Journal of Youth and Adolescence, VoL 9, No. 6, 1980
Perceived Change of Self Among Adolescents Amos Handel I
Received September 2, 1980 In order to examine the sense o f continuity o f adolescents, self-appraisals o f retrospective and prospective change or sameness were elicited from lsraeli boys and girls in grades 7, 9, and 11 (N = 186). With reference to each o f 60 self-attributes, these adolescents indicated the amount o f change they perceived in themselves, compared with what they were like five years ago. They then estimated how much they expected to change on each attribute five years from now. Most respondents perceived minimal change in themselves, both retrospectively and prospectively. Regression analyses indicated that the lower the amount o f perceived change o f self, the higher the level o f self-perceived ad/ustment and self-ideal congruence. These findings are discussed in terms o f their implications for future studies o f the sense o f continuity in adolescence and beyond.
INTRODUCTION The crucial task for adolescents, according to Erikson (1959, 1968), is to consolidate, at this time of physical, social, and emotional instability the three major components of self-identity: (a) the sense of mutuality, arising from the adolescent's awareness that his own self-perception is congruent with the way significant others perceive him; (b) the sense of unity, wholeness, and harmony among the different selves making up his identity; (c) the sense o f continuity between his present view of himself and his picture of his own past and future selves:
This research was supported in part by a grant from the University Research Council of the University of Halfa. ~Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Received his M.A. from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Major interests include adolescent personality and the development of the self-concept during the life span. 507 0047-2891/80"/1200-0507 $03.00/0 © 1980 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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This study focuses on the sense of continuity experienced by adolescents and, specifically, on the amount of retrospective and prospective change of self perceived and reported by them. Adolescents were asked to report whether, in their own view, they had changed or remained the same as they were in the past (five years ago) with reference to a particular set of self-attributes (e.g., qualities of leadership, independence). Similarly, they were asked to estimate whether they would change in the future (five years from now) in terms of these selfperceptions. Self-appraisals of retrospective and prospective change or sameness represent one aspect of a construct designated here as perceived change of self. Broadly viewed, this construct also accommodates related self-perceptions which might be evoked by such appraisals: the nature of the changes which have occurred or will occur, their number and intensity, their relative importance, their positive or negative implications, their anticipated stability and permanence, and the individual's attribution of these changes to specific events or to longterm experiences. The potential sources of data on perceived change of self range from unstructured, unsolicited material (e.g., diaries, autobiographies) to structured questionnaires, such as those employed in the present study to examine the following topics. The Amount of Perceived Change Reported by Adolescents. No hypothesis was formulated here, for two reasons. In the first place, no empirical data exist which are directly pertinent or demonstrably related to perceived change of self in adolescents. Second, the meager data on the amount of change among other age groups are confined to the retrospective dimension and were obtained by diverse methods. Some of these studies employed open interviews with adults and/or the elderly (Levinson, 1979; Musgrove, 1977; Werner et al., 1961); other studies dealt with only one or two self-attributes and were based on struc. tured questions presented to various groups of adults (Bradburn and Caplowitz, 1965; Hoge and Bender, 1974; Lopata, 1973) or to elderly people (Btau, 1956; Gubrium, 1974). Theories of adolescent identity appear to lead to two contradictory hypotheses - one suggesting a modal pattern of slight or limited change, and the other predicting a dominant pattern of radical change. Erikson's (1959, 1968) observations on the strength and vitality of adolescents and findings of longitudinal studies (cf. Bachman and O'Malley, 1977; Engel, 1959; Offer and Offer, 1975) seem to imply that most teenagers succeed in maintaining a sense of continuity, despite the turbulence they experience during this period. By contrast, notions of the protean style of self-process (Lifton, 1971,1976) or fluid identity (Kilpatrick, 1975) portray the typical adolescent as continually altering his perception of himself and evading the search for connections between his past, present, and future selves.
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The Relationship Between Retrospective and Prospective Change Among Adolescents. A strong association between the retrospective and prospective dimensions of perceived change of self seems to follow from Erikson's (1959, 1968) notions of continuity as a result of a twofold interrelationship between the present and both the past and the future selves. Accordingly, substantial correlations were expected between the amount of retrospective and prospective change.
The Relationship Between Amount of Change and Level of Adjustment. Adolescents who reported considerable change were expected to describe themselves as more maladjusted than those who reported moderate or slight change. This expectation derives from Erikson's (1959, 1968) account of the manigestations of emotional distress characteristic of adolescents in the state of identity diffusion. No prediction was made about the comparative level of adjustment of those who reported little or moderate change. This question was examined by testing the linearity of regressions of various measures of adjustment on the amount of perceived change. Perceived Change of Self at Different Stages of Adolescence. Boys and girls in grades 7, 9, and 11 were included in the study, so as to provide a comparative view of perceived change of self at different age levels in adolescence. Perceived Change and Estimated Change. In addition to self-ratings of perceived change, data on estimated change of self were collected, in order to establish whether the distinction between these two notions of change is empirically justified. The notion of perceived change of self is based on two assumptions: (a) Self-appraisals of change refer to those "changes in the Me, recognized by the I" (James; 1890, p. 373); (b) these appraisals are the result of comparisons made by the subject himself between his present and his retrospective or prospective views of himself. By contrast, the notion of estimated change of self originates in the external frame of reference of the researcher. It is based on comparisons made by the researcher between two sets of self-descriptions elicited from the subject on the same occasion: (a) the person's present self-concept; (b) the retrospective or prospective self-concept reported by the person, using the same set of selfdescriptions. Any discrepancy between these two self-concepts represents the measure of estimated change; the investigator is free to apply his own criteria of much or little change to discrepancies of a given size. Measures of estimated change have, in fact, been generated to assess various other constructs in studies of adolescents (Hauser, 1971; Hauser and Shapiro, 1973; Lowenthal et al., 1975) and older age groups (Andrews and Withey, 1976; Bortner and Hultsch, 1972;Lewis, 1971). Furthermore, in one of these studies (Lowenthal et aL, 1975), a measure of estimated change was employed to represent the notion referred to here as "perceived change."
