Impact du changement social et personnel dramatique sur la clarté de l'identité : le rôle 
de l'intégration du changement à l’identité

Dramatic changes, whether personal or social, are common in modern societies. Nevertheless, the effects of dramatic change on identity are understudied. Specifically, three important questions have yet to be answered. First, the negative impacts that dramatic social changes have on identity clarity, that capacity that individuals have to define the characteristics of their cultural group with certainty and consistency (Usborne & Taylor, 2010), have yet to be established. Second, the negative impacts that dramatic personal changes have on personal identity clarity, defined as the individual’s capacity to confidently and consistently identify the characteristics of his personal identity (Campbell, 1990), are still undetermined. Finally, nor the dramatic social change nor the dramatic personal change literature suggest a psychological mechanism explaining how an individual confronted to such changes may renew with a clear identity. The present thesis answers these three limitations by 1) showing that dramatic social change has a negative effect on cultural identity clarity, 2) exposing the negative effect of dramatic personal change on personal identity clarity, and 3) exposing that integrating the dramatic change to one’s identity helps to clarify this identity. To answer to these limitations, five studies were conducted and are reported in three articles. The first article investigate dramatic social change effects on cultural identity clarity in two experimental studies. In the first study, Québec’s independence is manipulated as a dramatic social change while the return to traditional gender role manipulates social change in the second study. The results of both studies demonstrate that dramatic social change decreases cultural identity clarity. v The second article, composed of two studies, focuses on dramatic personal changes. Specifically, the decrease of personal identity clarity following a dramatic personal change is shown. Furthermore, the role that integrating the dramatic personal change has on clarifying one’s personal identity following a dramatic personal change is brought to light. In the first study, a forced immigration scenario is manipulated as a dramatic personal change. The second study utilises a longitudinal design to show that integrating a dramatic personal change to personal identity clarifies personal identity. Results indicate that participants who integrated more to their personal identity the fact that they were university students possess a clearer personal identity than those who integrated that change to a lesser extent. The goal of the third article is to exhibit that integrating a dramatic social change to cultural identity strengthens cultural identity clarity. To achieve this goal, a dramatic social change (return to traditional gender roles) and the integration of the change are experimentally manipulated. Results show that the manipulation aimed at favoring the integration of the dramatic social change did not favor the integration of the change to the participants’ social identity and hence did not increase cultural identity clarity.

Keyphrases: dramatic social change, dramatic personal change, cultural identity clarity, personal identity clarity, identity integration