The Relationship between the Self-efficacy and Life Satisfaction of Young Adults

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between self-efficacy and life satisfaction of young adults. This study is cross-sectional study and variables. Data were collected between March 2012 and April 2012 from young adults who were bachelor degree and attending the Celal Bayar University Pedagogical Formation Program the academic term in 2011-2012. Participants consist of 405 young adults who selected by the simple random sampling. The number of women was determined to be 224 (57%) and that of men to be 181 (44%). Their mean age was 26.4. Data were collected by General Self–Efficacy Scale and The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Data was analyzed by ANOVA and regression analysis. It was determined that the self-efficacy of young adults significantly predicted their life satisfaction (48%, p=.05); also, self-efficacy and life satisfaction didn’t significantly differ among the groups in accordance with the perceived level of income. Depending on the results of this study, to raise self-efficacy of young adults can help to achieve their developmental tasks, this is vital for their healthy development and life satisfaction. It can be examine the longitudinal studies of the relationship between self-efficacy and life satisfaction in the young adulthood. Also, the factors that are effective in increasing life satisfaction can be determined through experimental studies to be performed with young adults.


Introduction
Young adults experience many concurrent changes in all aspects of their lives (Schulenberg, Bryant, & O'Malley, 2004).This period of development is characterized by high levels of personal exploration (Jessor, Donovan, & Costa, 1991), increased mobility and independence from parents, and the adoption of adult roles (Erikson, 1968) such as future careers, as regard to occupational achievement and family formation as important decisions (Settersten, Furstenberg, & Rumbaut, 2005).This period, at the same time, is a transition period to adulthood and it is when some set of ethical values acquired in the childhood and the set of values gained in life when becoming an adult are compared (Özbay, 1997).
According to Erikson, the basic developmental task of the individuals in the period of young adulthood is to overcome the crisis of "intimacy versus isolation" (Corey, 2005).The healthy individual has to achieve the capacity for closeness and intimacy through love or else suffer a sense of isolation that will permit only shallow human relationships.Young adults have to adapt to the new life patterns, new social expectations and new roles.They need to develop new values, interests and attitudes aiming at these roles (Hurlock, 1980).According to the developmental task theory (Havighurst, 1972) levels of life satisfaction appears related to factors connected with to various socially related personal factors, including one's life phase, as well as personal values and interpretations.Havighurst (1972) emphasised that happiness (or life satisfaction) may be dependent on the successful achievement of life-phase dependent developmental tasks arising from three sources.These are: physical maturation, cultural pressure and individual aspirations and values.In this theory to early adulthood, the developmental tasks in question would include learning to live in a marriage or kind of relationship, starting a family (with children), and getting started in an occupation (cited in: Bradley & Corwyn, 2004).achieving and managing the development tasks of young adulthood was related to happiness and feelings of success in life (cited in : Martikainen, 2008).
According to Diener et al. (1999), subjective well-being includes both a cognitive and an affective component.The cognitive component is usually measured by asking people how satisfied they are with their life as a whole.It measures a long-term evaluation of well-being, in contrast to the affective component, which evaluates people's more instantaneous positive and negative feelings.Life satisfaction also covers the satisfaction that one perceives from his / her current life, his/ her wish to change life, the satisfaction that he/she perceives from his/her past and the opinions of kinsmen about his/her life and it is regarded as the coverage of expectations, requirements, wishes, and desires (Diener & Lucas, 1999).In some of the studies, the life satisfaction of young adults are likely to increase work, parenthood, and especially union formation (Easterlin, 2006); and positive life events are likely to result in increasing life satisfaction level as result (Lelkes, 2008), health and income (Easterlin, 2006;Lelkes, 2008).The other studies indicate that young adults who successfully completed developmental tasks in the work, relationship and citizenship domain were more likely to have a stable high or an increasing life satisfaction level pattern than those who were less successful in completing these tasks (Schulenberg et al., 2004).