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Data on the present, retrospective, and prospective self-concept were obtained by means of a Hebrew Q-sort test used in previous studies of Israeli adolescents (Handel, 1961, 1973a). Of the 60 items in the test, 36 were selected from a larger pool of statements proposed by Murray (1938) for assessing the following needs: affiliation, rejection, succorance, nurturance, dominance, autonomy, blameavoidance, infavoidance, and achievement. For each of these needs, which were selected for their salience in the self-descriptions of adolescents (Handel, 1961), 4 items were included in the Q-sort test. The remaining 24 items were drawn from a list of statements included by Dymond (1953) in the Qadjustment score. Twelve of them were statements which, in the opinion of experienced clinicians, a well-adjusted person would endorse and place in the category of "like me" attributes (Q + items), and another 12 were statements which such a person would reject and classify as "unlike me" ( Q - items). In the instructions for the present-self Q-sort, each subject was asked to sort these items as they describe him in the present, placing the 4 items which characterize him most in pile 5; the 4 items least characteristic of him in pile 1; and 14, 24, and 14 items in the intermediate piles (piles 4, 3 and 2, respectively) of more "like me" to less "like me" self-descriptions. Using the same list of items and the same forced distribution, each subject was also instructed to describe himself as he was five years ago (retrospective self), as he will be five years from now (prospective self), and as he would like to be (ideal self). After every sorting, the placement of each item was recorded, and the number of the pile to which it had been assigned constituted its score for that sorting. In addition, the following scores were computed from the various Q-sorts for each subject: (a) Estimated retrospective change = product-moment correlation (r) between scores on each pair of the 60 items in the present-self and retrospective-self Q-sorts. The higher this correlation, the smaller the amount of estimated change; (b) Estimated prospective change = correlation between the present-self and prospective-self Q-sorts; (c) self-ideal congruence = correlation between the present-self and ideal-self Q-sorts. This was intended to serve as one of the measures of self-reported adjustment; (d) Q-index of adjustment = sum of scores (1 to 5) assigned by the subject to the Q + items, minus the corresponding sum for the Q - items, with a possible range of +48 (high level of adjustment) to - 4 8 (low level of adjustment). These scores were computed separately for each Q-sort. Measures of Perceived Change of Self Two inventories were employed to elicit data on perceived change, one for the retrospective dimension (Retrospective Change I n v e n t o r y - RCI) and the
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other for tiler prospective dimension ~rospective Change I n v e n t o r y - PCI). Each of these contained the same list of 60 items, consisting of the Q-sort statements modified to suit the RCI and PCI format (e.g., the Q-items "I am intelligent," "I stubbornly resist when others attempt to force something upon me," were rephrased in the RCI and PCI as "the notion that I am intelligent," "the tendency to resist stubbornly when others attempt to force something upon me"). For each RCI item, the subject was requested to report whether he had changed, compared to what he was like five years ago, using a 5-point scale ranging from "I have changed a lot" (score 5) to "I haven't changed at all" (score 1). This rating scale was also used for the PCI, in which the subject was asked to assess the amount of change he anticipated five years from now. Subjects were also instructed to indicate the direction of the change (i.e., whether a particular trait now characterized them more or less than it had in the past, or whether in future it would be more or less characteristic of them than it was now). It appears that the instructions for this task were not sufficiently clear to the subjects, since more than one-third of them failed to respond as required. This information was, therefore, discarded; subsequent analyses deal only with the amount of absolute change reported by the subjects. Two summary scores were computed for each subject: (a) sum of retrospective change (SRC) = sum of scores assigned to RCI items (possible range = 60-300); (b) sum of prospective change (SPC) = sum of scores assigned to PCI items (possible range = 60-300). Procedure
The tests were presented to groups of 8-12 students. In the first of the two test sessions, the following tasks were administered: (a)present-self Q-sort; (b) D48 test (Centre de Psychologie Apphqu6e, 1959), a nonverbal intelligence test; (c) retrospective-self Q-sort; (d) a Hebrew version (Handel, 1976) of the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory (JEPI; Eysenck, 1965), consisting of a Neuroticism scale, taken to be a measure of self-perceived maladjustment, an Extraversion scale, and a Lie scale; (e) prospective-self Q-sort. In the second session, 20 to 22 days later, six tests were presented: (f) present-self Q-sort (retest); (g) JEPI (retest); (h) Vocabulary, a Hebrew verbal inteUigence test (Handel, 1973b); (i) ideal-self Q-sort; (j) RCI; (k)PCI. The two retests were given as part of a wider research project on personality dimensions in adolescence, and are not directly related to the present study.
Supers
A total of 186 students participated in the study: 52 seventh-graders (23 boys and 29 girls), 72 ninth-graders (35 boys and 37 girls) and 62 eleventhgraders (28 boys and 34 girls). The two younger groups attended a middle class
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junior high school in Haifa, and the oldest group was drawn from an adjacent high school. The mean ages of the three groups were 12 years, 11 months (SD = 3.5 months); 14 years, 9 months (SD = 5.4 months); and 16 years, 7 months (SD = 5.4 months). The subjects were of average intelligence or above, as indicated by their scores on the D48 (M = 25.8, SD = 5.8) and Vocabulary (M = 26.1, SD = 5.8) tests (c.f. Handel, 1973b), with no significant differences between boys and girls. These sample data apply to all tests except the RCI and PCI. A systematic check of the responses to these two inventories revealed that some subjects had not completed all the items on either or both of them, or had endorsed more than one response alternative for the same item. For this reason, 11 of the RCI and 25 of the PCI response sheets were discarded. The RCI data are thus based on 175 subjects (50 seventh-graders, 68 ninth-graders, and 57 eleventh-graders), and the PCI data on 161 students (44 seventh-graders, 66 ninth-graders, and 51 eleventh-graders).
RESULTS The Amount of Retrospective and Prospective Change The majority of respondents perceived a limited amount of change when comparing their present with their retrospective or prospective views of themselves. The two response alternatives indicating little or no change (scores 2 and 1) were endorsed on average by 56% of the subjects over all the RCI items and by 63% over all the PCI items, as opposed to 25% and 20% who reported much or very much change (scores 4 and 5) on the RCI and PCI, respectively. The clear preference for responses which imply a sense of continuity and minimal change of self is even more striking when only the extremes of the scale (scores 1 and 5) are considered: 37% and 39% claimed no change on the RCI and PCI items, respectively, compared with the corresponding 11% and 10% who reported very much change. The same trend is reflected in the low median scores on the RCI items, which ranged from 1.28-3.02. There were only 9 items with a median of 2.5 or more. On the PCI items, the medians were even lower, running from 1.372.36, and more than half (32 items) had a median score of 1.99 or less. The adolescents' tendency to view themselves as basically unchanged was more pronounced retrospectively than prospectively. Comparisons of the mean of each RCI item with that of the corresponding PCI item, using correlated t tests, showed significant differences (p < 0.05, two-tailed) in 11 cases, and in each of these the RCI mean was higher. Similarly, the mean of the SRC score (M = 144.54) was significantly higher than that of the SPC (M = 136.96), with t(160) = 3.32, p < 0.001, two-tailed.
