Ethnic and Racial Identity Development From an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Introduction to the Special Issue

Contributions of the Special Issue

The articles in this special issue reflect several strengths that add to our understanding of the variation in ERI processes across racially and ethnically diverse emerging adults. First, the articles in this issue include Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, American Indian, racially/mixed/multiracial Brits (Song, 2019), African and Black Caribbean Canadians (Medina, Rowley, & Towson, 2019), Whites, Latin American/Caribbean immigrant children (van der Does & Adem, 2019), and Indigenous populations (Gonzalez, 2019). The focus on diverse ethnic and racial groups is important given the 2015 U.S. Census projection that by 2044, the United States will become a “majority–minority” country with no racial/ethnic group having a numerical majority (Zinn, Eitzen, & Wells, 2016). Similarly, the inclusion of biracial and multiracial perspectives is important, given recent rapid growth in the multiracial youth population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). At the very least, the articles add to our empirical knowledge base about ERI processes in underrepresented groups in the ERI literature. At best, the articles challenge the field and force us to move beyond simplistic and outdated Black/White and/or monoracial conceptualizations of ERI and to rethink whether our current schema and theory for understanding ethnic labeling and identification, as well as ERI, applies across these groups.

Second, the papers in this special issue reflect diverse and expansive definitions and theoretical perspectives of ERI. These include ERI as operationalized by Nigrescence theory (Cross, 1991), as a multidimensional process (Sellers et al., 1998), and as racial identity attitudes (Gonzalez, 2019), perspectives on identity (Medina et al., 2019), sense of belonging (Blake, 2019), self-categorization and labeling (Feliciano & Rumbaut, 2019), and national identity (van der Does & Adem, 2019). While work in this area has tended to adopt at most one of these perspectives in any particular investigation, an interesting observation by Blake (2019) is that there may be a discrepancy between youths’ self-identification and the group to which they feel the strongest sense of belonging. This finding suggests that self-identification and sense of belonging, while both examples of identity, should not be assumed equivalent, and focusing on any one particular operationalization of ERI to the exclusion of others may mask important nuance or even be misleading in understanding youths’ experiences of ERI.

Third, and perhaps not surprisingly, the articles reflect a strong developmental foundation and orientation. While emerging adulthood is a common point of reference among the papers, the articles not only evaluate ERI processes in age-diverse populations (adolescence, middle adulthood) but also consider the stability and evolution of ERI across the life course (Feliciano & Rumbaut, 2019; van der Does & Adem, 2019). As an example, the examination of stability in self-labels over time from emerging adulthood into middle adulthood by Feliciano and Rumbaut reminds us that ERI is not static and, for some, evolves across subsequent developmental stages.

In addition to changes in ERI over time, the articles identify myriad factors that likely play a role in how ERI develops and changes over time. Those changes may be a function of diverse influences including gender and national origin (van der Does & Adem, 2019), nativity (Feliciano & Rumbaut, 2019), cultural orientation (Medina et al., 2019), race/ethnicity and independence from parents and communities of adolescent development (Gullickson, 2019), young people’s developmental period (e.g., adolescence vs. emerging adulthood), discrimination experiences and colonial context (Gonzalez, 2019), and even having children (Song, 2019). The paper by Song illustrates, for example, that ERI is an iterative, evolving, and bidirectional process that, for multiracial parents, may be impacted by their children’s own identifications and experiences. Context matters, and interactions and transactions across multiple levels of influence (e.g., individual and ecological) shape ERI processes across the life course.

Limitations, Obstacles, and Small Steps Toward Interdisciplinary Synthesis

We cast our net broadly to encourage submissions from many disciplines, sending our call for submissions to listservs in multiple professional organizations and interdisciplinary scholarly groups. Yet, one limitation of our special issue is that the papers that appear within it primarily feature work by sociologists and psychologists. There are several potential reasons for this. We acknowledge that our own disciplinary affiliations may have played a role. Yet there were also defining aspects of the project and of the journal that likely contributed to this outcome, and we believe it is worth noting how those expectations can inadvertently limit interdisciplinary synthesis even in a project whose goal is to promote it.

Because the journal is Emerging Adulthood, a focus on age groups and developmental stages was highlighted in our call for papers. Although we said we would consider manuscripts that focus on any age, we noted that submissions focusing on emerging adults or emerging adults and other age groups were preferred. The focus on emerging adults and the developmental life stage in which ERI processes are most prominent is the particular realm of psychology. Other disciplines may not concentrate as much on specific developmental periods or may focus on additional ways that ethnic and racial identities develop or change after emerging adulthood as the result of distinct social processes, such as migration, intermarriage, political mobilization, or new genealogical discoveries. By initiating this project under the auspices of this journal, we may have limited the scope for interdisciplinarity in a way that represents the larger difficulties that interdisciplinary synthesis faces. When the focus or terms of the endeavor are shaped primarily within one discipline, they can exclude by virtue of the way the undertaking is defined. The very focus on ERI development hints at a developmental orientation that disciplines outside of psychology less frequently take up. But if this is the primary interest of psychologists, to omit it is to make the final product potentially less relevant to those who are interested in human development broadly, with ERI being one realm in which it occurs.

