Sense of Coherence and Salutogenesis through Adolescence and Young Adulthood: A Developmental-Contextual Perspective in Community and Medical Populations.

Sense of Coherence (SOC) is a key salutogenic construct and refers to the extent to which one views the world and one's surroundings as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. The present project will investigate how SOC develops through adolescence and young adulthood and how SOC is influenced by various contextual factors and normative developmental tasks, such as experienced parenting, the work context, and identity formation. Diverse populations (i.e., high school students, college students, young adults, and individuals with a chronic eillness) will be sampled. Further, the present project will examine how changes in SOC develop in tandem with generic (e.g., depressive symptoms, health risk behaviors) and sample-specific outcomes (e.g., work engagement and burnout, illness adaptation). Finally, mediating and moederating mechanisms will be uncovered in these longitudinal relationships. In doing so, the present project brings together researchers from different scientific disciplines (i.e., developmental psychology, organizational psychology, nursing science, and cardiology) and will significantly advance our current understanding of positive functioning in community and medical populations.

Keywords:Work engagement and burnout, Salutogenesis, Identity, Adolescence, Longitudinal, Sense of coherence, Congenital heart disease, Parenting

Disciplines:Cardiac and vascular medicine, Public health care, Developmental psychology and ageing, Applied psychology