How We Perceive Ourselves: Identity Development

Refining a Cultural Approach to Multiracial Identity Development

This program examines how multiracial individuals represent race in the self, navigate multiple racial identities, and interpret ethnoracial experiences that shape identity development.

Current Projects

  1. Measuring the self-concept
  2. Navigation strategies and rites of passage
  3. Agency and communion in ethnicity/race-related experiences

Project 1 — Measuring the Self-Concept

This project investigates multiracial self-concept through spontaneous self-definition. Participants generate open-ended self-descriptors, allowing identity representations to emerge without imposing fixed categories. This approach captures hybrid, culturally specific, and contradictory elements of the self that are often flattened in closed-ended measures. By modeling the content and organization of self-definitions, the study examines how multiracial identities are internalized and structured within self-concept. Manuscript under review (Jacobson-Salamatian, Benet-Martínez, & Weston).

Key idea: Self-concept structure reveals how identity is organized and navigated.

Navigation strategies visualization
Figure 1. Network plots using logistic regression where the likelihood of one content category in self-concept is associated with the presence of ethnicity/race in self-concept. The thicker edge shows higher association between the categories, while the node size is how frequently that category appears in general.
Rites of passage mapping
Figure 2. Bipartite matching across two individuals' self-descriptors, and their average cosine similarity score.

Project 2 — Navigation Strategies and Rites of Passage

This project examines the strategies multiracial individuals use to navigate their racial identities. I study both global patterns of identity (how people approach their multiracial identity in general) and local processes (how identity is negotiated within a single life event that involves their multiple racial identities). Strategies include code-switching, decentering race, compartmentalization, cultural bridging, and other forms of adaptation.

Key idea: Multiracial individuals use strategies to navigate their racial identities, but some strategies may be more adaptive than others, depending on context and life stage.

Agency and communion visualization
Figure 3. Posterior estimates of well-being by strategy endorsement class. (A) Posterior distributions of class-specific mean well-being for low, moderate, and high strategy endorsement classes; shaded regions indicate 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals. Higher values reflect greater well-being. (B) Posterior distributions of pairwise differences in mean well-being between classes (moderate–low, high–low, high–moderate). The moderate–high contrast was centered near zero, indicating minimal or uncertain differences between these classes.
Well-being links visualization
Figure 4. Association between Rite of Passage experiences and narrative valence. Regression coefficients (β) indicate whether each topic was more prevalent in positively valenced (β > 0) or negatively valenced (β < 0) narratives, based on OpenAI sentiment scores.

Project 3 — Agency and Communion in Ethnicity/Race-Related Experiences

Most research on ethnic/racial identity focuses on how identity develops. Less attention has been paid to the content of ethnic/racial identity: the lived experiences and meanings that people associate with their ethnicity and race. Because these experiences are highly contextual and difficult to capture with traditional rating scales, this project analyzes personal narratives of ethnicity- and race-related experiences. I used Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to identify recurring themes in narratives from both multiracial and monoracial participants. This approach captures identity content inductively, revealing the kinds of experiences people describe, and how those experiences differ across racial groups. I then linked STM topics to human-coded motivational themes of agency (autonomy, self-definition) and communion (connection, belonging), testing how these motivational framings shape the way participants narrate race- and ethnicity-related moments. Published in Journal of Personality (Jacobson, Westberg, Chou, Syed, & Weston, 2024).

Key idea: Agency and communion dimensions structure how individuals interpret and respond to ethnoracial experiences.

Self-concept measurement visualization
Figure 5. Agency and communion predicting topic prevalence for (A) Ethnic/cultural celebration and (B) Peer dynamics. (A) The prevalence of Ethnic/cultural celebration was positively associated with agency among high communion narratives. (B) Agency was negatively associated with the topic Peer dynamics when communion was high, but unassociated with this topic otherwise.