Phinney, Jean S.

Professor Jean Phinney has had a lifelong career as a developmental psychologist, focusing on the role of culture and ethnicity in development. She had her first exposure to cultural differences at the early age of 6, when she and her family accompanied her father on a sabbatical to France, where he studied French cathedrals. [Page 826]Her next travel experience was during college, when she took a bicycle trip through Europe and had the chance, in youth hostels and elsewhere, to meet young people from many countries. She later spent a summer in Finland, and 6 months in Paris teaching English. It was perhaps inevitable that she married someone who also liked to travel. Soon after getting married, she and her husband spent a year in Japan during his sabbatical. The Japanese trip included 3 months driving throughout Japan, from the northern island of Hokkaido to the southern island of Kyushu, where her husband, a plant geneticist, visited many universities and agricultural experiment stations. A few year later she, her husband, and two small children spent a sabbatical year in England, with vacation trips to France, Germany, Italy, and Israel.

In the meantime, a growing interest in psychology led Jean Phinney to enter a doctoral program in developmental psychology at UCLA. She had not yet realized that her cultural interests could be combined with developmental psychology, which at the time was heavily focused on Piaget and cognitive development. After completing her doctoral degree in 1973, on Piagetian concepts in young children, she took an academic position at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), an urban university with a student body that is about 80% non–European American, mostly Latino, but also Asian American, African American, and Middle Eastern. As she began conducting developmental research with children and adolescents in the schools and communities near CSULA, she became intrigued with the wide range of ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds of the children she was studying. As a result, she and her students began searching the literature for information on cultural and ethnic factors in development. At that time, in the early 1980s, there was very little psychological research on development in non-White children. She and a colleague began studying cultural and ethnic factors in children's behavior and then organized a conference on the topic. The conference resulted in a book that brought the topic of ethnicity to the attention of developmental psychologists (Phinney & Rotheram, 1987).

When Phinney and her students became interested in studying adolescents from diverse backgrounds, the topic of identity was an obvious topic to explore. Again, a review of existing literature revealed almost nothing on identity issues for minority group members or on the aspect of identity that is most relevant for non-White adolescents, namely, ethnic identity. She initiated a program of research on ethnic identity that has continued for almost two decades. With her research group, she developed an ethnic identity interview modeled on the work of James Marcia. A series of interviews was carried out with adolescents and young adults from a range of ethnic backgrounds, using trained interviewers from the same backgrounds as the participants. The results from the coded interviews supported the existence of distinct identity statuses (Phinney, 1989), similar to the statuses identified in ego identity research. A longitudinal follow-up study (Phinney & Chavira, 1992) revealed a developmental pattern of change over time in ethnic identity statuses, from an initial diffuse phase to an achieved ethnic identity. As this work progressed, Phinney carried out an extensive review of the existing psychological literature on ethnic identity. The review, published in Psychological Bulletin (Phinney, 1990), has been widely cited as a seminal article that laid the groundwork for future research on ethnic identity.

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