Nighat Gilani

Daughters and Mothers: Individuality and Connectedness Across Cultures Nighat Gilani

Starting the late 20th century, female identity development has attracted considerable attention and a large corpus of work has been produced. The effort in this book is to explore how the intertwined factors of the nature of mother-daughter connectedness, and their culture of origin influence female adolescent identity development. In an in depth cross-cultural study, mothers and daughters of two distinct cultural communities, namely, white English and second generation Pakistani origin, were studied. It examined daughters' connectedness with their mothers, their individuality and identity development, and conflict management styles as a function of their cultural contexts. Analysis revealed that there were clear cross-cultural differences in many areas of the two groups studied including their level of connectedness and their individuality and identity development. The research provides an opportunity to understand adolescents' attitude towards family relations and the impact of socio-cultural/familial contexts on their development. It also raises many questions regarding the existing theories of identity development during adolescence and their cross-cultural validity.