Oana Negru-Subtirica

Babeș-Bolyai University | UBB · Department of Psychology

Identity formation in adolescence is closely linked to searching for and acquiring meaning in one’s life. To date little is known about the manner in which these 2 constructs may be related in this developmental stage. In order to shed more light on their longitudinal links, we conducted a 3-wave longitudinal study, investigating how identity proce...

Identity and meaning in life are core developmental assets in emerging adulthood. We analysed how religiosity is related to these intentional strivings in emerging adults enrolled in theological education, by depicting (1) identity strivings and meaning in life accounts in faith narratives (Study 1) and (2) links between personal identity and meani...

Studiul oferă o imagine cuprinzătoare și detaliată asupra modului în care este realizată educația pentru democrație în școlile din România și propune mai multe recomandări de politici și intervenții. Accentul este pus asupra predării educației sociale, pornind de la premisa că această disciplină are potențialul de a integra și spori deprinderile și...

This article advances the unfolding research agenda on families, relationships and societies in the so-called ‘platform society’ by applying both a relational lens and a multigenerational approach. Our scoping review of the multidisciplinary research literature revealed two main themes linking relationality and digital platforms: (1) the intensific...

Educational identity has been studied increasingly in the past decades since school is a structured context that shapes adolescent identity formation. Across the academic years, adolescents learn to position themselves in terms of their education and schooling, perceiving these entities as more or less relevant for their self‐formation. In this art...

The last year of university is a developmental milestone, as students are approaching choices which might impact their long-term career development and psychological wellbeing. Despite vocational identity’s relevance for successful career development, there is limited research on its relations with volunteering and personal values as students appro...

A multidimensional model of emerging adults’ subjective financial well-being was proposed (Sorgente and Lanz, Int Journal of Behavioral Development, 43(5), 466–478 2019). The authors also developed a 5-factor scale (the Multidimensional Subjective Financial Well-being Scale, MSFWBS) intending to measure this construct in the European context. To da...

Crisis situations, such as the still ongoing war in Ukraine, make civic engagement extremely important, especially in Eastern Europe. Eastern European countries not only have extensive borders with Ukraine, but also share a common history as members of the former communist bloc. This part of the world is characterized by low levels of civic engagem...

Personal identity formation is a key developmental task of adolescence, with the educational domain being a core life domain. Parents are gatekeepers of adolescent career development but their role in facilitating educational identity formation still needs to be uncovered. The present study investigated developmental trajectories of educational ide...

For first-year university students developing and expressing themselves as learners is key for their future academic success. How students relate to the act of studying on a day-to-day basis represents a concrete here-and-now expression of their learner identity. First-year students need to gain the ability to self-regulate their goal pursuit by kn...

This gamification manual explains and offers best practices and examples of how the PROMIS project partners gamified contents related to social inclusion, in order to help other teachers and developers of online educational courses understand how gamification can be used as a pedagogical strategy for digital natives. This gamification manual can be...

Objective: Education has a strong impact on adolescent development. This study investigated the complex longitudinal associations between educational identity processes, academic achievement, and perfectionism. Method: The study used a 4-wave design (N = 744 adolescents, Mage = 15.2 years, 55% girls). Results: Results showed that self-oriented...

In this chapter, we critically discuss contemporary approaches to infer identity statuses. We will focus on how identity statuses can be delineated through a person-centered approach (e.g., cluster analysis and latent class/profile analysis [LCA/LPA]). These methods can depict how multiple variables are configured within persons, capturing identity...

Today, an increasing number of young adults’ first systematic work experiences occur beyond the boundaries of their homelands, leading to transnational school-to-work transitions. Work migration trends in the past decades indicate that more young adults choose or are forced to live their first systematic work experiences in a new country. This chap...

An international group of university scholars has developed this book, as a response to the “post-truth” world, where youth increasingly rely on information from unverified and often undocumented sources coming from different social media outlets. Disadvantaged and marginalized groups, like immigrants, ethnic minorities, people with low socioeconom...

Cross-sectional studies on perfectionism and general affect tend to interpret their findings suggesting affect is an outcome of perfectionism. However, personality theories posit that individual differences in general affect may also influence perfectionism. Expecting to find bidirectional relations, this 3-wave study sought to examine the longitud...

