By Edie Abraham-Macht
Today, I’m thrilled to spotlight a starred project by Anna Ghai, a student in the Identity & Prejudice course. For her project, Anna explored how age affects identity formation by interviewing six subjects across generations, coming to the meaningful conclusion that as we age, our identities become more individualized and less dependent on societal pressures. And she did this all in just 9 days!
Anna’s presentation on our last day of class was eloquent, concise, and fascinating. I was incredibly impressed by the tight connections she drew between her interviews and concepts from our course: for example, Anna used social comparison theory to explain teenagers’ anxiety about how their identities measure up to others’, and temporal self-appraisal theory to introduce a potential complication to her central finding. Anna also included a few salient quotes in her presentation to compare teenager versus adult perspectives on social pressure and personal values, which speaks to the masterful work she did distilling diffuse interview data into coherent findings in a short amount of time.
Reading Anna’s research paper after listening to her presentation only further convinced me that her project has the potential to significantly impact the way we view identity perception throughout the lifespan. Anna plans to continue her research by drawing on the perspectives of a larger set of participants with further interviews and qualitative surveys. Please take a few minutes to listen to Anna present her amazing work—I guarantee you’ll learn something new!