The Influence of Process Drama Scenario Construction on Adolescents' Identity Narratives: A Focus on the Expression of Identity Confusion

Identity construction in adolescents always implies dynamic changes in the positioning, social roles, and future projections. Identity confusion may manifest itself via conflicting narratives, changes of position, and uncertain future projection. The technique of process drama provides a fictional space for distancing via fictitious roles, conflicts, and scenarios, which allows expressing identity experiences indirectly. In total, the study involved 90 participants aged between 13 to 17 years who were divided into low conflict, escalating conflict, and multiple roles conditions. Audio, video, textual narratives, and interviews were recorded simultaneously. MacBERT was applied in order to detect identity conflicts, completeness of narratives, reflective thinking, and future projections. Additionally, a gated multimodal fusion model was applied for the combination of textual, behavioral, and contextual cues. It was found that escalating conflict condition and multiple roles increased expressive readiness, depth of narratives, and reflective engagement while expressive safety was not compromised by these conditions. Overall, a gated multimodal model provided the following performance: Accuracy = 0.806, Macro F1 = 0.805, and AUC = 0.879. The best predictive contribution was provided by self-correction, contradiction markers, and conflict intensity.