INTEGRITY, DESPAIR AND IN BETWEEN: TOWARD CONSTRUCT VALIDATION OF ERIKSON'S EIGHTH STAGE

Abstract

One hundred adults 65 and older participated in a semistructured psychosocial interview based on Erikson's writings on Integrity versus Despair.Subjects were assigned to one of four Integrity statuses by three raters, who achieved moderate reliabilities using an Integrity Status Rating Manual.Dependent variables were: the Integrity subscale from the Modified Eriksonian Psychosocial Inventory, the Openness to Experience scale from the NEO Personality Inventory, the Competence scale from the California Psychological Inventory, the Geriatric Depression Scale, and a measure of Perceived Health.Covariates were age and education.Four measures and education were significantly linked with status groupings, as were two factor analytically derived variables: 'Integrity' and 'Sophistication.'Among other findings, Integrated subjects were competent; Nonexploratory subjects conventional; Pseudointegrated subjects immature; and Despairing subjects demoralized.Life review, considered central to eighth stage personality development by Erikson, occurred rarely.Rather, lifespan continuity of the known self was the goal of aged subjects.LIST OF TABLESTable Page 1. Percentages of agreement between raters, percentages of agreement expected by chance, and kappa reliability coefficients .............s....e123 2. Means and standard deviations on convergent measures by status group ........

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.