Life satisfaction as a core dimension of subjective well-being and a key measure of psychological health (Pavot & Diener, 2008) indicates strong relationship especially with intrinsic processes like personality and personal tendencies (Diener & Lucas, 1999).At the same time, life satisfaction deal with a variety of risk behaviours (e.g., alcohol and drug use, aggressive and violent behaviour, sexual activities), psychopathological symptoms (depression, anxiety, low self-efficacy, loneliness) and physical health indices (e.g., eating behaviour, exercise); that global life satisfaction mediates the impact of stressful life events.Furthermore, life satisfaction appears to operate as an intrapersonal strength that helps buffer against the development of psychopathology in the face of increasing stressful life events (McKnight, Huebner, & Suldo, 2002).
As emphasized in the performed studies the fact that there is a positive relationship between life satisfaction and hope, interpersonal relationships, personal harmony (Huebner & Gilman, 2006), self-efficacy provides an important advantage in terms of both increase of life satisfaction and psychological and social development (Suldo & Huebner, 2006).Because, it was observed that there is a negative relationship between self-efficacy and social stress, anxiety, depression, outer control focus (Huebner & Gilman, 2006) and violence (Valois, Paxton, Zullig, & Huebner, 2006).At this point, the belief in self-efficacy influences people's way of thinking and intrinsic reactions, and determines individuals' motivations and behaviour (Bandura, 1994).Individuals with high self-efficacy can be more comfortable and productive when they face hard working conditions.Those with low self-efficacy believe that what they will do is harder than reality.Such kind of a thought increases anxiety and stress, while it narrows the necessary viewpoint for a person to solve a problem ideally (Pajares, 2002).High-level of self-efficacy is of importance in terms of the fact that it determines psychological well-being (Magaletta & Oliver, 1999) and psychological harmony (Cutler, 2005).One has to solve the real life problems in order to get life satisfaction and to be happy (Dora, 2003).
Depending on all these results, high level of self-efficacy can contribute to the increase of activity level of young adults and to their being pleased with themselves, their lives and other conditions in their lives (certain living areas such as family, friends, and the environment being lived in).In our country, the studies of life satisfaction focus on primary school students (Kaya & Siyez, 2008), adolescents (Eryılmaz & Öğülmüş, 2010;Çivitçi & Çivitçi, 2009); university students (Tuzgöl-Dost, 2007); similarly, in studies of self-efficiency, although adolescents (Yardımcı & Başsakal, 2010), university students (Kaya & Dönmez, 2008), and young adults (Miçooğulları, Cengiz, Aşçı, & Kirazcı, 2010) were studied, the relationship between life satisfaction and self-efficacy were not sufficiently examined in the period of young adulthood.This study is expected to draw attention to the factors about life satisfaction of young adults and to contribute to taking the precautions to increase their life satisfaction.Also, the comparison of the results of national and international studies concerning the life satisfaction of young adults is expected to compensate for the deficiency in literature through the help of this study.
In this study, the relationship between the self-efficacy and life satisfaction of young adults is investigated.For this purpose, responses are sought to the following questions: 1) Do self-efficacy of young adults differ in terms of the perceived level of income?
2) Do life satisfaction of young adults differ in terms of the perceived level of income?
3) Do self-efficacy of young adults predict life satisfactions of them at a meaningful level?

Method
In this study, quantitative and relational model was used to analyze the relationships among variables.

Participants
The population of study consists of from young adults (N=972) who were bachelor degree and attending the Celal Bayar University Pedagogical Formation Program the academic term in 2011-2012.In this program is gained the teaching skills and perspective of educationalist to participants.Data were collected between March 2012 and April 2012.Participants were formed 405 young adults who were selected by the simple random sampling.They completed questionnaires in their home classrooms.In addition to the presence of a researcher was present in each group.Participants were informed that responses were confidential, that participations were completely voluntary.The number of women was determined to be 224 (57%) and that of men to be 181 (43%).The mean age of the participants, whose ages vary from 22-36, was determined to be 26.4.

