Adolescents' Perceptions of the Relevance of Domains of Identity Formation: A South African Cross-Cultural Study

This study investigated South African Afrikaans-, English-, and Xhosa-speaking secondary school adolescents' (N = 1217) perceptions of the relative importance of identity-related domains. For this purpose a structured questionnaire consisting of 14 domain-specific items was used. Most of the domains were regarded as very important or fairly important by a significant majority of participants. Four domains were regarded as very important by more than 70% of the total research group, namely, future career, moral values, family relationships, and religious matters. Political and sexual matters were regarded as of least importance. Intercultural differences were evident in most domains. Significant gender differences were also found. Relatively more females than males reported a high priority to domains such as future career, moral values, friendships with same sex peers, gender role, and community matters. The male participants regarded relationships with the opposite sex and sexual matters as more important than the females did. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of carefully considering the domains included in future research on identity formation, depending on variables such as socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics of the specific research groups to be included in the investigation.