The Research Of University Students’ Ego-identity Crisis

This essay, theoretically based on Erikson’s ego-identity theory, studies Chinese college students’ ego-identity crisis and its coping mechanisms. Erikson’s ego-identity theory was introduced in the 1950 s,Macia and other scholars extracted it into two dimensions: exploration and commitments, and researched the ego-identity states of adolescents of different nationalities, cultural backgrounds and ages. After arguments and discussions among different scholars, CÇ'té and some scholars maintain that exploration and commitment are not sufficient enough to characterize the ego-identity theory of adolescents put forward by Erikson, and the descriptions of identity states cannot replace the in-depth analysis of the identity crisis, which results in the orientation and regression to Erikson’s theory in the study on the ego-identity crisis among adolescents. This essay, precisely under the background of such theory development, on the theoretical basis of Erikson’s adolescent ego-identity theory, conducts the research of the ego-identity crisis and its coping mechanisms in contemporary college students in our country.In this essay, the research logic is "the Task- Conflict- Crisis- Coping" : for college students, the tasks to be accomplished in college at their ages include the completion of college study, the initial establishment of goals for their future, and the handling of all the main types of relationships around them at this stage, when the realization of these three tasks encounters difficulties and arises identity crisis, college students coping mechanisms. The main concept of this essay includes: ego-identity, important relationships, the Task- Conflict- Crisis.Establishing future ideals is one of the important life goals for college students during their college life. In this essay, the study of college students’ future ideal crisis is divided into three steps: The first step is to get to know the current situation of college students’ future ideals through questionnaire surveys; The second step is to highlight factors that influence their future ideals by making models; The third step, is to describe the college students’ future ideal crisis by case interviews. Specifically, college students look forward to the future, over 90% of college students position their own long-term futures in the middle of society and above. Factors that have more significant impacts on college students’ future ideals include family economic status, the clear extent to an occupation view and so on, therefore, in case interviews, we focus on families, colleges, college teachers and college students’ future ideals crisis. The conflict of intergenerational occupation values between college students and their parents, the identity conflict of their majors, the cognitive conflict between new information taught by teachers, all these will lead to college students’ future ideal crisis. When facing the crisis, college students will choose to modify their own future or to stick to their future ideals/confusions. By the effective guidance from teachers, college students who are in the identity conflict of their major and in the cognitive conflict of information, will choose to modify their future ideals; College students who are close to their parents will choose to do so when encountering the conflict of intergenerational occupation values; while college students who alienate from their parents will stick to their future ideals and confusions.For college students, well handling all types of relationships during college life is a requirement raised by college and social environment. In this essay, the study of college students’ relationship crisis is also divided into three steps: The first step is to get to know all kinds of relationships and the current situation of college students by researching; The second step is to highlight factors that influence peer relationships among college students by modeling; The third step is to deeply analyze college students’ relationship crisis and affecting factors by case interviews. Through questionnaire surveys on the report of all kinds of college students’ relationships, in the report of family relations, college students regarding their parenting as democratic type account for over 70%; college students who join various student organizations account for more than 80%; The number of college students who usually study and entertain together is mainly 2 to 5 persons.By analyzing factors that affect the number of friends of college students, we start our interviews by focusing on two elements, that is, family relations and the actual existence of dating principles. In the in-depth interviews, we find that college students’ family relation crisis concentrate on the conflict between the expectation for independence and emotional attachment to families, such conflict is mostly inner conflict, the solution to this conflict is that college students should actively, consciously conduct affective feedback toward their parents so as to highlight their independence. The crisis of peer relationship focuses on whether their value are similar or not, when students of different values live in the same roof, it will lead to college students’ inner conflict and crisis, the response to this crisis is to seek profit and avoid loss, that is, get close to the " positive support", and be away from the " negative support ".The important task of personal development during college life, is to complete the study in college. The study of college students’ learning crisis is divided into three steps: The first step is to investigate and find out college students’ attitudes toward the poor studying phenomena that exist in the current colleges and factors that affect college students’ academic performance; The second step is to deeply analyze the personal experience of a certain student whose grades go from bad to good through case interviews; The third step is to organize group work, to validate the relationship between college students’ self-awareness and their expectations for their academic performances. College Students hold an opposite view on the cheating and plagiarism existing in the current colleges, college students’ attitudes toward these two kinds of poor studying phenomena also have marked impact on their academic performances. College students hold tolerant view on the skipping phenomenon, college students’ opinion about skipping class has less marked impact on their academic performances. In an in-depth case interview with a college student whose grades go from bad to good, we find that the study is " their own thing ", the generation of the learning crisis also results from college students’ unclear self-awareness and self-positioning. Through group work services, we also find that when college students gradually deepen their knowledge and understanding of themselves, their expectations for academic performances will be improved as well.Through this study, we find that Erikson’s ego-identity crisis theory is one of the effective theories of researching adolescent development. Unlike the cultural background of foreign countries, "relationship" plays an important role in adolescent identity crisis and its coping in China, which echoes the drive of relation capital in the ego-identity capital theory put forward by CÇ'té toward the development of adolescents. Due to the limit of research level in this paper, we only highlight three types of ego-identity crises in the development of college students’ ego-identity. The future research on adolescent ego-identity, on the one hand, can expand its scope to not only college students, but also migrant workers, school dropouts, etc, on the other hand, can focus on the study of its crisis and coping mechanism in order to expand the study of adolescent ego-identity crisis in the direction of depth.