Studying Identity Development in Everyday Conversations: A Practical Guide to Developmental Discursive Micro-Analysis (DDMA)

Young people’s identities develop in the context of their everyday lives, but traditional approaches to identity development have limited access to the concrete, situated and action-oriented mechanisms underlying long-term development. This paper addresses this gap by outlining a developmental discursive approach to the study of identity development within contexts (i.e. micro-analysis). Grounded in a social constructionist epistemology and discursive psychology, the approach treats identity as an unfolding, situated process shaped by talk and interaction; it is explicitly developmental (i.e. it examines how identities unfold over time) and psychological (i.e. it centers individuals and their situated meaning-making practices). Developmental discursive micro-analysis (DDMA) can show how the processes underlying long-term identity development (e.g. identity exploration, meaning-making, or narrative engagement) are enacted as people engage with each other and the world. The manuscript provides an accessible introduction to discursive psychology for identity researchers, and includes concrete guidance on the full analytic cycle – from the design of research projects to the analysis of identities in interactions. The analytic strategies are outlined using data from a video-recorded coming out conversation between a young gay man and his mother, highlighting how analysis can capture identity processes at individual, relational and cultural levels.