I have been struggling for the past 3 weeks to establish the baseline for my work toward my thesis as well as the more current pressing matter of my directed readings project. Trying to assemble these thoughts I have come up with the following paragraph:

At the core of a social life is the construct of identity. Identity is the vessel in which each individual stores a sense of self, established through internal thoughts and feelings as well as external interactions. A large component of individual identity is group affiliation. Such affiliations are established through social connections, in-group behavior and out-group presentation. Identity is not only a construction of the sum of experiences and social attributes, but also by determining what attributes do not describe the person. Social psychology involves the use of various theories to describe and define how these identities are formed, whether by symbolic interactions, controls of affect in interpersonal interaction or some other means. Regardless of the theory used a common trait of all interpretations is the identification with a specific category, label or strata of social experience. Group process is a large part of identity, but it is far from all of it and there is nearly always more than one in-group identity to which each person belongs.