What Can the Assimilation Model Learn from the Identity Positions Interview and What Can It Teach? a Commentary on Cunha’s “constructing Organization through Multiplicity”

In this dialogue between the assimilation model and the Identity Positions Interview (IPI), the two theories make suggestions for how the other might be improved and how the two might become more compatible. The assimilation model points out that the IPI might gain a more differentiated view by incorporating a developmental sequence into its structure. The IPI responds by pointing out how the assimilation model could be studied systematically using IPI procedures. The IPI also presents case examples that pose theoretical puzzles for the assimilation model, such as the active and systematic avoidance of seemingly mild problems. Theories and methods of studying the dialogical self must encompass continuity and transformation, and they must do so in a way that is developmental and relational. They must accommodate people's sense of consistent agency and yet contend with systematic growth and sudden shifts. They should be understandable in narrative terms, developing systematically over time, if perhaps not predictable, and in dialogical terms, emerging through spoken and unspoken interactions between and within people. These specifications set a formidable challenge, to which Cunha (2007, this issue) has risen admirably. She has sketched answers the questions of what keeps us consistent and how we change. And, most importantly, she has outlined a program of research that addresses these problems empirically. The Identity Positions Interview (IPI, Gonçalves & Cunha, 2006) is designed to elicit dialogical processes surrounding a particular personal problem. It seeks to reveal the current state of and relations among key internal voices. And it probes their capacity for dialogue and change using a variant of the revealed differences technique, in which potential internal discrepancies are foregrounded by staging dialogues with the imaginal perspectives of other people and future selves. AUTHOR NOTE. Please address correspondence about this article to William B. Stiles, Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056; USA. Email: [email protected]