We will have to dig deeper to understand identity

If you are less positive about your identity, you are likely to have more mental health problems, says Justin Thomas

there are widespread reports of deteriorating standards of Arabic among Emirati millennials. Nicole Hill / The National

The UAE’s national strategy, as outlined in Vision 2021, talks about the preservation of a cohesive society proud of its identity. In fact, one of the nation’s key performance indicators for 2021 is a measure of national identity. According to data reported by the National Bureau of Statistics for 2009, Emiratis are just 11 per cent of the UAE’s population. Furthermore, there are widespread reports of deteriorating standards of Arabic among Emirati millennials. It’s easy to see why national identity has become such a big issue.

In exploring group identity, psychologists tend to use terms like “in-group evaluation” and “out-group preference” to refer to how positive or negative we feel about the groups we belong to. Psychologists also try to obtain accurate measurements of the things they study. But how do you measure something as slippery and subjective as national identity?

To date, psychologists have taken two basic approaches. The first is to simply let people rate their sense of belonging, solidarity and positivity on questionnaires or surveys. This approach is often referred to as a self-report or an explicit measure. One criticism of this technique is that people often give socially desirable rather than honest answers.

The second approach to assessing in-group identity is to use performance or task-based techniques. These are often referred to as implicit measures, and are designed to get at a deeper more authentic reading.

These implicit tasks generally involve asking people to rapidly categorise images or words as either positive or negative.

The task is set up in such a way that some of the stimuli reflect the in-group while others represent an out-group. Each participant’s response times – measured in milliseconds – to in-group and out-group stimuli give us an indication of how they truly feel about their in-group. Without an insider-knowledge, it’s virtually impossible to fake the results.

One particularly interesting finding to emerge from the research into national identity in recent years, is that implicit (task-based) measures of national identity sometimes contradict the explicit (questionnaire-based) measures.

For example, among a group of Welsh students, those who were least fluent in the Welsh language had the highest scores on an explicit measure of Welsh identity, but got the lowest scores on the implicit measure. Those students most fluent in their native tongue demonstrate the exact opposite pattern of results.

This suggests that using implicit measures may be important when trying to evaluate a person’s deeper sense of belonging. Explicit questionnaire measures just don't tell the whole story.

In one of Zayed University’s own research projects, published in the journal Eating Behaviours, we explored the implications of national identity (in-group evaluations) for mental health, with a specific focus on eating disorders.

We used an explicit questionnaire measure (for example, “Emiratis have a lot to be proud of”) but we also developed a computerised assessment capable of exploring implicit evaluations of national identity.

Our implicit assessment involved using common Emirati names (Alyazia/Hazza) versus common North American names (Richard/Jessica) in a classic positive/negative categorisation task. The millisecond response times of each participant gave us an implicit measure of their relative in-group positivity, or if you like, their national identity.

One of the key findings in this study was that people with lower in-group positivity scores (weaker national identity) had poorer mental health status and higher levels of eating-disorder symptoms. The explicit measure, the questionnaire, predicted nothing. If we are going to meaningfully assess national identity, as a national key performance indicator or as a psychiatric risk factor, we would do well to consider these innovative assessment techniques.

Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas