| Emerging adulthood has increasingly become a popular period of life from which to examine identity formation processes. However, emerging adulthood is a broad concept, including all individuals between the age of 18 and 24. As such, generalized theories of identity formation during this life stage do not fully capture the unique identity-related challenges various members of this population face. This dissertation seeks to overcome this issue by examining how a specific population of emerging adults, middle to upper-middle class college-enrolled females, form and maintain identity within a lifeworld characterized by risk, doubt, and uncertainty. The contributions of this dissertation challenge three assumptions regarding the process of identity formation among emerging adults within a mediated culture: First, I challenge the assumption that emerging adults embrace media and information communication technologies (ICTs) as a central component of their identity projects by proposing that among this population media and ICTs play a less central, catalytic role as lived experience remains the dominant influence on identity. Second, despite the belief that emerging adults are free to actively construct and express numerous identities, I demonstrate that within this milieu social institutions exert a strong influence on identity, resulting in a relatively stable and coherent identity trajectory. Third, I suggest that this stability is punctuated by situational disruptions that create identity micro-cycles and result in subjective interpretations of identity risk, doubt, and uncertainty. In aggregate, these contributions suggest that despite being increasingly perceived as an individual task, identity remains strongly determined by structural influences within this particular socio-historic context. |
