Revising the measurement of Eriksonian ego identity in contemporary Italian adolescents: the EPSI-IT

Introduction

The Identity subscale of the Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory (EPSI) is the most widely used brief measure of Eriksonian ego identity, but it carries a historically situated gender item and has no published Italian validation. Instruments inherit the assumptions of the era that produced them, and an item can lose validity as those assumptions shift.