School-to-work (STW) pathways and transitions are key developmental processes in young adulthood. During this time, young adults face multiple choices and challenges. Young Adult Development at the School-to-Work Transition describes pathways for students to successfully transition to the work environment. The book examines social, economic, cultur...

The formation of a personal identity represents a fundamental task in human development. Personal identity revolves around the commitment to goals, beliefs, and values that are central to who one is. Starting from adolescence and continuing into young adulthood, people envision their life and reflect on their career path. Given the fast-paced deman...

Personality and identity formation are intricately linked in adolescent development. The personality disposition of perfectionism has been associated with identity processes, but their longitudinal interplay in adolescence has not yet been investigated. This 4-wave study, with 5- to 6-month intervals between each wave (N = 744 Caucasian adolescents...

Perfectionism is a pervasive and prevalent personality disposition with high implications for psychological maladjustment. Adolescence represents a particularly relevant period for the development of perfectionism, and perceived parental behaviors have been shown to play an important part. Yet, so far only few longitudinal studies have investigated...

Volunteering can be a means of identity development in emerging adulthood and it can provide a protective environment for vocational identity formation. The aims of our study were two-fold: (1) to investigate vocational identity statuses of student emerging adult volunteers (N = 385, 75.1% females) and (2) to analyze how these statuses are linked t...

Identity development is undoubtedly one of the most crucial tasks in human life. Identity is also one of the most frequently examined issues in contemporary developmental psychology research. In the literature, we can find various definitions of identity, as well as various theoretical conceptualizations and models. The present paper describes cont...

Objective: Being a student is an important social role youth play during adolescence and how they approach this role has critical implications for their future development. This three-wave longitudinal study investigated the links between academic achievement (i.e., GPA) and personality traits, through the lens of social comparison mechanisms. Me...

To understand the relation between financial behaviors and satisfaction in emerging adults (EAs) and parental financial socialization, we conducted a cross-sectional study focusing on families from a collectivistic, former communist country, Romania, a cultural context marked by extreme financial dependence of youth on their parents. Participants w...

Recent reviews underscored the need for a better link between different identity models in order to enhance our knowledge of identity development. In the present study, we used a mixed methodology design to investigate how the integration of process-oriented and narrative life-story approaches can be used to better understand the complexity of iden...

Acest volum reprezintă un prim efort colectiv de a analiza dintr‐o perspectivă interdisciplinară datele PISA despre România, urmărind atât realizarea unei imagini nuanțate a stării învățământului cât și dezvoltarea unor recomandări de politici. Prin studiile care îl compun își propune să atragă atenția asupra potențialului cercetărilor comparate ca...

Pornind de la datele unui sondaj realizat pe un eșantion reprezentativ pentru profesorii claselor 5-12 din România1, precum și de la o serie de interviuri de grup, studiul își propune să ofere răspunsuri următoarelor categorii de întrebări: 1. Care sunt atitudinile, valorile și orientările profesorilor în ceea ce privește sistemul politic din Român...

Introduction. Present-day developments in Europe, such as persistent socio-economic inequalities, growing numbers of young people at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion, xenophobic attitudes, and discrimination, present numerous challenges to youth identity development. Experiences of social exclusion and discrimination based on important aspects o...

Romania’s transition from communism to democracy has gradually crafted specific paths of identity development for people growing up in a time frame of great transformations. Most young people in post-communist Romania have developed their identities guided by “imported” life goals, in terms of types of strivings that define a successful person. Thi...

Education and vocation are core identity domains in adolescence. School is a normative social context in this developmental time frame and the formation of an educational identity is embedded in the goals that youth pursue in school. One of the main goals of education is to prepare young people for their future careers. Hence, educational identity...

In the context of increasing ethnic diversity in many European countries, a successful development and integration of ethnic minority youth becomes a central concern for the future of Europe. It is particularly important to understand specific challenges and opportunities related to identity development among ethnic minority youth. The aim of this...

România se află constant pe ultimele poziții dintre țările UE în evaluările internaționale ale calității educației. Politicile educaționale din România acordă prea puțină atenție fundamentării prin rezultate științifice. Școala românească are o finanțare deficitară și ineficientă. Politicile educaționale din România pornesc adesea de la definiții ș...

