Going Against the Norm: Links between Personality, Well-Being, and Deviating Family Trajectories in Young Adulthood [PhD Project]
Across the last decades, young adults’ experiences of family transitions, like leaving the parental home, cohabitation, and the transition to parenthood, have diversified in Western societies. The heterogeneity in the timing and order of these transitions has increased, and it is not uncommon that transitions are delayed or skipped entirely. For example, there is an increase in the number of young adults living alone, and in the proportion of individuals who, by choice or involuntarily, do not have children. The increasing heterogeneity goes together with changes in societal norms about what is considered appropriate - ‘off-time’ and ‘on-time’ - at certain ages.
The relaxed norms related to adulthood have opened up the potential for individual dispositions, such as personality, to play a more focal role in shaping people’s family trajectories (e.g., partnering or not). At the same time, family trajectories can trigger changes in personality and well-being. The proposed project aims to understand what happens in these contemporary cohorts when individuals do not follow the family trajectory that is “normatively prescribed”.
By combining insights from family sociology (Dr. Katya Ivanova), personality psychology (Dr. Manon van Scheppingen), and methodology (Prof. Jeroen Vermunt), our goal is to the provide the most complete picture of the interplay between family trajectories and psychological development in young adulthood to date.
We focus on two research questions:
- Which demographic, social, and psychological (e.g., personality) variables predict who deviates from the normative occurrence, order, and timing of family transitions (e.g., moving out of the parental household, moving in with a partner, and having children)?
- Do deviations in occurrence, order, and timing of family transitions relate to differences in how young adults develop, in terms of personality and well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, loneliness, self-esteem)?
Research Team
Project duration: 2022-2026
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Cross-cutting themes
The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.