A Personal Bio-Psycho-Social Assessment
My purpose in writing this report is to present a bio-psycho-social self-assessment, a task made difficult by the fact that it requires me to be objective about issues that are ultimately rather subjective. As Baron and Byrne (2000) have pointed out, objectivity about the self requires introspection, reflection and a willingness to honestly share personal details with an audience that one may not know particularly well. Nevertheless, this is the task at hand.
I will begin by describing myself. I am a 25-year-old African-American female attending college who works to support herself. In this simple statement, I have revealed several key facts about who and what I am. I am a woman born and raised in America and who is therefore "Western" and individual in my worldview. As a member of a racial minority group, I have a connection to the culture, traditions, values and norms of that group; I am also to some small degree conscious of the fact that as an African-American, I am in some fairly subtle ways "different" from other American women of my age cohort who are Asian, Hispanic, or Caucasian.
As a woman, particularly a woman living in a society that remains largely dominated by a male power structure and male elite, I face certain challenges that my male peers do not. Further, and perhaps more significantly, my gender and its implications in terms of reproductive and sexual matters is a significant determinant of identity. The glass ceiling aside, the fact that I am a woman means that I will experience the world in a manner that men do not and can not.
I am 25 years old, which places my among an age cohort that possesses certain values and beliefs about themselves, about the world, and about how life should be lived. I am not a member of Generation X, but I am a member of a generation that had computers in elementary school classrooms, video games and cable televisi...