Exploring adolescents’ interests and identity work: A dialogical perspective

Pursuing their interests is an important way for adolescents to explore who they are and who they wish to become. Though identity is frequently referred to in research on adolescents’ interests, it is rarely the explicit focus. In an explorative study, we investigated how interests inform identity,. We drew on Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans, 2001) as a lens to examine the interest-related identity work adolescents engage in when they talk about their interests, through interviews ( N = 81) with Dutch adolescents. We analyzed the ways in which adolescents brought their multiple interest-related identities into dialogue, and found that this dialogue could involve a temporal dimension, and a social dimension. Our findings highlight how interests can be a domain-specific context for exploring one’s identity, how adolescents engage in identity work when describing and discussing their interests, and the importance of this for adolescents’ experiences of and relationships with their interests.