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Internal Consistency of the RCI and PCI The internal consistency of the two inventories was high, as indicated by the alpha coefficients of 0.957 (RCI) and 0.966 (PCI). Further evidence of their homogeneity is provided by the correlations obtained between each of the 60 RCI items and the SRC score (median correlation = 0.55), and likewise between the PCI items and the SPC score (median correlation = 0.58). Thus, the SRC and SPC scores are internally consistent measures of perceived change in a variety of self-attributes, which constitute elements of the self-concept. These summary scores may serve as a composite measure of the amount of change perceived in the entire self-concept. The Relationship Between Retrospective and Prospective Change A close relationship between the retrospective and prospective dimensions of change was found in the following analyses: 1. A high degree of concordance (rho = 0.75, p < 0.001, two-tailed) was obtained between the rank order of the medians of the RCI and PCI item scores. 2. Significant correlations (p < .01) were obtained between every pair of RCI and PCI item scores. These 60 correlations ranged from 0.20 to 0.58, with a median o f r = 0.41. 3. The correlation between the SRC and SPC summary scores of the total sample was r(158) = 0.79 (p < 0.001, two-tailed). Similar correlations were found in each of the major subgroups in the sample: 0.74 for the boys (N = 70), 0.82 for the girls (N = 90), and 0.92, 0.67, and 0.79 for seventh-graders (iV = 44), ninth-graders (N = 65), and eleventh-graders (N = 51), respectively.
The Relationship Between Perceived Change and Measures of Adjustment The data in Table I are in general accord with the expectation of significant correlations between measures of adjustment and the amount of perceiced change. Subjects who reported a substantial amount of change generally had lower adjustment scores on the various Q-sorts. These adolescents rarely described themselves in terms of the self-perceptions assumed to characterize well-adjusted persons (Q+), and tended to view themselves particularly 2 as individuals who do not "have friendly relationships with many people," do not "get along easily with people in their environment," and are not "'optimistic." They endorsed many of the attributes typical of maladjustment (Q-), and described
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Table 1. Correlations of Perceived and Estimated Change of Self with Measures of Self-Reported Adjustment, JEPI Scales, and Tests of Intelligencea Perceived change
Estimated change b
Measure
SRC (n = 175)
SPC (n = 161)
Retrospective (n = 186)
Prospective (n = 186)
SRC SPC Neuroticism Self-ideal congruence Present Q-ADJ c Ideal Q-ADJ c Retrospective Q-ADJ c Prospective Q-AD J c Retest Q-ADJ c Vocabulary D48 Age Extraversion Lie scale
79 e 27 e -24 e -17 d -23 e -25 e - 13 -25 e -07 -13 - 10 -02 -02
79 e 18 e -21 e -17 d -24 e -18 e -06 -14 -20 e -23 e -22e -06 11
-42 e -28 e -19 e 44 e 31 e 25 e 58 e 30e 32 e 02 12 06 09 08
-29 e -26 e -31 e 64 e 53 e 34e 45 e 43 e 43 e 18 e 18 e -03 25 e 05
aAll decimal points have been omitted. bMeasures of estimated change are z functions of correlations between the presentand retrospective- or prospective- self Q-sorts. High scores denote absence of change and low scores a large amount of change. CEach of the five indices of self-reported adjustment is a difference score of the sum of Q - items subtracted from the sum of Q + items for the respective Qsorting. dp < 0.05. ep < 0.01.
themselves especially 2 as persons w h o do " n o t believe in their f u t u r e , " do " n o t respect themselves," and are " t i r e d o f c o n s t a n t l y struggling w i t h l i f e . " Moreover, they manifested a l o w e r degree o f self-ideal congruence and attained higher scores on the Neuroticism scale than adolescents w h o viewed themselves as n o t having' changed or n o t being likely to change in the future. These data, therefore, confirm the e x p e c t a t i o n that appraisals o f substantial change o f self are accompanied by expressions o f self-perceived m a l a d j u s t m e n t . E x a m i n a t i o n o f all 12 regressions o f the various a d j u s t m e n t indices on the SRC and SPC scores s h o w e d that o n l y 1 deviated f r o m l i n e a r i t y ) This finding suggests that adolescents w h o r e p o r t e d little change are, in fact, b e t t e r adjusted than those w h o perceived a m o d e r a t e a m o u n t o f change. An u n e x p e c t e d correlation was f o u n d b e t w e e n b o t h age and intelligence and the SPC score, indicating that adolescents w h o were older or o f higher 2The self-perceptions cited refer to Q+ and Q - items significantly correlated (p < 0.05) with SRC and SPC scores. 3This is the regression of the ideal-self index of adjustment on the SPC score (r 2 = 0.06, eta 2 = 0.16).
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intelligence envisaged a relatively small amount of change in the future. This relationship, which is specific to the SPC and does not apply to the SRC score, 4 deserves further investigation. Perceived and Estimated Change of Self
The association between perceived and estimated change in the retrospective dimension (r = - 0 . 4 2 ) and in the prospective dimension (r = -0.26) showed that the two share a small amount of common variance. They cannot, therefore, be viewed as substitute measures of the same construct. A similar correlation (r = 0.48, df = 73, p < 0.05) obtained for the retrospective dimension among adults (Zadik, 1979) offers additional evidence of the need to distinguish between perceived and estimated change. It should be noted, however, that the relationship between adjustment and estimated change in the present study follows the same pattern as that between adjustment and perceived change (Table I).
Perceived Change of Self at Different Stages of Adolescence
Comparisons of the data obtained from the six subgroups in the sample (boys and girls in grades 7, 9 and 11) revealed an overall similarity in their perceptions of retrospective and prospective change of self. (a) The estimates of internal consistency (coefficient alpha) of the SRC and SPC scores were almost identical in the six subgroups. The SRC alpha coefficients were 0.97, 0.95, and 0.97 for boys in grades 7, 9, and 11, respectively, and 0.96, 0.96, and 0.92 for the girls. The corresponding SPC alpha coefficients were also very similar: 0.97, 0.94, 0.98, 0.96, 0.93, and 0.97, respectively. The correlations between the SRC and SPC scores were of approximately the same magnitude (see p. 513.) (c) There was a strong resemblance across the six subgroups in the RCI items which obtained the highest and lowest median scores. This similarity is reflected in the significant Kendall coefficient of concordance (w = 0.40, p < 0.001). The corresponding coefficient for the PCI was also significant (w = 0.35,p < 0.001). Two differences between some of the subgroups were found, however, in the means of the SPC or SRC scores: Seventh-graders anticipated more prospective change (M = 160.3) than ninth-graders (M = 127.4) or eleventh-graders (M =
4Additional evidence of this difference was found in the multiple regressions on the SRC and SPC scores. The set of the two intelligence tests plus age explained four times as much of the variance in the SPC (11.2%) as in the SRC (2.6%) scores. This difference remained when age was held constant; then the two intelligence tests together explained 6.6% of the variance in the SPC and only 1.7% in the SRC scores.
