How can I measure the changes in the identity and personal development in a group of participants? I established questions for the interviews, I can see the changes and the impact on participants' lives, but I can't measure (or describe) the changes with plausibility and credibility, finally with objectivity. Thank you in advance for your suggestions.
First of all, it's a very good and very hard question, I already work on that subject in order to Muslim communities. what I can say to you, and I hope it would be helpful, is: I distinguished between two types of identity; the cultural and the national (or political) one. and I argued in some of my researches (unfortunately it's in Arabic but this paper in which I already work on nowadays is in English and I would be glad to send it to you when it finish) that the cultural side of identity is some thing related to what we can call the soul of group and it is very natural, I mean: there is no institutions are working to keep it work in society, because if we have these institutions then we are in front of the second type of identity which is not natural but artificial, I mean it's something hand made, but it made by a great political institutions (and that includes the educational and religion institutions) . I did not think before that I could make a measure for these human feature (Identity) but I think with using my distinguishing, you can study the changes which happen in a specific group in a specific period of time and I wish you tell me about the next steps and new results you reach it..
Since "measuring" of an identity philosophically is rather an issue beyond human competence I elaborate on this question in the context of social interaction and globalization by identifying similar subquestions: how can one measure personality?; how can one measure emotions?; how can one measure culture? Accordingly, an identity can consider a measurable model of personality (Big Five); a measurable model of emotions (probabilistic Picard's HMM); a measurable model of culture (synthetic culture). Combination of these models results in an identity that can be measured and encapsulated, for example, in a computer agent.
You might be interested in "Social interaction, globalization and computer-aided analysis" that describes scenarios of social interaction (chapter 3), populating numeric models (chapter 4) and practical implementation (chapter 6). Hope you can find it in the library of your university.
Book Social Interaction, Globalization and Computer-Aided Analysi...
Philosophically, i believe that the concept of 'identity' turns out to be very connected to 'generation'.
It is a historiographical-philosophical category whose meaning is to be commonly used as the 'motor of history'. For example,Ortega y Gasset would relate the identity, with the values of the contemporaneity (to live in the same historical time) and the one of the coetanidade (to have the same age).
Taking into account that identity implies the sharing of common ideals, it turns out to be a concept symmetrical to that of 'generation'. Each identity is unique and singular, so it is never measurable!
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