Four Stages of Faith Identity (Marcia's)

Right now I am finishing up my revised term paper for my adolescent development class. In one aspect of my paper, I talked about my spiritual faith and where I was at as an adolescent. James Fowler has his stages of Faith development from young children to adults. Now I am reading another article that talks about Marcia's Identity stages while other researchers uses her model in faith development during adolescence. I am using this to teach others. Here is a summary:

In general, our findings seem to confirm the commitment and exploration conceptual underpinnings of Marcia’s (1966) adolescent identity-status categories in the religious domain. Our analyses of religious commitment and crisis (doubting), and especially our analysis of belief-confirming versus belief-threatening exploration, lend support to the validity of Marcia’s conceptualization. However, we would agree that religious doubt, itself, is only a part of religious exploration and possibly a better indication of crisis rather than active exploration. Our assessment of the consultation process for religious questions and doubts is probably a better measure of actual exploration, related to potential commitment or avoidance of commitment. Overall, then, what do our findings suggest regarding links between religion and each of the four identity statuses?

1. Achievement: In general, there was little association between identity achievement and religion in our studies. There was a weak tendency for achievement to be related to religious commitment in Study 2 only, but there was no link between achievement and the extent of self-reported religious doubting in eitherstudy. Notably, however, when more achieved individuals did have questions and doubts, they tended to consult both belief-confirming and belief-threatening sources for assistance. They were, thus, apparently open to hearing “both sides of the issues,” consistent with Berzonsky and Kuk’s (2000) and Berzonsky and Sullivan’s (1992) informational style proposals.

2. Moratorium: These scores were modestly related to evidence of more religious doubting, lack of religious commitment, and lower religious fundamentalism. Higher Moratorium scores were related to a tendency to avoid BCC both concurrently and 2 years in the future. Indeed, consistent with this, Moratorium scores were also linked with self-perceptions of becoming less religious over time.

3. Foreclosure:Our findings suggested that foreclosed individuals have indeed made religious commitments, generally accepting the religious teachings they grew up with. They also tended to believe that they belong to the one, true religion (as measured by the RF scale), and they were inclined not to doubt religious teachings. When doubts did arise in their lives, they preferred to resolve them by consulting sources that would confirm traditional religious teachings, and they tended to avoid sources that might threaten their religious beliefs, both concurrently and in the future. In light of this, it is not surprising that Foreclosure scores were predictive of decreased religious doubting 2 years later.

4. Diffusion: Finally, diffused individuals tended to be experiencing moredoubts about religion and were generally religiously uncommitted. They tended to be nonfundamentalist in their approach to religion, were inclined to avoid going to church, and also tended to disagree with parental religious teachings. They also did not seem particularly interested in seeking out information to help them resolve religious issues, tending to avoid both belief-confirming and belief-threatening sources of information. Consistent with the conceptualization of diffused identity, these people seemed to be avoiding both association with religion and seeking out information that might help them to resolve religious questions and doubts. Diffusion scores were predictive of decreased consultation (both pro- and anti-religious) in the future. There was also evidence that people with higher Diffusion scores were able to recognize that they were drifting further away from religion over time. These patterns generally parallel the diffuse–avoidant style of information processing described by Berzonsky and Kuk (2000).

These patterns of associations between identity status and religion are generally quite consistent with the conceptualization of the identity construct, and they add color and texture to basic identity-religion associations. More important, our findings regarding consultation for religious doubts are, with the exception of moratorium status, consistent with Berzonsky and Kuk’s (2000) suggestion that different identity statuses may have unique information-seeking and processing styles. Furthermore, these styles may have important implications for the eventual religious commitments (or lack thereof) among our participants.

Hunsberger, B., Pratt, M. & Pancer, S.M. (2001). Adolescent identity formation: Religious exploration and commitment. An International Journal of Theory and Research, 1:4, 365-386. Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S1532706XID0104_04.