Development and Assessment of Self-Authorship

Book excerpt: This book brings together new scholarship that expands and refines the concept of self-authorship across cultures. It adopts a constructive-developmental approach to self-evolution that emphasizes the interaction of personal characteristics and contextual influences on individuals’ construction of knowledge, identities, and relationships. Individual chapters cover subjects from populations as varied as Dutch students, male and female Bedouin and Jewish adolescents, African American male and female adolescents in economically depressed areas of the US, Latino/a college students grappling with ethnic identity and dissonance, Australian college females preparing to be childcare workers, and finally a comparative study of Japanese and U.S. college students’ epistemic beliefs.The book concludes by addressing questions about the challenges and opportunities involved in developing a valid measure of self-authorship that is less time and expertise-intensive than the in-depth one-on-one interview employed until now; and offering an outline of future theoretical and methodological research needed to further our understanding of self-evolution in general and self-authorship in particular.