Abstract

By the time of life long learning developpement, the Bologna process and Lisbon tools, european university is now aimed at developping training course for adults workers. The objective of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of this involvement and its identity stakes, by presenting the results of our research, based on a longitudinal case study (25 adults Master degree). To do so, we tried to determine wether mobiles or reasons appear in a two-level analysis of our corpus, which is based on two interviews per adult, the first at the end of their one-year training, the second at least two months later. During this second interview, we organized a cross-reading of their motivation letter that had been sent before the beginning of the course. This longitudinal investigation enlighten us on the nature of the data collected, that is a central question in social science researches. A review of the literature on the dynamics of identity constructions and the social representations reveals the interest to consider the self-discrepancy theory as a factor of interpretation; besides, the collected data state specific feelings, indeed “ambivalent representations” of the object of work, and the lack of social exchange as an element that can lead us to discover an identity dead end.