certain contexts, the second theory can fit in with the first theory, and I've no doubt that this would work the other way round in other contexts as well.

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