The Adaptive Success Identity Plan (ASIP): A Career Intervention for College Students

The Adaptive Success Identity Plan (ASIP) uses the construct of success identity as the core of a career intervention program. Three empirical studies (N > 2,000) explored the success identity construct and its application in a structured career intervention. Study 1 provided reliability and validity evidence of the measures. Study 2 indicated that programming efforts targeting family involvement, self-efficacy, and stress and time management should enhance a number of college outcomes. Study 3 found that students who received the ASIP intervention were more likely to use the success identity construct in defining their role in college success. This monograph examines two issues related to constructing effective life transition programs for college students. First, a theoretical metamodel based on Developmental Systems Theory (DST; Ford & Lerner, 1992) and a theoretical model drawn from social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), diathesis-stress models, and social integration theory (Tinto, 1987) provides the rationale for how to successfully build transition programs. Second, the Adaptive Success identity Plan (ASIP) illustrates how the theoretical framework can be applied to facilitating college students' transitions. Section I introduces DST as the framework guiding transition programming. This section highlights self-identity as the unit of analysis and provides a case study exploring the difficulty of changing self-identity without active environmental intervention. Section II introduces theoretical constructs associated with promoting successful transitions. These constucts were drawn from social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), diathesis-stress models, and social integration theory (Tinto, 1987). Section III provides validation for the success identity construct (Study 1). Section IV introduces ASIP as a comprehensive college intervention program designed to build success identities and thereby enhancing college outcomes. Section IV includes an overview of ASIP, application of developmental systems theory, and describes the range of systemic applications. Section V evaluates the effectiveness of the constructs to predict college outcomes and the effectiveness of ASIP in producing success identities. Finally, Section VI explores future directions for research and intervention programming. I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE: DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS METATHEORY Developmental systems theory (DST; Ford & Lerner, 1992) provides the organizing framework for constructing successful life transition programs. This section (a) introduces self-identity as the level of analysis; (b) provides a case example of how preexisting role definitions, such as being a college student, can remain intact even when faced with undesired outcomes; (c) describes how behavior episode schemata (BES) operate to generate individual definitions of situations; and (d) prescribes how to modify BES to incorporate success strategies. Defining Self-Identity Self-identity serves as the fundamental construct in this approach to transitions. Super (1942, 1957, 1990) believed vocational counseling should be viewed in terms of the development and implementation of an individual's self-identity, and argued that educational and occupational choices serve to maintain and develop emerging selfconcepts. The term self-concept denotes the perceived role a person plays within a community (e.g., student role), whereasself-identity refers to the system of these self-concepts. Developmental systems theory provides the theoretical framework for explaining emerging selfconceptions and changing problematic identity systems into more effective ones. Dysfunctional identity systems are defined as those that consistently lead to nondesired outcomes. For example, perceiving faculty as uninterested in students would be viewed as dysfunctional to the extent that it discourages talking with faculty and increases the likelihood of leaving college. …