Developmental investigation of the domain-specific nature of the life satisfaction construct across the post-school transition

Abstract

This study evaluated the nature of the life satisfaction construct with an emphasis on the comparison between a global or domain-specific operationalization during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. A combination of person-centered and variable-centered methods were used to analyze 7 waves of data covering the postschool transition from a sample of 24,721 youth participating in Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY) between 1998 and 2010. Evidence for the increasing importance of a domain-specific approach as adolescents entered adulthood was provided by: (1) factor analyses identifying a 3-factor model covering achievement, family, and leisure satisfaction that proved invariant across time waves; (2) factor mixture analyses showing shape-related differences between profiles (i.e., within-profile differences between domains) that increased as young people moved into adulthood.