Identity formation is a main adolescent psychosocial developmental task. The complex inter-connection between different processes that are at the basis of one’s identity is a research and applied intervention priority. In this context, the identity style model focuses on social-cognitive strategies (i.e., informational, normative, and diffuse-avoid...

Background and Objectives: Although perfectionism has been proposed to be a risk factor for the development of anxiety, research on perfectionism and anxiety symptoms in adolescents is scarce and inconclusive. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the two higher-order dimensions of perfectionism – perfectionistic strivings and per...

Objective: Although perfectionism is a prominent personality disposition, only a few longitudinal studies have investigated how perfectionism develops. Theoretical models and qualitative studies have posited that academic success is a developmental antecedent of perfectionism. Yet, quantitative studies tend to interpret the cross-sectional relatio...

Identity research has mainly focused on the degree to which adolescents and emerging adults engage in exploration and commitment to identity goals and strivings. Somewhat lacking from this research tradition is an explicit focus on the content of the identity goals that individuals deem important and pursue. The present manuscript describes two lon...

This study examines the relation between educational and vocational identity in Romanian adolescents. Access to work-relevant experiences is very limited among Romanian adolescents, and most encounters with career constructs are confined to educational settings. Hence, to gain a better understanding of how identity processes in the educational and...

Although perfectionism is a personality disposition that plays an important role in educational contexts, research on perfectionism and school engagement is limited. School engagement is a key process in predicting educational outcomes in students. Consequently, it is important to know how perfectionism relates to school engagement and whether perf...

The present three-wave longitudinal study provides empirical evidence for the mechanisms of the bright and dark sides of identity development in the academic context. First, we investigated the patterns of stability and change in educational identity and academic achievement among adolescents. Second, we examined the reciprocal associations between...

Academic achievement is viewed as an indicator of success starting from an early age, when children enter into the educational system. Culture plays an important role in how academic achievement is viewed. In Romania, a post-communist country, society in general and parents and teachers in particular reinforce and pressure children to be competitiv...

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS), a self-report measure aimed at assessing identity processes of commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. We tested its factor structure in university students from a large array of cultura...

Emerging adulthood is a challenging period in terms of identity development, especially in the education and career domains. In the present paper we employed a person-centered approach of identity processes to identify pre-service teachers' educational identity statuses. As beliefs about teaching influence teachers' engagement in professional devel...

Perfectionism has been shown to predict individual differences in achievement goal orientations in university students, but research on perfectionism and goal orientations in school students is still very limited. Investigating 584 adolescent school students in a cross-sectional correlational design, the present study examined how self-oriented and...

The main aim of our research was to describe the comprehensive picture of relationships between identity and well-being with a cross-national perspective. We examined identity considering the interplay of three processes (i.e., commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) and we treated well-being as a multidimensional laten...

This qualitative study explores the dynamics of religious cognitions, behaviors, and emotions in emerging adult discourse in a sample of Romanian youth of heterogeneous socioeconomic, denominational (Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, Neo-protestant), and educational background. Also, from a parent-child dyad perspective, we investigate the role o...

Research on the 2 x 2 model of perfectionism and affect is still limited. Following a variable-centered approach, the present study investigated in a sample of 576 adolescents whether self-oriented perfectionism (SOP) and socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP) predicted positive and negative affect, comparing four subtypes of perfectionism: pure S...

Adolescence is regarded a key period when individual differences in perfectionism develop. Yet, so far only a few longitudinal studies have investigated the development of perfectionism in adolescents. Using a longitudinal correlational design with 381 adolescents aged 15-19 years, the present study investigated whether perceived parental expectati...

The manner in which young people set academic achievement goals, engage in academic tasks, and relate to success or failure has a decisive influence on how they shape their educational identity. What motivates adolescents and emerging adults to engage in learning commitments? How are their motivational orientations related to their identity develop...

The tenets of emerging adulthood are closely linked to changes imposed by the educational transition from high-school to university. Immersion in a new school context (university) seems to make personal perception on self, others, and the world, more focused on exploration and experimentation. In order to test these assumptions, we analyzed charact...