First Year Experience

Developing Integrity

Chickering and Reisser point out that developing integrity is closely related to establishing identity and clarifying purposes. Our core values and beliefs provide the foundation for interpreting experience, guiding behavior, and maintaining self-respect (1993). You bring to college a wide variety of values and beliefs. You have an idea as to what is right and wrong, true and false, good and bad, etc. You probably acquired these assumptions from parents, church, school, media, peers, etc. Developing integrity involves reviewing personal values and experimentation. It may involve an affirmation of values that have ongoing relevance and searching for ways to reconcile contrasting perspectives. Throughout this examination, students explore the links between values and behavior.

Developing integrity involves three sequential but overlapping stages: humanizing values, personalizing values, and developing congruence.

Humanizing values involves a shift from a belief in the absoluteness of rules to a more relative view, where connections are made between rules and the purpose they are meant so serve. It is at this point that students learn to understand why some campus rules exist. Personalizing values involves students selecting guidelines to suit themselves and to suit the conditions of their lives. This is an important revelation as students then begin deciding how and what is considered appropriate behavior. Then consequently, students develop congruence by achieving behavior consistent with their personalized values.

---

Reference:
Chickering, Arthur, & Reisser, Linda. Education and Identity. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA 1993.