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Relationships Between Identity and Well-Being in Italian, Polish, and Romanian Emerging Adults

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Abstract

The main aim of our research was to describe the comprehensive picture of relationships between identity and well-being with a cross-national perspective. We examined identity considering the interplay of three processes (i.e., commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) and we treated well-being as a multidimensional latent variable, whose indicators were subjective well-being, psychological well-being, and social well-being. Participants were 1,086 (60.6 % female) emerging adults from Italy, Poland, and Romania. They completed self-report measures of identity and well-being. We adopted a structural equation modeling approach and we tested associations between identity and well-being for university students (taking into account educational identity) and working emerging adults (considering job identity). For all countries and in both identity domains findings indicated that well-being was consistently associated with high commitment, high in-depth exploration, and low reconsideration of commitment. Implications of these findings are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

Dominika Karaś was supported by Grants (UMO-2012/07/N/HS6/02015) from the Polish National Science Centre. Jan Cieciuch was supported by Grants (DEC-2011/01/D/HS6/04077) from the Polish National Science Centre. Oana Negru was supported by Grant PD412/2010 from the Romanian National University Research Council (CNCSIS). Elisabetta Crocetti was supported by a Marie Curie fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IEF).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, ul. Wóycickiego 1/3, 01-938, Warsaw, Poland

    Dominika Karaś

  2. University of Finance and Management, Warsaw, Poland

    Jan Cieciuch

  3. Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Oana Negru

  4. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Elisabetta Crocetti

  5. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jan Cieciuch

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  1. Dominika Karaś
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  2. Jan Cieciuch
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  4. Elisabetta Crocetti
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Correspondence to Dominika Karaś.

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Karaś, D., Cieciuch, J., Negru, O. et al. Relationships Between Identity and Well-Being in Italian, Polish, and Romanian Emerging Adults. Soc Indic Res 121, 727–743 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0668-9

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