Abstract

Objective: Life satisfaction is one of the most important variables in adolescents’ life. The purpose of the study is to determine the relationship between agency and identity dimensions and the effect of this relationship on adolescents’ life satisfaction.
Methods: A total of 302 university students participated in the study. Of these, 142 were male and 160 were female. Their ages ranged from 18 to 23 and the mean age was 20.26 (Sd=1.31). Dimensions of Identity Development Scale, Multi-Measure Agentic Personality Scale-Short Form and Satisfaction with Life Scale were administered to collect data. Pearson correlation, descriptive statistics and path analysis method were used to analyze the data.
Results: The results revealed that identity dimensions mediated the relationship between agency and life satisfaction. According to the results of this study, agency was negatively related to ruminative exploration and positively related to other identity dimensions. According to identity dimensions, except from ruminative exploration, other identity dimensions were positively related to life satisfaction.
Conclusion: The more agency improves, the healthier identity development becomes and healthy identity development increases life satisfaction. Based on this result, it can be useful for the specialists who work with adolescents to consider identity development and agency in the evaluation of problems related to life satisfaction.

Key words: Agency, identity formation, life satisfaction