Agency, Identity Development, and Subjective Well-Being, Among Undergraduate Students at a Central United States University

For traditional-age undergraduates (~18–24 years), the college career brings opportunities to explore the self and gain control over one’s future prospects (Arnett, 2000; Côté, 2006). However, college also presents challenges and demands across academic, social, and professional domains—these challenges can threaten how students see themselves as capable of improving their standing and controlling their surroundings, with implications for college persistence (e.g., Graham et al., 2013). However, students who face life’s challenges with a clear focus on agency and who feel that they are in control should also be making more progress in exploring and committing to aspects of their identity (see Schwartz et al., 2005) and have greater well-being (e.g., McLean et al., 2019). In this study, we were interested in considering two indices of undergraduates’ agency in addressing subjective well-being and identity development.

Agency is a fundamental motivational drive that is reflected in the ways individuals make sense of their life experiences (McAdams et al., 1996). Individuals who maintain a greater emphasis on agency should feel that they are better in control of their lives, have a clearer sense of who they are, and have greater self-efficacy for life’s challenges. Agency is especially salient for younger adults who are in the process of exploring and coming to terms with their place in the world (Arnett, 2000). There are multiple approaches for measuring agency. Many of these measures involve autobiographical narrative tasks. We compared two such indices of agency: global displays of agency—whether individuals emphasize having more or less control over their lives, regardless of other evaluations about the event (Grysman et al., 2016); and displays of agency within a redemptive narrative arc—emphasis on how one has more control and mastery in the course of a negative experience becoming positively resolved (McAdams et al., 2001).

THE CURRENT STUDY

This study addresses the ways a) global agency and b) redemptive agency within narratives of painful life experiences inform college student identity development (exploration and commitment) and subjective well-being (SWB; positive affect, negative affect, life satisfaction). We focused on negative autobiographical experiences, where agency is likely to be challenged (McAdams et al., 1996). We hypothesized that each display of agency would be associated with greater identity development and SWB. We also tested whether these displays of agency would be uniquely associated with outcomes when considered simultaneously.

METHOD

Sample

As part of a larger project about how high school experiences are informative for campus engagement and student well-being, participants were recruited from a public, central United States (U.S.) university (n = 162; 73.5% women, M age = 19.3 years, SD = 3.0). Most participants identified as White (70.4%), followed by those who identified as Black (11.1%), Multiracial (11.1%), Southeast Asian (4.3%), Latinx (1.2%), and Middle Eastern (1.2%). Most participants were first-year students (73.3%). Most participants (96.7%) represented majors other than Psychology.

Procedure

Participants were recruited through the Psychology Department’s SONA (online participant recruitment) System for Introductory Psychology—a general education course for many majors on-campus—and completed a set of online measures. Procedures took no more than one hour to complete. Participants received credit toward a research exposure requirement in Introductory Psychology.¹

Measures

Narrative Task

Each participant was asked to provide a narrative of “an experience from [their] high school years that stands out as an especially negative event in some way.” Participants were asked to detail the event and discuss how they felt at the time and at the present, as well as discuss what the memory of the event says about their life. There was no time or word limit.

Narrated Agency

Narratves were manually rated for displays of global agency and redemptive agency. Global agency was determined based on an approach by Grysman and colleagues (2016), where each narrative was rated on a 0–3 scale (0 = the narrative displayed helplessness, passiveness, and/or a lack of control; 3 = the narrative...