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129.5). s The boys saw themselves as having changed more (3,/= 153.4) than the girls did (M = 139.8). 6 Finally, slightly larger differences were found between the age groups in prospective change than between boys and girls in retrospective change. 7
DISCUSSION
Two o f the findings have been singled out for discussion because o f their potential value for a broader developmental perspective on perceived change of self. The first concerns the relatively high frequency of adolescents who reported little or no change in both the retrospective and prospective dimensions. This finding suggests that the protean style of self-process (Lifton, 1971, 1976) and comparable styles such as fluid identity (Kilpatrick, I975) and mutable self (Zurcher, 1972, 1977) are not predominant among adolescents. Instead, their modal response pattern recalls the sense of sameness and continuity noted by Erikson (1959, 1968). A global sense o f continuity and little change o f self also seems to be common among older individuals who are undergoing a period of transition, such as bereavement or aging. Of the widows interviewed by Lopata (1973), 46% claimed that they had not changed as a result of widowhood, even though they frequently mentioned the fact that they had been obliged to acquire new skills, to change their life styles, and so on. Similarly, only one-quarter of the elderly studied by Blau (1956) reported considerable change in the last 10 or 15 years. A similar pattern prevails in reports of retrospective change *in specific self-attributes, such as feelings of happiness (Bradburn and Caplowitz, 1965; Gubrium, 1974), loneliness (Gubrium, 1974), political liberalism (Hoge and Bender, 1974) and attitudes to religion (Fink, 1960), among adult and aged respondents. The percentage o f respondents reporting no change (55%, 43%, 51%, 50%, and 41% in these four studies, respectively), bear a marked resemblance to one another and to the present findings on adolescents.
s A two-way analysis of variance (sex X grade) of SPC scores indicated that the main effect of grade was the only significant effect (F(2, 155) = 8.95, p < 0.001); the Newman-Keuls test applied to the SPC scores of the six subgroups showed that the means of both the boys and the girls in grade 7 (161.9 and 159.2, respectively) were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than the mean of the ninth-grade girls (114.9). Moreover, a priori contrasts of the means of all PCI items showed that expectation of change in 39 of them was significantly greater (p < 0.05) among seventh-graders than among ninth- and eleventh-graders combined. 6A two-way analysis of variance (sex X grade) of these scores showed that the main effect of sex was the only significant effect (F(1, 169) = 4.36, p < 0.05). The eta 2 coefficient for the main effect of grade in the SPC scores was 0.10, compared with eta 2 = 0.03 for the main effect of sex in the SRC scores.
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The striking similarity among such diverse age groups calls for clarification of the following points: (a) the amount of retrospective and especially prospective change among adults and older individuals, in a wider range of salient selfattributes; (b) the adequacy (i.e., internal consistency) of the summary scores of perceived change, as composite measures of change perceived in the entire selfconcept by these older age groups; (c) the direction of change in each selfperception over and above the absolute amount of change analyzed in the present study; (d) the discrepancy in inferences drawn from studies which employed open interview. For example, Musgrove (t977) emphasized the sense of continuity of his adult and elderly respondents, while Werner et al. (I961) pointed out that change in various aspects of the self was a recurrent theme in the self-descriptions of their elderly interviewees. The second finding of interest in the present study concerns the linear regressions of various indices of self-reported adjustment on the amount of both retrospective and prospective change, implying that the smaller the amount of change in the adolescent's self-concept, the higher the level of his self-reported adjustment, and vice versa. This finding not only corroborates Erikson's (1968) account of the emotional distress of adolescents in the state of identity diffusion, but makes it possible to generalize beyond these extreme cases and to estimate the level of adjustment of adolescents in general, according to the amount of change they perceive in themselves. The significant relationship found between perceived change and selfreported adjustment among adolescents raises the question of further possible generalizations. First, this relationship may not be specific to adolescence, but may pertain to other stages of the life span as well. The significant correlation between the amount of retrospective change and self-ideal congruence obtained in a study of adults aged 22-40 (Zadik, 1979) may provide a clue in this direction, and suggests that feelings of inadequacy are experienced also by individuals in states of identity diffusion at later stages of their life cycle. Second, it is conceivable that this relationship applies not only to measures of self-reported adjustment but equally to behavioral manifestations of adjustment or maladjustment. Evidence of this possibility comes from one of the secondary findings in a study of middle-aged adults (Hoge and Bender, 1974). Adults who viewed themselves as having changed considerably, compared to what they were 30 years ago at college, had been rated at that time as being less well-adjusted than those who now perceived themselves as unchanged since their college days. These behavioral ratings had been made by their college peers and teachers with reference to specific attributes such as self-confidence, energy, and ambition. It remains to be shown that the relationship between perceived change of self and self-reported adjustment extends from adolescents to other agegroups and from self-report data to behavioral measures of adjustment. Such
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confirmation would enhance the potential utility of measures o f perceived change o f self as an operational representation o f the sense o f continuity, and would permit further exploration o f its correlates at various stages o f the life span.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is indebted to Dr. Martin Lakin for many stimulating discussions on the topics of this research, and to David Yagil, who participated in planning this study and directed the collection o f its data. The author also wishes to thank Sony Bar, Shmuel Ofer, Tani Shneider, Maya Weinberg, Allan Weinstein, and Anat Yosefsberg for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.
REFERENCES Andrews, F. M., and Withey, S. B. (1976). Social Indicators of Well-Being, Plenum Press, New York. Baehman, J. G., and O'MaUey, P. M. (1977). Serf-esteem in young men: A longitudinal analysis of the impact of educational and occupational attainments. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 35: 365-380. Blau, Z. S. (1956). Changes in status and age identification. Am. Sociol. Rev. 21: 198-203. Bortner, R. W., and Hultsch, D. F. (1972). Personal time perspective in adulthood. Dev. Psychol. 7: 98-103. Bradburn, N. M., and Caplowitz, D. (1965). Reports on Happiness: A Pilot Study of Behavior Related to Mental Health, Aldine, Chicago. Centre de Psychologic Appliqu~e (1959). Manuel: Test D48. Editions du Centre de Psychologic Appliqu~e, Paris. Dymond, R. F. (1953). An adjustment score for Q-sorts. J. Consult. Psychol. 17: 339-342. Engel, M. (1959). The stability of the self-concept in adolescence. J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 58: 211-215. Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle: Selected papers. Psychol. lss. 1 (1). Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis, Norton, New York. Eysenek, S. B. G. (1965). Manual of the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory, University of London Press, London. Fink, R. (1960). The retrospective question. Publ. Opin. Quart. 24: 143-149. Gubrium, J. F. (1974). Marital desolation and the evaluation of everyday life in old age. J. Marr. Faro. 35: 107-113. Handel, A. (1961). The self-concept of Kibbutz adolescents. Megamot 11: 142-159. Handel, A. (1973a). Cognitive styles among adolescents in Israel. Int. Jr. Psychol. 8: 255267. Handel, A. (1973b). The I)48 as a measure of general ability among adolescents in Israel. J. Cross-Cult. Psychol. 4: 302-313. Handel, A. (1976). Personality factors among adolescent boys. Psychol. Rep. 39: 435-445. Hauser, S. T. (1971). Black and White Identity Formation: Studies in the Psychosocial Development of Lower Socioeconomic Class Adolescent Boys, Wiley, New York. Hauser, S. T., and Shapiro, R. L. (1973). Differentiation of adolescent self-images. Arch. Gen. Psychiat. 29: 63-68. Hoge, D. R., and Bender, I. E. (1974). Factors influencing value change among college graduates in adult life. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 29: 572-585.
