Identity Styles and College Adaptation: The Mediational Roles of Commitment, Self-Agency and Self-Regulation

ABSTRACT

Identity processing styles (i.e., normative, informational, and diffuse-avoidant) refer to differences in how individuals engage or circumvent the challenge of processing self-relevant information and negotiating identity-relevant conflicts. The role identity commitment, personal agency, and self-regulation played in mediating relationships between identity styles and how successfully students were adapting to college was investigated. Measures of identity style, commitment, agency, self-regulation, and three indicators of adaptation (i.e., depressive symptoms, loneliness, and college adjustment) were completed by 402 college freshmen. A normative style was associated with an adaptive pattern; whereas the pattern for the diffuse-avoidant style was maladaptive. An informational style was only directly associated with college adjustment. All these relationships were mediated by personal agency and self-regulation. Commitment only uniquely mediated relationships with depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that identity commitment has a minimal to negligible impact on college adjustment independent from students’ sense of agency and regulatory resources. Implications of the role agency and self-regulation play in how freshmen students with different identity styles form identity commitments and adapt to college are considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity style
• commitment
• agency
• self-regulation
• college adaptation

Notes

1. We also estimated a full-mediation model to evaluate whether the structural paths from each identity style to the three adjustment measures were completely mediated by the three mediator variables. All of the paths from the styles to the three mediators were significant. The paths from commitment to loneliness and college adjustment were not significant; all other mediator-to-adjustment variable paths were significant. However, the model provided a poor fit to the data (χ2 [9] = 57.88, p < .0001, CFI = .960, RMSEA = .116.) Commitment, agency, and self-regulation combined accounted for 36.0% of the variance in depressive symptoms, 19.4% in Loneliness, and 40.2% in college adjustment.