The purpose of this constructivist inquiry was to explore the impact of socially prescribed gender roles on college men’s identity development. Ten White, traditionally-aged students were interviewed and data from the interviews were analyzed using hermeneutic phenomenology. Students discussed communication restrictions associated with scripted gender roles, fear of femininity, feelings of being overly challenged, and a sense of confusion about masculinity.

Gilligan’s (1982) landmark self-in-relation theory of women’s development inspired important challenges to traditional views of human development and led to the reevaluation of many of the theories that undergird the practice of student development. Student affairs scholars and practitioners no longer rely solely on theories that have been constructed primarily by and about men. Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule (1986), for example, developed a conceptual framework that helped student affairs practitioners better understand women’s cognitive development. Josselson’s (1987, 1996) and Jones’s (1997) investigations allow student affairs professionals to hear women’s voices in the context of identity development. The findings in these studies demonstrate the need for student affairs practitioners to become familiar with the ways that gender affects

Although researchers have begun to investigate how gender affects women’s identity development, there has been relatively little written about such impact on the psychosocial development of college men. One reason for this lack of research may be based on a faulty assumption that most traditional scholarship regarding human development has already been about men. At first glance, this assumption seems obvious and well-founded. After all, Gilligan (1982) and others have convincingly argued that developmental research has too often viewed the male sex as representative of humanity. However, as Meth and Pasick (1990) point out, although psychological writing has been androcentric, it has also been gender blind [and] it has assumed a male perspective but has not really explored what it means to be a man any more than what it means to be a woman. (vii)

Researchers need, therefore, to more closely examine the development of men through the lenses of gender.

Researchers’ understanding of identity formation is commonly attributed to Erikson’s (1968) developmental theory. According to Erikson, individuals gain a sense of who they are by confronting a universal sequence of challenges or crises (e.g., trust, intimacy, etc.) throughout their lives. Marcia (1966) operationalized Erikson’s original theory and similarly suggested that identity formation is the most important goal of adolescence. Marcia viewed identity development as a process of experiencing a series of crises with one’s ascribed childhood identity and subsequently emerging with new commitments. That is, as individuals consider new ideas that are in conflict with earlier conceptions, they weigh possibilities, potentially experiment with alternatives, and eventually choose commitments that become the core of a newly wrought identity. Those successfully transcending crises and making commitments are said to have an achieved identity. Individuals avoiding the process altogether, neither experiencing crises nor making commitments, are in a state of identity diffusion. Individuals may also be somewhere between these two possibilities by either simply maintaining a parentally derived ideology (foreclosed) or by actively experimenting with and resolving identityrelated questions prior to commitment (moratorium).

Josselson’s longitudinal research (1987, 1996), based upon Marcia’s framework, investigated women’s identity development. Josselson (1987) categorized participants into all four identity statuses and found that women

internalize the central priorities of their mothers as the issues to feel the same or different about. As college-age, late adolescents, these women judge their distance from their families by whether and how much they carry on family religious traditions, whom they choose as friends, what sexual values they adopt, how they dress, whether and when and whom they plan to marry. These were the central points of negotiation in the separation-individuation drama. (p. 172)

For the women in her study, relationships with primary family, partners, children, and friends were what Josselson (1987) called key “anchors” (p. 176) that mediated making new commitments.

Whereas Marcia (1966) found decisions involving occupational choice, religious beliefs, and political ideology to be predictive of overall identity statuses, especially with men, Josselson (1987) and Schenkel and Marcia (1972) each found that crises and commitments in the areas of religion and sexual values to be more indicative of women’s identity statuses.

Recent models of identity development have gone beyond these more epigenetic conceptualizations, with their emphasis on cognitive processes of development, to increasingly focus on the dynamic interaction between individuals and the social systems in which they function. Chickering and Reisser (1993), for example, in an update of Chickering’s (1969) work, added a section to the establishing identity chapter entitled “sense of self in a social, historical, and cultural context” (p. 181). In addition, Josselson (1996) recently suggested that identity is “not just a private, individual matter . . . [but] a complex negotiation between the person and society” (p. 31). Similarly, D’Augelli (1994) conceived identity as “the dynamic processes by which an individual emerges from many social exchanges experienced in different contexts over an extended historical period” (p. 324). The construction of identity also depends, therefore, on the cultural, social, and political context in which these processes occur. A recent model offered by Jones and McEwen (2000) reinforces this idea. In their model, sexual orientation, race, culture, class, religion, and gender are identity dimensions that circulate around one’s core identity. The salience of a particular dimension to one’s core identity depends on changing contexts that include current experiences, family background, sociocultural conditions, career decisions, and life planning. In the current investigation, we examined one of these dimensions-gender-in an attempt to understand how college men internally experience externally defined gender roles.