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James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, Holt, New York. Kilpatrick, W. (1975). Identity and Intimacy, Dell, New York. Levinson, D. J. (1979). The Seasons of a Man's Life, BaUantine Books, New York. Lewis, C. N. (1971). Reminiscing and self-concept in old age. J. Gerontol. 26: 240-243. Lifton, R, J. (1971). Protean man. In Wolman, B. B. (ed.), The Psychoanalytic Interpretation o f History, Basic Books, New York. Lifton, R. J. (1976). The Life of the Self.'TowardaNewPsychology, Simon and Schuster, New York. Lopata, H. Z. (1973). Identity in marriage and widowhood. Sociot. Quart. 14: 407-418. Lowenthal, M. F., Thurner, M., and Chiriboga, D. (1975). Four Stages o f Life: ,4 Comparative Study o f Women and Men Facing Transitions, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in Personality, Oxford University Press, New York. Musgrove, F. (1977). Margins o f Mind, Methuen, London. Offer, D., and Offer, J. B. (1975). From Teenage to Young Manhood: ,4 Psychological Study, Basic Books, New York. Werner, M. M., et al. (1961). Self-perceived changes in community resident aged. Arch. Gen. P.sychiat. 4: 501-509. Zadik, Y. (1979). Perceived retrospective change of self-conospt in the wake of changing one's name. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Haifa. Zureher, L. A. (1972). The mutable self. Futurist 6: 181-185. Zurcher, L. A. (1977). The Mutable Self: A Self-concept for Social Change, Sage, Beverly Hills, Calif.
Perceived Change of Self Among Adolescents Amos Handel I
Received September 2, 1980 In order to examine the sense o f continuity o f adolescents, self-appraisals o f retrospective and prospective change or sameness were elicited from lsraeli boys and girls in grades 7, 9, and 11 (N = 186). With reference to each o f 60 self-attributes, these adolescents indicated the amount o f change they perceived in themselves, compared with what they were like five years ago. They then estimated how much they expected to change on each attribute five years from now. Most respondents perceived minimal change in themselves, both retrospectively and prospectively. Regression analyses indicated that the lower the amount o f perceived change o f self, the higher the level o f self-perceived ad/ustment and self-ideal congruence. These findings are discussed in terms o f their implications for future studies o f the sense o f continuity in adolescence and beyond.
INTRODUCTION The crucial task for adolescents, according to Erikson (1959, 1968), is to consolidate, at this time of physical, social, and emotional instability the three major components of self-identity: (a) the sense of mutuality, arising from the adolescent's awareness that his own self-perception is congruent with the way significant others perceive him; (b) the sense of unity, wholeness, and harmony among the different selves making up his identity; (c) the sense o f continuity between his present view of himself and his picture of his own past and future selves:
This research was supported in part by a grant from the University Research Council of the University of Halfa. ~Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Received his M.A. from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Major interests include adolescent personality and the development of the self-concept during the life span. 507 0047-2891/80"/1200-0507 $03.00/0 © 1980 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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This study focuses on the sense of continuity experienced by adolescents and, specifically, on the amount of retrospective and prospective change of self perceived and reported by them. Adolescents were asked to report whether, in their own view, they had changed or remained the same as they were in the past (five years ago) with reference to a particular set of self-attributes (e.g., qualities of leadership, independence). Similarly, they were asked to estimate whether they would change in the future (five years from now) in terms of these selfperceptions. Self-appraisals of retrospective and prospective change or sameness represent one aspect of a construct designated here as perceived change of self. Broadly viewed, this construct also accommodates related self-perceptions which might be evoked by such appraisals: the nature of the changes which have occurred or will occur, their number and intensity, their relative importance, their positive or negative implications, their anticipated stability and permanence, and the individual's attribution of these changes to specific events or to longterm experiences. The potential sources of data on perceived change of self range from unstructured, unsolicited material (e.g., diaries, autobiographies) to structured questionnaires, such as those employed in the present study to examine the following topics. The Amount of Perceived Change Reported by Adolescents. No hypothesis was formulated here, for two reasons. In the first place, no empirical data exist which are directly pertinent or demonstrably related to perceived change of self in adolescents. Second, the meager data on the amount of change among other age groups are confined to the retrospective dimension and were obtained by diverse methods. Some of these studies employed open interviews with adults and/or the elderly (Levinson, 1979; Musgrove, 1977; Werner et al., 1961); other studies dealt with only one or two self-attributes and were based on struc. tured questions presented to various groups of adults (Bradburn and Caplowitz, 1965; Hoge and Bender, 1974; Lopata, 1973) or to elderly people (Btau, 1956; Gubrium, 1974). Theories of adolescent identity appear to lead to two contradictory hypotheses - one suggesting a modal pattern of slight or limited change, and the other predicting a dominant pattern of radical change. Erikson's (1959, 1968) observations on the strength and vitality of adolescents and findings of longitudinal studies (cf. Bachman and O'Malley, 1977; Engel, 1959; Offer and Offer, 1975) seem to imply that most teenagers succeed in maintaining a sense of continuity, despite the turbulence they experience during this period. By contrast, notions of the protean style of self-process (Lifton, 1971,1976) or fluid identity (Kilpatrick, 1975) portray the typical adolescent as continually altering his perception of himself and evading the search for connections between his past, present, and future selves.
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The Relationship Between Retrospective and Prospective Change Among Adolescents. A strong association between the retrospective and prospective dimensions of perceived change of self seems to follow from Erikson's (1959, 1968) notions of continuity as a result of a twofold interrelationship between the present and both the past and the future selves. Accordingly, substantial correlations were expected between the amount of retrospective and prospective change.
