Analysing identity issues within and between communities

Personal and group identity issues lie at the centre of many of the problems seen in our communities. Identity Exploration provides a range of services to organisations working to build greater community cohesion.

Our services include:

Undertaking research into identity issues in communities
Building psychological assessment instruments for use by partner organisations working in the community and providing expert analysis and reporting to these partners such that effective interventions can be designed
Designing evaluation programmes to ensure that interventions have been successful - our evaluation approach is unique in that it measures the change in an individual (or group) across time and so is an excellent mechanism to test for attitudinal change

At our home base here in Northern Ireland we are all too aware of how fundamental differences in identities can spill into mistrust and violence.

At Identity Exploration, we enable researchers, community organisations and policy makers in local and national government to gain a much more accurate understanding of the issues that cause conflict and to identify policies that help build social cohesion. We then work with such organisations to help develop positive interventions that will make a real difference on the ground.

Some current issues under investigation include:

Identity issues in young offenders
Ethnic Extremism
Community relations in N.Ireland
Middle Eastern Identities in Israel
Indigenous identities in North America and Australia

Our analytical techniques, Identity Structure Analysis (ISA) acknowledges the multi-cultural complexities of contemporary communities and our dedicated software (Ipseus) allow researchers to build and use investigative instruments which measure inter and intra-community identities in a highly sophisticated way.

We engage in research project ourselves, generally with specialist partners and we also provide professional input and software to clients around the world who are using Identity Structure Analysis as the core of their research.