El benestar psicològic en l'adolescènciala perspectiva de les ciències de la complexitat

Abstract

Psychological well-being is the psychological dimension of quality of life and a growing field of study. It has a shorter past compared to other psychosocial concepts. However, researchers coming from many diverse displicines are every day enlarging the list of those who take psychological well-being as their object of study. The study of adolescent psychological well-being is probably one of the fields where the need of moving forward is more evident. Its study in adolescent population has a double interest. On the one hand, boys and girls deal with different changes and transitions at these ages and this leads adolescence frequently to be an stressful period of time, with important consequences for their psychological well-being. On the other hand, the fact of deeping in its knowledge during this period has also an interest which goes beyond the scientifical one, and allows the designing of more adjusted to the specific problems adolescents are living prevention programs. The exploration of psychological well-being elements is one of the approximation strategies to its study. In this thesis, we have selected some of the elements it is considered by the scientific literature to have a stronger connection to psychological well-being. They are the following: satisfaction with life as a whole, satisfaction with specific life dimensions, self-esteem, social suport, perception of control and values. There is an important consensus in considering that the exploration of this elements is of vital need to deepen in the psychological well-being structure. They have generally been studied in a separated way, however, it is possible to find some theoric integration attempts. The most important limitations that psychological well-being and also its elements have nowadays are basically epistemological, and refer to the difficulty of finding common visions (at the definitions level and at explanatory theories as well), shared by a majority of social researchers. These limitations justify the interest of directing attention towards other type of qualitatively different explanations, while avoding those being reductionistic and based on rigid causal explanations. Complexity theories can be a valid alternative as those properties that characterise complexity (fuzziness of limits, catastrophical points, fractal dimensions, chaotic and non linear processes) are, at the end, the same features psychosocial phenomena have. This including psychological well-being. The data we had, obtained through a transversal study, do not allow us to approximate to psychological well-being from each of the above properties with the exception of non linearity. The general objective of the thesis has been constructing a psychological well-being model from the obtained data which should be able of: 1) Making evident some up-to-now still non-explored relationships among variables, 2) Comprehending these relationships beyong their unidirectionality, and 3) Understanding psychological well-being in adolescence from a more integrative and holistic point of view and, thus, offering a more comprehensive way of approaching to these phenomenon. This thesis must be understood as a first step, specially a methodological one, to elaborate in the future conceptualisations about psychological well-being in adolescence based on complexity theories principles. Although the obtained results have some limitations, they also open to new analysis perspectives in the study of psychological well-being in adolescence.