Conference Agenda

Mental health of students in Higher Education is worrisome. Many of these mental complaints classify as age-specific side-effects of identity development. Problems in identity development are related to multiplicity and deficits in terms of authenticity and direction in particular. Project UrU was funded to develop a digital platform to support students in these challenges.

Pilot research showed that students crave an overview of the challenges they might encounter as well as an indication of their whereabouts in this field. They would like a navigation map of potential challenges in order to understand what to confront rather than avoid in order to keep growing.

Problematic was that, since every user comes from a different perspective, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for a roadmap. Moreover, aspects of self-understanding constitute a field of tensions in which striving for one implies harming something else. The Dialogical Self Theory meets these challenges, making it a useful framework for a map for identity development in emerging adulthood.

To design this map, we used the axes mood and self-other focus from the Self-Confrontation Method for cardinal directions. This provided us with an area of agency and strength, relatedness and warmth, loneliness and isolation, and agitation and stress. We further divided each of these area’s by implementing the degrees of internalisation provided by the Self Determination Theory, and some area-specific themes and challenges.

To navigate the map, we designed four tools. The first assists in finding an idiosyncratic promotor position as a personal compass. A second helps solving conflicts between I-positions. The third helps differentiating between I-positions, reflecting upon and embracing their strengths and weaknesses as an agent. The fourth invites tracing where each I-position typically brings one in the mental map.

We suggest that this DST navigation-set provides both the insight and means to travel emerging adulthood.