An International Student in the United States: A Case Study of Communication Theory of Identity

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Identity has been a significant concept for well over a hundred years and a focus of empirical research in the social sciences since the late 1970s, especially with the development of Social Identity Theory by Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979). In the intervening years, with the rise of multiculturalism, gender and queer studies, and intersectionality, identity has become an even more important and prominent topic. In the field of communication studies, one of the most established theories of identity is Michael Hecht’s Communication Theory of Identity (CTI), a theory that, while consistent with most previous social scientific conceptions of identity, is distinguished by the central role it assigns to communication (Hecht, 1993).