A single interdisciplinary project is unlikely to result in full integration that can lead to a cumulative synthesis, but there are various ways to move the needle, some of which are easier than others. As psychologists and sociologists engaged in the editing of this issue, we can suggest some of the advantages that each of these disciplines offers for the other and that we see as important next steps for advancing research in each field. Compared to psychologists, sociologists tend to rely on simple measures of ERI—what psychologists would call ethnic or racial labels rather than identities. A single survey question asking people what ethnic or racial category they fit themselves into, such as what sociologists and others use when relying on census data or other demographic surveys, does not capture the depth or complexity of the identities that people develop. Recent work has noted this limitation (Dowling, 2014; Roth, 2012), as well as the contextual nature of what people check when filling out such surveys and how their answers change over time (Liebler, Rastogi, Fernandez, Noon, & Ennis, 2014; Saperstein and Penner, 2012). Psychologists more regularly use advanced measures of ERI that incorporate how people feel about and have engaged with their identities, including dimensions such as identity salience (Yip and Fuligni 2002), exploration (whether they have examined or investigated the meaning of that particular identity), resolution (resolving their feelings about the role of that identity component in their broader social self), and affirmation (the degree of positive feelings toward their ethnic group; Umaña-Taylor, Yazedjian, & Bámaca-Gómez, 2004). These items take up more space and time on a survey but could enhance scholarship in sociology, political science, and other fields to know not just what label a person selects in a given moment but what an ethnic or racial identity actually means to them.

Compared to sociologists, psychologists still rely frequently on convenience samples, even for quantitative research. This would seem to suggest that one person’s psychology works much like everyone else’s or—more typical of the types of convenience samples used—that all people react in the way that college undergraduates do. Sociologists recognize that class differences in who attends college, as well as racial, ethnic, gender, and other differences in who participates in these studies, make those samples distinctive and less meaningful for capturing a clear picture of how ERI works in society at large. Furthermore, psychology studies of ERI might benefit from sociologists’ focus on group and societal-level processes, including changes to an entire group’s classification or changing norms for how individuals are classified by others (Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2017; Roth, 2018a). And as Gullickson’s (2019) paper in this issue illustrates, historical norms for classification play a role in ERI and may well influence the salience, exploration, resolution, and affirmation as well as the label people choose. We believe that psychology research can benefit from incorporating these methodological and theoretical considerations.

Conclusion and Future Directions

The articles in this special issue contribute to our understanding of how context shapes ERI development and also suggest areas of research that need more attention. In addition to the impact of parenting and children’s own experiences and self-reflection on identity, what are other ways that ERI may change in later adulthood? Major life changes such as immigration or return migration are one path (Joseph, 2015; Kim, 2008; Roth, 2012). New discoveries through genetic ancestry testing may be another (Nelson, 2016; Roth & Ivemark, 2018). Are there other ways that the ERI development process continues beyond emerging adulthood and into later life stages? The focus of this journal in some ways limits us from exploring processes beyond the developmental life stages that prior research has uncovered.

In light of evidence that self-identification may differ from sense of group belonging and that appearance plays a role in ERI development, how are ERI processes similar and different for people who are ethnoracially ambiguous? Research shows that the proportion of people who identify or classify themselves differently than they are seen by others has been growing in the United States due largely to immigration and growing multiracial populations (Campbell, Bratter, & Roth, 2016; Roth, 2018b; Saperstein, 2006). While we would expect the role of reflected appraisals to function similarly, it may take on greater importance and potentially interact with factors such as cultural upbringing and the strength of ties to different sides of the family. Traditional research on ERI development has focused on typical processes within monoracial groups; more work is needed, especially incorporating the role of appearance, among multiracial individuals and groups that have racial mixture as part of their historical legacy, such as African American, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native American populations. These questions are also related to the additional consideration of skin tone (not examined in this issue) as an important marker of ERI processes during emerging adulthood and across the life course.

Finally, it will be important to consider how conceptualizations of identity have evolved with time and across generations. While psychological studies use relatively more advanced measures of ERI, many of the models used in current studies were developed in the second half of the 20th century. To what extent do these measures and conceptualizations of ERI, amid rapid demographic changes, recent changes in the political climate, and technological advances, adequately reflect ERI processes (e.g., exploration) in the 21st century? Are new conceptual models and measures necessary to advance our understanding of ERI processes in this new era? Moreover, our focus in this issue has, understandably, been on ERI, but historically, race and ethnicity have operated as “master (categories)” (Omi & Winant, 2015) that interact simultaneously with class, gender, and other social categories. Going forward, how can theoretical advances consider variations in ERI processes among various intersecting identities that operate in tandem with ERI? In what ways are ERI processes similar and different within race–ethnic groups but across other identities (e.g., Black poor man vs. Black well-to-do woman)? And how well do our current measures of ERI capture and operationalize the inherent complexities of these multiple intersecting identities? Many questions remain unanswered, but this special represents an important step in advancing our thinking about ERI development.