The Relationship Between Amount of Change and Level of Adjustment. Adolescents who reported considerable change were expected to describe themselves as more maladjusted than those who reported moderate or slight change. This expectation derives from Erikson's (1959, 1968) account of the manigestations of emotional distress characteristic of adolescents in the state of identity diffusion. No prediction was made about the comparative level of adjustment of those who reported little or moderate change. This question was examined by testing the linearity of regressions of various measures of adjustment on the amount of perceived change. Perceived Change of Self at Different Stages of Adolescence. Boys and girls in grades 7, 9, and 11 were included in the study, so as to provide a comparative view of perceived change of self at different age levels in adolescence. Perceived Change and Estimated Change. In addition to self-ratings of perceived change, data on estimated change of self were collected, in order to establish whether the distinction between these two notions of change is empirically justified. The notion of perceived change of self is based on two assumptions: (a) Self-appraisals of change refer to those "changes in the Me, recognized by the I" (James; 1890, p. 373); (b) these appraisals are the result of comparisons made by the subject himself between his present and his retrospective or prospective views of himself. By contrast, the notion of estimated change of self originates in the external frame of reference of the researcher. It is based on comparisons made by the researcher between two sets of self-descriptions elicited from the subject on the same occasion: (a) the person's present self-concept; (b) the retrospective or prospective self-concept reported by the person, using the same set of selfdescriptions. Any discrepancy between these two self-concepts represents the measure of estimated change; the investigator is free to apply his own criteria of much or little change to discrepancies of a given size. Measures of estimated change have, in fact, been generated to assess various other constructs in studies of adolescents (Hauser, 1971; Hauser and Shapiro, 1973; Lowenthal et al., 1975) and older age groups (Andrews and Withey, 1976; Bortner and Hultsch, 1972;Lewis, 1971). Furthermore, in one of these studies (Lowenthal et aL, 1975), a measure of estimated change was employed to represent the notion referred to here as "perceived change."
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Data on the present, retrospective, and prospective self-concept were obtained by means of a Hebrew Q-sort test used in previous studies of Israeli adolescents (Handel, 1961, 1973a). Of the 60 items in the test, 36 were selected from a larger pool of statements proposed by Murray (1938) for assessing the following needs: affiliation, rejection, succorance, nurturance, dominance, autonomy, blameavoidance, infavoidance, and achievement. For each of these needs, which were selected for their salience in the self-descriptions of adolescents (Handel, 1961), 4 items were included in the Q-sort test. The remaining 24 items were drawn from a list of statements included by Dymond (1953) in the Qadjustment score. Twelve of them were statements which, in the opinion of experienced clinicians, a well-adjusted person would endorse and place in the category of "like me" attributes (Q + items), and another 12 were statements which such a person would reject and classify as "unlike me" ( Q - items). In the instructions for the present-self Q-sort, each subject was asked to sort these items as they describe him in the present, placing the 4 items which characterize him most in pile 5; the 4 items least characteristic of him in pile 1; and 14, 24, and 14 items in the intermediate piles (piles 4, 3 and 2, respectively) of more "like me" to less "like me" self-descriptions. Using the same list of items and the same forced distribution, each subject was also instructed to describe himself as he was five years ago (retrospective self), as he will be five years from now (prospective self), and as he would like to be (ideal self). After every sorting, the placement of each item was recorded, and the number of the pile to which it had been assigned constituted its score for that sorting. In addition, the following scores were computed from the various Q-sorts for each subject: (a) Estimated retrospective change = product-moment correlation (r) between scores on each pair of the 60 items in the present-self and retrospective-self Q-sorts. The higher this correlation, the smaller the amount of estimated change; (b) Estimated prospective change = correlation between the present-self and prospective-self Q-sorts; (c) self-ideal congruence = correlation between the present-self and ideal-self Q-sorts. This was intended to serve as one of the measures of self-reported adjustment; (d) Q-index of adjustment = sum of scores (1 to 5) assigned by the subject to the Q + items, minus the corresponding sum for the Q - items, with a possible range of +48 (high level of adjustment) to - 4 8 (low level of adjustment). These scores were computed separately for each Q-sort. Measures of Perceived Change of Self Two inventories were employed to elicit data on perceived change, one for the retrospective dimension (Retrospective Change I n v e n t o r y - RCI) and the
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other for tiler prospective dimension ~rospective Change I n v e n t o r y - PCI). Each of these contained the same list of 60 items, consisting of the Q-sort statements modified to suit the RCI and PCI format (e.g., the Q-items "I am intelligent," "I stubbornly resist when others attempt to force something upon me," were rephrased in the RCI and PCI as "the notion that I am intelligent," "the tendency to resist stubbornly when others attempt to force something upon me"). For each RCI item, the subject was requested to report whether he had changed, compared to what he was like five years ago, using a 5-point scale ranging from "I have changed a lot" (score 5) to "I haven't changed at all" (score 1). This rating scale was also used for the PCI, in which the subject was asked to assess the amount of change he anticipated five years from now. Subjects were also instructed to indicate the direction of the change (i.e., whether a particular trait now characterized them more or less than it had in the past, or whether in future it would be more or less characteristic of them than it was now). It appears that the instructions for this task were not sufficiently clear to the subjects, since more than one-third of them failed to respond as required. This information was, therefore, discarded; subsequent analyses deal only with the amount of absolute change reported by the subjects. Two summary scores were computed for each subject: (a) sum of retrospective change (SRC) = sum of scores assigned to RCI items (possible range = 60-300); (b) sum of prospective change (SPC) = sum of scores assigned to PCI items (possible range = 60-300). Procedure
The tests were presented to groups of 8-12 students. In the first of the two test sessions, the following tasks were administered: (a)present-self Q-sort; (b) D48 test (Centre de Psychologie Apphqu6e, 1959), a nonverbal intelligence test; (c) retrospective-self Q-sort; (d) a Hebrew version (Handel, 1976) of the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory (JEPI; Eysenck, 1965), consisting of a Neuroticism scale, taken to be a measure of self-perceived maladjustment, an Extraversion scale, and a Lie scale; (e) prospective-self Q-sort. In the second session, 20 to 22 days later, six tests were presented: (f) present-self Q-sort (retest); (g) JEPI (retest); (h) Vocabulary, a Hebrew verbal inteUigence test (Handel, 1973b); (i) ideal-self Q-sort; (j) RCI; (k)PCI. The two retests were given as part of a wider research project on personality dimensions in adolescence, and are not directly related to the present study.
Supers
A total of 186 students participated in the study: 52 seventh-graders (23 boys and 29 girls), 72 ninth-graders (35 boys and 37 girls) and 62 eleventhgraders (28 boys and 34 girls). The two younger groups attended a middle class
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junior high school in Haifa, and the oldest group was drawn from an adjacent high school. The mean ages of the three groups were 12 years, 11 months (SD = 3.5 months); 14 years, 9 months (SD = 5.4 months); and 16 years, 7 months (SD = 5.4 months). The subjects were of average intelligence or above, as indicated by their scores on the D48 (M = 25.8, SD = 5.8) and Vocabulary (M = 26.1, SD = 5.8) tests (c.f. Handel, 1973b), with no significant differences between boys and girls. These sample data apply to all tests except the RCI and PCI. A systematic check of the responses to these two inventories revealed that some subjects had not completed all the items on either or both of them, or had endorsed more than one response alternative for the same item. For this reason, 11 of the RCI and 25 of the PCI response sheets were discarded. The RCI data are thus based on 175 subjects (50 seventh-graders, 68 ninth-graders, and 57 eleventh-graders), and the PCI data on 161 students (44 seventh-graders, 66 ninth-graders, and 51 eleventh-graders).
