Social Identification with Family and Friends in Emerging Adulthood: Disentangling Within- and Between-Person Associations with Psychosocial Adjustment

Social identification with family and friends may offer beneficial consequences for psychosocial adjustment. This three-wave longitudinal study with approximately three-month intervals between successive time points aimed to investigate whether social identification with family and friends might improve psychosocial adjustment among 291 emerging adults from Turkey (76.3% female; M age = 23.34, SD age = 2.85). Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models resulted in mostly between-person associations. Specifically, social identification with both groups was positively related to psychological and social well-being. At the within-person level, all cross-lagged associations were non-significant, with the exception of a significant positive effect from social identification with family to social identification with friends. Moreover, social identification with friends was concurrently positively associated with social well-being. As such, the current study clarifies the links between social identification and psychosocial adjustment by disentangling between- and within-person dynamics and proposes further examination of their interplay in future longitudinal research with shorter (e.g., daily) and longer (e.g., yearly) intervals.