The personal meaning of individuality and relatedness: gender differences in middle and late adulthood

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on gender differences in individuality and relatedness in the second half of life. ‘Individuality’ broadly refers to the experience of the own person as a coherent whole clearly separate from other persons and ‘relatedness’ refers to the experience of the own person in relation to other persons (Guisinger and Blatt, 1994; Bode, 2003). Personality psychologists have used a number of concepts similar to individuality and relatedness, such as agency and communion (Bakan, 1966; McAdams, 1988), self and other motives (Hermans and Hermans-Jansen, 1995) and independent and interdependent selves (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). Although subtle differences in the meanings of these concepts exist, they all refer to the aspects of self and identity mentioned earlier. They are seen as basic motives in human functioning that are not stable personality traits, but aspects of flexible, socially and culturally constructed identities. These basic motives are expressed in the self-concepts of ageing persons. Individuals may differ in the degree to which individuality and relatedness are important in their selfconcepts as well as in the different meanings that they give to their own person as well as to their relations with others. In this chapter, individuality and relatedness are studied from this perspective, which represents the point of view of ageing persons themselves. We here address the individual meanings of individuality and relatedness for women and men in the second half of life. The focus lies on age differences between middle-aged and older adults (aged 40-85 years) and on the role of gender in creating diversity within age groups.