Mandy A. E. van der Gaag

• PhD
• Assistant professor at University of Groningen

Based on Marcia’s theory, many researchers consider exploration and commitment as the main processes in identity development. Although some identity theorists have hypothesized that emotional experiences may also be an important part of the mechanisms of identity development, empirical research to investigate this claim has been lagging behind. In...

Over recent years, it has become clear that group-based approaches cannot directly be used to understand individual adolescent development. For that reason, interest in Dynamic Systems Theory, or DST, has increased rapidly. Psychosocial Development in Adolescence: Insights from the Dynamic Systems Approach covers state-of-the-art insights into adol...

Individuals are faced with a number of major decisions throughout their lives, including the choice of a suitable education, career, and life partner. Making such major life decisions is challenging, as is evidenced by substantial rates of divorce and drop-out from higher education. Although poor major life decisions can lead to considerable costs...

The landscape of identity model views identity as a constellation of commitments with different levels of strength and integration, showing how this constellation emerges from everyday life experiences. Drawing on key principles from the complex dynamic systems approach, our model further describes this conceptualization, as well as the mechanisms...

This paper argues for a person‐centered approach in developmental science and presents theoretical and empirical techniques to help shift the focus to the individual. The need for a person‐centered approach is urgent, because of widespread nonergodicity in developmental psychology: traditional between‐individual, group‐level statistics often cannot...

Many recent approaches to identity share a foundational similarity with ecological psychology, namely, to place identity in its context. That is, they explicitly place identity in its physical and social environments. Yet, we can distinguish at least two different approaches that diverge fundamentally with regards to the role that this “context” ha...

The Groningen Identity Development Scale (GIDS-L2) is a semi-structured interview that comprehensively assesses an individual's identity in various domains of life, including occupation, family, friendships, relationships, leisure time, and a flexible domain. The GIDS-L2 employs a unique approach that combines domain-specific and integrative elemen...

In this short-term longitudinal study, we examine specific examples of identity exploration in real-time interactions among peers. The participants included 12 first-year students majoring in literature, social sciences, and humanities at a national university in Japan (Mage = 18.2; SD = 0.39; 83.3% female). They were divided into four triads that...

(in Dutch) Hoe gaat het proces van voortijdig schoolverlaten (VSV) in zijn werk? Hoe kun je dit proces effectief bijsturen om VSV te voorkomen? Hoe zet je een VSV-preventie programma op met hoge kans van slagen? En hoe past dit alles binnen het Nederlandse VSV-beleid? In dit boek wordt VSV-preventie vanuit meerdere kanten belicht: vanuit wetensch...

We present the u-can-act platform, a tool that we developed to study the individual processes of early school leaving and the preventative actions that mentors take to steer these processes in the right direction. Early school leaving is a significant problem, particularly in vocational education, and can have severe consequences for both the indiv...

A poster about the influence of need fulfillment in a school context and need fulfillment in a non-school context on subjective well-being.

In this book, we have brought together cutting-edge dynamic systems research concerning adolescent development. In doing so, our general aim was to demonstrate how a dynamic systems approach can uniquely move the field of adolescent development forward. With the various chapters in this book, we have demonstrated how dynamic systems principles have...

A poster about the research aim and data collection of u-can-act, including participation results and our theoretical model on early school leaving.

In this talk I have described some of the methods that I have used in two of my projects: my PhD on identity development and career transitions, and my current post-doc project about the prevention of early school leaving among at-risk youth. In both projects I use a within-individual, micro-level approach to study adolescent developmental processe...

This PhD thesis is about daily and weekly (‘micro-level’) identity-development processes and the role of these processes in two career transitions that are important to many young individuals: choosing a career path and dropping out of university. On a micro level, identity development encompasses at least two processes: how strongly individuals fe...

Based on Marcia’s theory, many researchers consider exploration and commitment as the main processes in identity development. Although some identity theorists have hypothesized that emotional experiences may also be an important part of the mechanisms of identity development, empirical research to investigate this claim has been lagging behind. In...

Making a suitable career choice is a difficult task. Every year, many adolescents prematurely end their studies, commonly citing “having made the wrong choice” as the main reason. This is a problem, both for the adolescents making these choices, and for society, which bears at least part of the cost of higher education. A thorough understanding of...

In many modern societies adolescents are expected to make crucial choices for their future career path. In order to develop suitable career commitments it is necessary to explore both broadly and in-depth, and determine how well an option could fit with own interests and capabilities. Recently, the negative side of exploration processes has been em...

We investigate intra-individual processes of identity at the micro level. With an intensive longitudinal design in the general context of higher education, we explore associations between changes in pivotal identity concepts: commitment and exploration and elaborate on how we conceptualize these concepts on a micro level. With our within-individual...

Making a suitable career choice is a difficult task. Every year, many adolescents prematurely end their studies, commonly citing 'having made the wrong choice' as the main reason. This is a problem, both for the adolescents making these choices, and for society, which bears at least part of the cost of higher education. A thorough understanding of...