A new look at capturing social identity compatibility in transition: extending and applying the social identity model of identity change to student transition to university

We explore measuring the work required to integrate a new social identity into an existing self-concept during life transitions. We propose a method to quantify the degree to which attributes associated with the new identity are not already associated with existing identities. The central hypothesis is that a higher degree of novel content would mean more work to integrate the identity and a more cognitively taxing transition. The measure avoids subjective self-reports of compatibility (which can be biased by level of identification) and also accounts for the subjective importance of the aspects in the existing self-concept and weighs the content accordingly. Two studies test this proposed measure in real-word samples to measure self perception and subjective wellbeing of students who have made the transition from high school to university. Findings indicate that the new measure of work acts as a “cost” in a cost-benefit model of identity transition, such that a greater degree of novel content to be integrated into the self was negatively associated with known protective factors (identification with the new identity, social resources), positively associated with costs (baseline self-complexity) and was a significant predictor over and above these, in a model predicting wellbeing outcomes.