Flourishing and social relationships during emerging adulthood in Spain

Abstract

Psychosocial flourishing is a recent conceptualization of social and psychological well being. Flourishing is a combination of feeling good and working effectively. The person who “flourishes” notices that her/his life is going well, works productively, contribute to the community, is healthier, has a longer life expectancy, and has better social relationships. Social relationships, and particularly perceived friends and family support, as well as romantic relationships, play an important role as predictor of positive development in emerging adulthood. In this way, these social relationships contribute to wellbeing and flourishing in this stage of development. Emerging Adulthood is a period of instability and exploration in which young people will probably have more distanced relationships with their parents than in previous years, and couples will burst into important figures for development. For this reason, it´s necessary to study the influence of family, peer and romantic relationships over the young people positive development. The main goal of this paper is to know if social relationships among emerging adults, in particular, the perceived social support from parents and friends and the quality of romantic relationship, have an effect on the psychological flourishing of a sample of Spanish emerging adults. Method The sample was composed by 278 young adults (197 female), aged range 18 to 29 years. They completed a self-administered questionnaire which included flourishing (Flourishing scale; Diener et al., 2010), family and peer support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support; Zimet et al., 1988) and romantic relationship (Experience of Close Relationship; ECRR, short; Wei et al., 2007). Results Results showed that flourishing of young adults is positively related to the perceived social support of family and friends, and negatively related to the anxiety in romantic relationships. Flourishing was related to sex: women reached higher levels of flourishing than men. Nevertheless, the regression equations revealed that, once included family support, anxiety in romantic relationships and friends support, sex ceased being influential. Thus we may conclude that during emerging adulthood flourishing is closely linked to the social network, in particular, to the family, romantic and friends relationships, in that order. Discussion These first results point out the significance of social relationships for flourishing in emerging adulthood. It is especially important the family role. Family influence remains essential for these years, contributing to flourishing more than peer support and romantic relationships. However, more research with larger samples is necessary to explain the factors determining flourishing during the emerging adulthood in diverse cultural contexts.