Structural Profile of Life Strategies in Young People

A life strategy is a configuration of life orientations, which are relatively stable personality traits that manage life priorities. Today, young people organize their lives in a highly transitive social environment. They tend to rely on diverse frameworks because a single-scenario life strategy is no longer sufficient. Although the contemporary life model and lifestyle capture the complexity of life organization, their empirical structure remains unexplored. This article describes the structure of life strategies employed by young people (n = 419, aged 23–27). The five-factor structure of life orientations, identified during the pilot stage, was tested using confirmatory factor analysis and bifactor modeling. Percentile thresholding and cluster analysis were then used to identify typical configurations. The five-factor structure was found to include orientations toward morality and ethics, adaptation, resilience, self-centeredness, and the present time perspective. All these orientations formed a space with two independent cores. The prosocial-normative core united the first three orientations, while the individualistic core was shaped by the other two independent orientations. In this research, 72% of the sample fell into the middle zone between the cores with no distinct types of life strategy, indicating that strategies emerge as an individual balance of orientations rather than one dominant type.