Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Douglas Barnett

Abstract

By numerous indicators, American college students today are experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Most attend college during emerging adulthood when identity formation is a salient developmental task. Therefore, college students are likely to experience developmentally appropriate identity crises in addition to or exacerbated by the social, financial, and academic stressors of college. This dissertation aimed to assess how college student identity content – specifically identity content coherence between the student role and reported domains – was associated with psychosocial outcomes using the Multilevel Model of Identity Content in Context (Galliher et al., 2017a). This study also aimed to assess potential moderators of these associations, specifically cultural expectations for emerging adulthood and barriers to sleep and completing schoolwork.

A sample of college students (N = 308) completed an online survey and reported on their identity content, life satisfaction, symptomology, master narrative, and barriers. The measure of identity content was open-ended and required participants to finish the sentence “I am…” 15 times. These responses were coded for various identity content domains, including academic roles and competencies. It was hypothesized that academic content – content consistent with the student role – would be positively associated with life satisfaction and negatively associated with symptoms. Results of a structural equation model supported this hypothesis, however, only the model with life satisfaction as the dependent variable achieved acceptable fit. Moderation analyses using regressions found that the importance of graduating university during emerging adulthood moderated the association between achievement traits and internalizing problems such that those who rated graduating university in that timeframe as extremely important did not experience the buffering effect of increased academic identity content. This was contrary to the expected results. Moderation analyses also showed that barriers to sleep and completing schoolwork significantly moderated the association between academic roles and externalizing problems such that academic identity content seemed to buffer the negative effects of barriers.

In all, the current dissertation provides support for the connection between identity content coherence and psychosocial outcomes and highlights a potential avenue for college student interventions. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, poor model fit, and lack of generalizability to those who are not college students in emerging adulthood.

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