An area within psychology that looks at the strengths and positive sides of human life has emerged the last decade. It is called positive psychology and one area related to that is positive adaptation. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the natural history of females’ positive extrinsic and intrinsic adaptation from childhood to adulthood, with a focus on typical positive patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop within the same individual. The sample consisted of about 500 Swedish girls and data were taken at age 13, 15, and 43 from the longitudinal research program Individual Development and Adaptation (IDA). Variable-oriented methods were used to study basic relationships among factors both within age and between childhood and adulthood and person-oriented methods were used to study typical patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop, using cluster analyses and cross-tabulation of clusters. The overall results show, as expected, more distinct typical positive adaptation patterns in the intrinsic than the extrinsic area in both childhood and adulthood. Significant longitudinal developmental streams between typical positive adaptation patterns in childhood and adulthood were found and these are discussed from a dynamic system perspective suggesting the interaction between factors thru reinforcing feedback processes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-7226 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Andersson, Håkan |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Psykologiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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