The youth identity status project: Findings of a four-wave longitudinal study of youths in Hong Kong

Abstract

The Youth Identity Status Project is a four-wave longitudinal study conducted by a multidisciplinary research team of Hong Kong Shue Yan University from 2020 to 2023*. Participants were recruited from secondary schools for students in the 15-17 age group, and post-secondary institutions for students in the 18-24 age group. The final sample at Wave 1 consisted of 958 secondary school students and 882 post-secondary school students. The DIDS (Dimensions of Identity Development Scale) developed by Luyckx et al., 2008, consisting of five identity dimensions, was used to determine the various identity statuses according to their degrees of commitment making, identification of commitment, exploration in breadth and depth, and ruminative exploration. From Wave 1 data, six identity statuses were discovered, namely, achievement (identity formed and committed after exploration), foreclosure (identity and commitment formed without exploration), moratorium (identity not yet formed but actively exploring), searching moratorium (identity not yet formed but having moderate commitment), diffused diffusion (identity not yet formed but ruminatively exploring), and carefree diffusion (lacking interest in forming identity). All the six statuses or clusters were found to exhibit differences in a number of psychosocial variables. For example, those in achievement and searching moratorium statuses have higher levels of prosocial behaviour, lower levels of deviance, lower levels of social media addiction, and higher levels of proactive career behaviour than other statuses. In the analysis of all four waves of data, the secondary school subsample and the post-secondary school subsample were estimated separately in Mplus 7.4 for youth identity groups using Quadratic latent class growth mixture models (LCGM), combining the R3STEP and BCH auxiliary function in Mplus to estimate the associations between groups and the psychosocial indicators. The results show that while all the individual statuses/groups have remained rather stable in the secondary subsample, two transitional trajectories were found in the postsecondary subsample, namely, from “Foreclosure to Undifferentiated (“Undifferentiated” is a status showing that the scores for the identity dimensions are close to the means when all four waves of data are taken into account),” and “Diffused Diffusion to Carefree Diffusion”. Four antecedents (stressful life events, proactive personality, prosocial behaviour, and attachments to parents) were chosen for an examination of their influence on identity developmental trajectories. Results show that, in both samples, those experiencing more stressful life events, having a proactive personality, engaged in more prosocial behaviour, and more attached to parents are more likely than others to belong to desirable statuses such as achievement. In addition, life satisfaction, social networking addiction, proactive career behaviour and deviant behaviour were chosen as four outcome variables. In terms of life satisfaction, for the secondary subsample, the foreclosure group has the highest level of life satisfaction, whereas in the postsecondary group, it was the achievement group that has the highest life satisfaction. In social networking addiction, members of the moratorium group were at the highest risk for addiction for secondary students, and for post-secondary secondary students, those in the diffused diffusion to carefree diffusion were more at risk for addiction than those in other groups. For proactive career behaviours, members of the achievement group have the highest level of proactive career behaviours in both subsamples. Lastly, all groups have low levels of deviant behaviour in the secondary subsample, and the achievement group has the fewest deviant behaviour in the post-secondary subsample. Academic contributions of the longitudinal study include the pioneer exploration of youth identity statuses and their trajectories over time in Hong Kong, which can contribute to the scanty literature on this topic in the Chinese context. Findings of the study have practical implications for the sharpening of the DIDS and related instruments for the assessment of identity statuses of youths in Hong Kong, which can lead to the next step of designing intervention programmes for NGOs and schools that can facilitate the development of desirable statuses (e.g., achievement) in youths in Hong Kong.