Describe and assess the following
With respect to developmental influences, and to specific cognitive abilities, youth’s increasingly sophisticated perspective-taking abilities have direct implications for ERI development during adolescence (see Quintana, 1994). Adolescents have the capacity to merge their personal identity or sense of self with their reference group develop an ethnic group consciousness (Quintana, 1998). Individuals in late adolescence and young adulthood possess more advanced perspective-taking skills compared to young or middle adolescents, demonstrating an age-related developmental trend. In terms of ERI, these new cognitive capacities give adolescents the ability to explore what ERI means to them with respect to their ethnic or racial reference group, apart from what it means to their parents. Given these changes, the construct of ERI exploration or search is particularly salient during this developmental period (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2004). Erikson suggests it is through exploration of options, followed by firm commitments to a career choice and a set of core beliefs that individuals come to achieve a secure identity. Marcia operationalized Erikson’s ideas for empirical research by delineating four identity statuses (i.e., achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion). Achievement refers to commitments enacted following a period of exploration, moratorium denotes active identity exploration in the absence of commitments, foreclosure represents commitments made without much prior exploration, and diffusion represents an absence of commitments coupled with an absence of systematic exploration.