Balancing life roles with life challenges: Toward a deeper understanding of social role functioning in young adults with a chronic illness

Adhering to different social roles, such as being a student, employee, spouse, or parent, constitutes the core of identity development. A meta-analysis found young adults with a chronic illness to have lower rates of finishing higher education, finding employment, marrying, and becoming a parent as compared to their peers. In the present project, we want to gain a deeper understanding of why these young adults more often fail to adopt valued social roles by focusing on underlying mechanisms. More specifically, we focus on patients’ feelings of competence and satisfaction in the roles of student, employee, spouse, and parent. This project extends prior research by examining (1) the development of social role functioning within different chronic illness populations and healthy controls; (2) the longitudinal interplay among different roles; (3) antecedent factors of social role functioning (i.e., illness identity and support from fellow patients); and (4) bidirectional associations with depressive symptoms, quality of life, health status, treatment adherence, and healthcare use. A quantitative study with three annual measurement waves will be conducted in five different samples (type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, cystic fibrosis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, and healthy controls) followed by a qualitative interview study. With this project, we aim to better understand the needs of young adults with a chronic illness and to remedy important gaps in the care for these patients.