RESULTS The Amount of Retrospective and Prospective Change The majority of respondents perceived a limited amount of change when comparing their present with their retrospective or prospective views of themselves. The two response alternatives indicating little or no change (scores 2 and 1) were endorsed on average by 56% of the subjects over all the RCI items and by 63% over all the PCI items, as opposed to 25% and 20% who reported much or very much change (scores 4 and 5) on the RCI and PCI, respectively. The clear preference for responses which imply a sense of continuity and minimal change of self is even more striking when only the extremes of the scale (scores 1 and 5) are considered: 37% and 39% claimed no change on the RCI and PCI items, respectively, compared with the corresponding 11% and 10% who reported very much change. The same trend is reflected in the low median scores on the RCI items, which ranged from 1.28-3.02. There were only 9 items with a median of 2.5 or more. On the PCI items, the medians were even lower, running from 1.372.36, and more than half (32 items) had a median score of 1.99 or less. The adolescents' tendency to view themselves as basically unchanged was more pronounced retrospectively than prospectively. Comparisons of the mean of each RCI item with that of the corresponding PCI item, using correlated t tests, showed significant differences (p < 0.05, two-tailed) in 11 cases, and in each of these the RCI mean was higher. Similarly, the mean of the SRC score (M = 144.54) was significantly higher than that of the SPC (M = 136.96), with t(160) = 3.32, p < 0.001, two-tailed.
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Internal Consistency of the RCI and PCI The internal consistency of the two inventories was high, as indicated by the alpha coefficients of 0.957 (RCI) and 0.966 (PCI). Further evidence of their homogeneity is provided by the correlations obtained between each of the 60 RCI items and the SRC score (median correlation = 0.55), and likewise between the PCI items and the SPC score (median correlation = 0.58). Thus, the SRC and SPC scores are internally consistent measures of perceived change in a variety of self-attributes, which constitute elements of the self-concept. These summary scores may serve as a composite measure of the amount of change perceived in the entire self-concept. The Relationship Between Retrospective and Prospective Change A close relationship between the retrospective and prospective dimensions of change was found in the following analyses: 1. A high degree of concordance (rho = 0.75, p < 0.001, two-tailed) was obtained between the rank order of the medians of the RCI and PCI item scores. 2. Significant correlations (p < .01) were obtained between every pair of RCI and PCI item scores. These 60 correlations ranged from 0.20 to 0.58, with a median o f r = 0.41. 3. The correlation between the SRC and SPC summary scores of the total sample was r(158) = 0.79 (p < 0.001, two-tailed). Similar correlations were found in each of the major subgroups in the sample: 0.74 for the boys (N = 70), 0.82 for the girls (N = 90), and 0.92, 0.67, and 0.79 for seventh-graders (iV = 44), ninth-graders (N = 65), and eleventh-graders (N = 51), respectively.
The Relationship Between Perceived Change and Measures of Adjustment The data in Table I are in general accord with the expectation of significant correlations between measures of adjustment and the amount of perceiced change. Subjects who reported a substantial amount of change generally had lower adjustment scores on the various Q-sorts. These adolescents rarely described themselves in terms of the self-perceptions assumed to characterize well-adjusted persons (Q+), and tended to view themselves particularly 2 as individuals who do not "have friendly relationships with many people," do not "get along easily with people in their environment," and are not "'optimistic." They endorsed many of the attributes typical of maladjustment (Q-), and described
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Table 1. Correlations of Perceived and Estimated Change of Self with Measures of Self-Reported Adjustment, JEPI Scales, and Tests of Intelligencea Perceived change
Estimated change b
Measure
SRC (n = 175)
SPC (n = 161)
Retrospective (n = 186)
Prospective (n = 186)
SRC SPC Neuroticism Self-ideal congruence Present Q-ADJ c Ideal Q-ADJ c Retrospective Q-ADJ c Prospective Q-AD J c Retest Q-ADJ c Vocabulary D48 Age Extraversion Lie scale
79 e 27 e -24 e -17 d -23 e -25 e - 13 -25 e -07 -13 - 10 -02 -02
79 e 18 e -21 e -17 d -24 e -18 e -06 -14 -20 e -23 e -22e -06 11
-42 e -28 e -19 e 44 e 31 e 25 e 58 e 30e 32 e 02 12 06 09 08
-29 e -26 e -31 e 64 e 53 e 34e 45 e 43 e 43 e 18 e 18 e -03 25 e 05
aAll decimal points have been omitted. bMeasures of estimated change are z functions of correlations between the presentand retrospective- or prospective- self Q-sorts. High scores denote absence of change and low scores a large amount of change. CEach of the five indices of self-reported adjustment is a difference score of the sum of Q - items subtracted from the sum of Q + items for the respective Qsorting. dp < 0.05. ep < 0.01.
themselves especially 2 as persons w h o do " n o t believe in their f u t u r e , " do " n o t respect themselves," and are " t i r e d o f c o n s t a n t l y struggling w i t h l i f e . " Moreover, they manifested a l o w e r degree o f self-ideal congruence and attained higher scores on the Neuroticism scale than adolescents w h o viewed themselves as n o t having' changed or n o t being likely to change in the future. These data, therefore, confirm the e x p e c t a t i o n that appraisals o f substantial change o f self are accompanied by expressions o f self-perceived m a l a d j u s t m e n t . E x a m i n a t i o n o f all 12 regressions o f the various a d j u s t m e n t indices on the SRC and SPC scores s h o w e d that o n l y 1 deviated f r o m l i n e a r i t y ) This finding suggests that adolescents w h o r e p o r t e d little change are, in fact, b e t t e r adjusted than those w h o perceived a m o d e r a t e a m o u n t o f change. An u n e x p e c t e d correlation was f o u n d b e t w e e n b o t h age and intelligence and the SPC score, indicating that adolescents w h o were older or o f higher 2The self-perceptions cited refer to Q+ and Q - items significantly correlated (p < 0.05) with SRC and SPC scores. 3This is the regression of the ideal-self index of adjustment on the SPC score (r 2 = 0.06, eta 2 = 0.16).
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intelligence envisaged a relatively small amount of change in the future. This relationship, which is specific to the SPC and does not apply to the SRC score, 4 deserves further investigation. Perceived and Estimated Change of Self
The association between perceived and estimated change in the retrospective dimension (r = - 0 . 4 2 ) and in the prospective dimension (r = -0.26) showed that the two share a small amount of common variance. They cannot, therefore, be viewed as substitute measures of the same construct. A similar correlation (r = 0.48, df = 73, p < 0.05) obtained for the retrospective dimension among adults (Zadik, 1979) offers additional evidence of the need to distinguish between perceived and estimated change. It should be noted, however, that the relationship between adjustment and estimated change in the present study follows the same pattern as that between adjustment and perceived change (Table I).
