Identities in Standard English

Abstract

A customary methodology for studying personal identities—the Twenty Statements Test of Kuhn and McPartland (1954)—asks respondents to write twenty answers to the question “Who am I?” The number of identities (as opposed to attributes and other kinds of responses) named by American respondents typically is less than a dozen, even when the test provides more than twenty answer blanks (Schwirian 1964). In societies where collective identities are more important than individual attributes, a higher proportion of identities is named, but the average number of identities enumerated with this methodology still is less than two dozen (e.g., see Ma and Schoeneman 1997). Thus, traditional identity researchers presume—and affirm through objective empirical measurements—that individuals adopt a few dozen identities at most, mainly in the institutions of work, family, religion and leisure.