The Role of Human Agency, Gender and Age in Identity Characteristics: Arnett's Emerging Adulthood

The purpose of the article was to investigate the relationship between the agency and demographic variables with the five identity characteristics of students based on Arnett’s emerging adulthood theory.
The sample included 700 undergraduate students. To collect data, the Inventory of Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (Reifman, Arnett & Colwell, 2007) and the Multi-Measure Agentic Personality Scale (Côté, 1997) were used. The results indicated that there was a relationship between the agency and the five features. The regression analysis showed that the agency played a role in explanation of the variance of all the characteristics. The gender and age in the explanation of the variance of three, and one characteristics was involved, respectively. As a result, students with a higher level of agency, were more self-focused, and did more identity exploration, had more optimistic viewpoint on their life period and consider it as an opportunity, had more experimentations. They had more feeling in-between, and feel less instabiity and negativity. Agency, gender and age can be used to predict five, three, and one characteristics, respectively