The moderating effect of autonomy on the relationship between enabling peer group and sibling relations and adolescents' mental health and life satisfaction

• Main Authors: Perez, Mari Minapearl D., Ocampo, Anna Carmela G., Reyes, Melissa Lopez, Tan, Charisse Yap
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Subjects: Autonomy in adolescence; Autonomy (Psychology); Interpersonal relations; Teenagers—Mental health; Satisfaction; Psychology
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/10818
• Institution: De La Salle University

Adolescents' peer group plays a critical role in their development, providing them acceptance and positive regard. Adolescents who experience supportive supportive relations in the peer group also tend to have positive metnal health and a high level of life satisfaction. Yet, as quasi-age peers, siblings also play the same role as the peer group, although possibly with a different nuance. How adolescents are influenced by their age peers is here hypothesized as a function of the adolescents' autonomy, or their inclination to decide and act on their own valuing and convictions, independently of group norms. This study thus examines the moderating role of autonomy in the link between enabling peer group and sibling relations and adolescents' mental health and life satisfaction. Filipino students from three universities (n = 129) answered pertinent scales of the Multicontext Assessment Battery of Youth Development. Whereas better enabling peer group relations are associated with higher levels of mental health and life satisfaction among adolescents with low or medium levels of autonomy, these do not have any bearing on highly autonomous adolescents' mental health and life satisfaction. On the other hand, the positive contribution of enabling sibling relations is found to be alike among adolescents with low, medium, and high levels of autonomy. The results of the study thus suggest that autonomy plays a more salient role in the nature of peer group relations. As a personality-related construct, autonomy constrains or enhances the effects of contexts on the adolescents' development.