Adulthood Meaning for Spanish Emerging Adults: A Thematic Analysis

Previous research on the meaning of adulthood among youth has focused on the move from traditional markers towards individualistic criteria for adulthood. We interview 30 young adults in Spain to investigate how they see adulthood. From our thematic analysis, we extract three major themes (and 16 subthemes): socio-demographic markers (residential independence, age, occupation, family), societal expectations (independence, duties, on your own, nontriviality, other-orientation), and personal resources (autonomy, purpose, thoughtfulness, resilience, realism, responsibility, relational maturity). Our results show that some emerging adults still consider traditional markers of adulthood. A wide range of sub-themes relate to societal expectations, which young people refer to somewhat negatively. In a context in which young people mostly see adulthood with an individualistic lens, two sub-themes emerge which make references to others –being other-oriented and able to establish mature relationships; even if quantitatively these were not as frequent as other sub-themes, we find these deserve further attention.