Write a 8 page essay on Significance of Belonging in Young Peoples Lives. Belongingness and Identity.

Belongingness is a phenomenon that is characterized with a central feature called identity – be it a individualized or community based, but identity is the core factor governing the sense of belongingness. Identity attributes the exaggeration of outsider versus insider barriers due to polarization, so is happened with nationalism to the larger extent.

Identification with one’s own ethnic group occurs at the cost of estrangement from the larger societal framework. Belongingness as a manifested form of identity influences the fundamental structure of personal identification at its basic level, whereas, at its most complex level, it articulates the complex involvement with other individuals within the social network, featuring a range of potentially contradictory identity factors contributing to adherence such as gender factor, attitudinal factors, sexual orientation factor, ethnicity factors, ethnic preference factor and so on. When the development of the sense of belongingness is deprived, it may result in increased anxiety, stress and emotional distress along with various forms of psychopathology and physiological malfunctioning (Baumeister & Leary, 1995. Anderman, 2002).

Need for Belongingness

As stated in Sociometer theory proposed by Leary and Baumeister (2000), there is a strong correlation between one’s relational value and perceived self-esteem. If an individual perceives that his or her relational value is at risk, it may lower his or her self-esteem to quite a further. This threat is central to the need for belongingness that educes reflection about the problematic condition and potential solutions, as described by rumination theory proposed by Martin and Tesser (1996). Hence, if the perceived threat of relational inadequacy is continuing through the human system, the distorted self-esteem may cause the threat to repetitively turn out to be the individual’s focus of awareness by interfering reflection over the barren goal, namely, the satisfaction of the need for belongingness. Aligned to this fact, rumination theory proposes that the perceived threat to the contentment of a basic need is one of the central factors educing and maintaining reflection (Gold & Wegner, 1995).

Forms of Belongingness

In order to develop an understanding about the relationship of belongingness to a young’s life in terms of their living style, historical context of their existing condition, as well as present contextual framework, a thorough approach in considering the forms of belongingness needs to be assessed. There are essentially two forms of belongingness that influence an individual’s life especially a young individual’s life to quite a greater extent: belonging to place, inclusive of nationality and neighbourhood and a blend of these two aspects and belonging to sexual community.

Belonging to Place

In several times, various researchers conducted studies in order to find out the implication of belongingness in an individual’s life in relation to the social location the individual belong to. It has been found that the sense of belongingness is shaped by the social location in which an individual belonging into (Rutherford, 1990). Hence, the essential contributing factors shaping a young individual’s sense of belongingness include locality, gender, ethnicity, religion and social class.

In such a study called Inventing Adulthood Study (London South Bank University, 2006) conducted to find out the sense of national identity among young individuals suggests that the national identity seems to be invisible with an