Assessing diachronic reasoning: exploratory measures of perceived self-change in young adults

Personal persistence, the subjective perception of self-sameness through time, is implied or explicitly asserted in nearly all modern theories of self and identity. Recently, personal persistence has become the subject of inquiry and argument, most directly due to Galen Strawson, who recently described himself as experiencing a distinct series of non-defective and non-pathological selves, each phenomenologically independent of the other. Using a combination of previously published, modified, and newly constructed measures, the present study, in an attempt to provide empirical information relevant to the theoretical treatments of personal persistence, assembled an assessment battery of assumptively intercorrelated personal persistence measures, which collectively provided dichotomous, linear, quantitative, and qualitative information about the experience of self-persistence in a sample of 177 mostly female college students between the ages of 18 and 44 years.