Perceived Change of Self at Different Stages of Adolescence
Comparisons of the data obtained from the six subgroups in the sample (boys and girls in grades 7, 9 and 11) revealed an overall similarity in their perceptions of retrospective and prospective change of self. (a) The estimates of internal consistency (coefficient alpha) of the SRC and SPC scores were almost identical in the six subgroups. The SRC alpha coefficients were 0.97, 0.95, and 0.97 for boys in grades 7, 9, and 11, respectively, and 0.96, 0.96, and 0.92 for the girls. The corresponding SPC alpha coefficients were also very similar: 0.97, 0.94, 0.98, 0.96, 0.93, and 0.97, respectively. The correlations between the SRC and SPC scores were of approximately the same magnitude (see p. 513.) (c) There was a strong resemblance across the six subgroups in the RCI items which obtained the highest and lowest median scores. This similarity is reflected in the significant Kendall coefficient of concordance (w = 0.40, p < 0.001). The corresponding coefficient for the PCI was also significant (w = 0.35,p < 0.001). Two differences between some of the subgroups were found, however, in the means of the SPC or SRC scores: Seventh-graders anticipated more prospective change (M = 160.3) than ninth-graders (M = 127.4) or eleventh-graders (M =
4Additional evidence of this difference was found in the multiple regressions on the SRC and SPC scores. The set of the two intelligence tests plus age explained four times as much of the variance in the SPC (11.2%) as in the SRC (2.6%) scores. This difference remained when age was held constant; then the two intelligence tests together explained 6.6% of the variance in the SPC and only 1.7% in the SRC scores.
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129.5). s The boys saw themselves as having changed more (3,/= 153.4) than the girls did (M = 139.8). 6 Finally, slightly larger differences were found between the age groups in prospective change than between boys and girls in retrospective change. 7
DISCUSSION
Two o f the findings have been singled out for discussion because o f their potential value for a broader developmental perspective on perceived change of self. The first concerns the relatively high frequency of adolescents who reported little or no change in both the retrospective and prospective dimensions. This finding suggests that the protean style of self-process (Lifton, 1971, 1976) and comparable styles such as fluid identity (Kilpatrick, I975) and mutable self (Zurcher, 1972, 1977) are not predominant among adolescents. Instead, their modal response pattern recalls the sense of sameness and continuity noted by Erikson (1959, 1968). A global sense o f continuity and little change o f self also seems to be common among older individuals who are undergoing a period of transition, such as bereavement or aging. Of the widows interviewed by Lopata (1973), 46% claimed that they had not changed as a result of widowhood, even though they frequently mentioned the fact that they had been obliged to acquire new skills, to change their life styles, and so on. Similarly, only one-quarter of the elderly studied by Blau (1956) reported considerable change in the last 10 or 15 years. A similar pattern prevails in reports of retrospective change *in specific self-attributes, such as feelings of happiness (Bradburn and Caplowitz, 1965; Gubrium, 1974), loneliness (Gubrium, 1974), political liberalism (Hoge and Bender, 1974) and attitudes to religion (Fink, 1960), among adult and aged respondents. The percentage o f respondents reporting no change (55%, 43%, 51%, 50%, and 41% in these four studies, respectively), bear a marked resemblance to one another and to the present findings on adolescents.
s A two-way analysis of variance (sex X grade) of SPC scores indicated that the main effect of grade was the only significant effect (F(2, 155) = 8.95, p < 0.001); the Newman-Keuls test applied to the SPC scores of the six subgroups showed that the means of both the boys and the girls in grade 7 (161.9 and 159.2, respectively) were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than the mean of the ninth-grade girls (114.9). Moreover, a priori contrasts of the means of all PCI items showed that expectation of change in 39 of them was significantly greater (p < 0.05) among seventh-graders than among ninth- and eleventh-graders combined. 6A two-way analysis of variance (sex X grade) of these scores showed that the main effect of sex was the only significant effect (F(1, 169) = 4.36, p < 0.05). The eta 2 coefficient for the main effect of grade in the SPC scores was 0.10, compared with eta 2 = 0.03 for the main effect of sex in the SRC scores.
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The striking similarity among such diverse age groups calls for clarification of the following points: (a) the amount of retrospective and especially prospective change among adults and older individuals, in a wider range of salient selfattributes; (b) the adequacy (i.e., internal consistency) of the summary scores of perceived change, as composite measures of change perceived in the entire selfconcept by these older age groups; (c) the direction of change in each selfperception over and above the absolute amount of change analyzed in the present study; (d) the discrepancy in inferences drawn from studies which employed open interview. For example, Musgrove (t977) emphasized the sense of continuity of his adult and elderly respondents, while Werner et al. (I961) pointed out that change in various aspects of the self was a recurrent theme in the self-descriptions of their elderly interviewees. The second finding of interest in the present study concerns the linear regressions of various indices of self-reported adjustment on the amount of both retrospective and prospective change, implying that the smaller the amount of change in the adolescent's self-concept, the higher the level of his self-reported adjustment, and vice versa. This finding not only corroborates Erikson's (1968) account of the emotional distress of adolescents in the state of identity diffusion, but makes it possible to generalize beyond these extreme cases and to estimate the level of adjustment of adolescents in general, according to the amount of change they perceive in themselves. The significant relationship found between perceived change and selfreported adjustment among adolescents raises the question of further possible generalizations. First, this relationship may not be specific to adolescence, but may pertain to other stages of the life span as well. The significant correlation between the amount of retrospective change and self-ideal congruence obtained in a study of adults aged 22-40 (Zadik, 1979) may provide a clue in this direction, and suggests that feelings of inadequacy are experienced also by individuals in states of identity diffusion at later stages of their life cycle. Second, it is conceivable that this relationship applies not only to measures of self-reported adjustment but equally to behavioral manifestations of adjustment or maladjustment. Evidence of this possibility comes from one of the secondary findings in a study of middle-aged adults (Hoge and Bender, 1974). Adults who viewed themselves as having changed considerably, compared to what they were 30 years ago at college, had been rated at that time as being less well-adjusted than those who now perceived themselves as unchanged since their college days. These behavioral ratings had been made by their college peers and teachers with reference to specific attributes such as self-confidence, energy, and ambition. It remains to be shown that the relationship between perceived change of self and self-reported adjustment extends from adolescents to other agegroups and from self-report data to behavioral measures of adjustment. Such
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confirmation would enhance the potential utility of measures o f perceived change o f self as an operational representation o f the sense o f continuity, and would permit further exploration o f its correlates at various stages o f the life span.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is indebted to Dr. Martin Lakin for many stimulating discussions on the topics of this research, and to David Yagil, who participated in planning this study and directed the collection o f its data. The author also wishes to thank Sony Bar, Shmuel Ofer, Tani Shneider, Maya Weinberg, Allan Weinstein, and Anat Yosefsberg for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.
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