Ethnic-racial identity in Europe: Adapting the identity project intervention in five countries

A global challenge for developmental psychology is to better understand how young people around the world make sense of their identities growing up in pluralistic societies. The study of ethnic-racial identity provides an important lens for this process. This paper describes how five European countries (Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, and Sweden) adapted the Identity Project, an 8-week school-based intervention originally developed in the United States to promote adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity exploration and resolution. Across the five countries, deep structure adaptations included revised or added content regarding key terminology used, a focus on migration and foreignness rather than ‘race,’ and discussions regarding national and regional identities, in addition to ethnic-racial identities, and how they may relate to one another. The process and content of adaptation we describe addresses two fundamental issues relevant to a globalized developmental psychology: 1) contributing to theoretical advances on key aspects of development by taking sociohistorical context seriously, and 2) moving between etic and emic perspectives to arrive at psychological constructs that can be appropriately studied across diverse cultural contexts.