Commitment and exploration:The need for a developmental approach

This chapter addresses identity development from a process perspective, with specific focus on commitment andexploration as core processes of identity development. It begins with an overview of the theory on identitydevelopment. Via Erikson and Marcia, the authors discuss the recent models of Meeus and colleagues, as well asof Luyckx and colleagues, demonstrating that a process approach is becoming increasingly salient in thinkingabout identity development and arguing that, to understand the developmental processes, one needs to study thedevelopment of individuals. Next, the authors present a process model that describes how identity emerges fromreal-time events. Finally, the authors elaborate how, based on a dynamic systems perspective, researchers couldset up studies that gain insight into the processes of emergence, stability, and change of commitments, and theydiscuss some simple techniques that can be used to study developmental processes on an individual level