Real-Self and Virtual-Self: Identity Matrices of Adolescents and Adults

Understanding the trajectories of identity formation in response to the interplay between traditional and digital socialization, especially among the younger generation, is interesting for predicting the areas of opportunity and risks of a changing society. The aim of the study is to carry out a comparative analysis of the specific aspects of online and offline identities and their structure in adolescents and parents. The study sample comprised 396 adolescents aged 14 to 17 and 411 parents of adolescents of this age. The ‘Who Am I’ method was used to assess real and virtual identities. The results show that the online and offline identity matrices of adolescents and parents differ from each other in a number of parameters. For adolescents, the categories of the “Social Self” and “Personal Self” appear online as equal, while offline the importance of the social Self increases. For parents, the social Self definitely dominates in the two worlds. For adolescents and parents, digital identity is the leading subcategory in the online social Self. Parents are characterized by a less rich Self-image in the virtual space compared to both adolescents and their own image of the real Self. The virtual Self and the real Self do not oppose each other but actively interact on the principle of mutual complementation. Meanwhile, for adolescents and parents they differ significantly in content and are constructed in different ways. Compared to parents, adolescents develop a more holistic Self-image online and offline, which allows them to master adaptive strategies of mixed convergent reality better, and in retrospect the strategies prove to be pre-adaptive and determine a higher readiness of new generations to change.