Instruments
The data of the study was collected by using Personal Information Form, General Self-Efficacy Scale, Life Satisfaction Scale.

General Self-efficacy Scale
GSE scale developed by Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1995) Turkish version of GSE scale translated into Turkish using translation-back translation method.As a result of the factor analysis, alpha internal consistency was found .83.Test-retest reliability scales was found to be (r=.80,p=.001).These results led the author to consider that the Turkish version of the GSE scale valid and reliable.All the items of 10 item four point likert type scale (0=completely wrong; 4=completely true) are scored positively.10 to 40 scores are taken from the scale.High score means that general self-efficacy is high (Aypay, 2009).The alpha value of the scale was determined to be .84 in the content of this study.

The Satisfaction with Life Scale
The widely used Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) is a 5-item self-report measure of overall satisfaction with life.Questions are answered on a 7-point Likert scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree," and responses are summed to provide an overall score.The SWLS was significantly and positively correlated with nine other measures of subjective well-being, with correlations ranging from .47 to .75 across two samples.In the study, the reliability of the scale was calculated to be alpha=.87and the scale-dependent validity to be .82.The Turkish validity, reliability study of the scale was performed by Köker (1991) and Yetim (1993).In the study of Yetim (1993), the Cronbach alpha value of the scale was reported to be 0.86.The scores taken from the each item can vary from1 to 7 and the total score from 1 to 35.As the score taken from the scale increases, life satisfaction increases.Alpha value was determined to be .92 in the content of this study.

Personal Information Form
The forms were prepared by the researcher to collect data appropriate for the study.Participants provided information on sex and perceived level of income.For the evaluation of the economic status of the participants a self reporting 3-point scale was used (1 bad to 3 good).

Data Analyses
The data were analyzed by ANOVA, regression analysis.The life-satisfaction and self-efficacy of young adults were looked out whether there is a difference among groups depending on the perceived level of income and finally regression analysis was carried out to determine whether their self-efficacy significantly predict their life satisfaction.The results of life satisfaction and self-efficacy of young adults were looked out whether there is a difference among groups depending on the perceived level of income.(see Table 3) The results of ANOVA was performed to find out whether the self-efficacy and life satisfaction scores of young adults differ according to perceived income level and no significant difference was found.

3.3
The results of regression analysis were performed to look out whether self-efficacy of young adults is a predictor of their life satisfaction.(see Table 4) As is inferred from the table 4, the variable of self-efficacy of young adults was found to predict the life satisfaction scores of young adults a significant level (R=.483,R 2 =.233, F=122.584,P=.000).This finding demonstrates that self-efficacy of young adults is observed to predict significantly life satisfaction of them.Accordingly, self-efficacy accounts for 48% (P=.05) of variation of life satisfaction.

Discussion
In this study, the relationship between the self-efficacy and life satisfaction of young adults was analyzed and the findings were discussed according to the aim of the study in view of literature.The first finding of the study was that self-efficacy of young adults does not differ significantly in terms of perceived level of income.In the studies in which different kind of results and findings are encountered in literature, it is stated that there is a relationship between low level of income and low self-efficacy (Bandura, 1995), high level of income is related to strong self-efficacy in men (Siaspush, McNeill, Borland, & Fong, 2006), low economic status and economic problems are related to the belief of low self-efficacy (Pearlin, Menaghan, Lieberman, & Mullan, 1981); on the other hand, self-efficacy affects positive overcoming stress depending on low economic status (Coleman & Karraker, 1998); economic conditions of family supports self-efficacy (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002).According to the results of the study indicating the negative relationship between the economic status of family and self-efficacy of the young, this situation is assessed in a way that it can affect low level income young's beliefs of self-efficacy regarding working in part time jobs, earning money, and social environment that encourages agencies (Jones & Jolly, 2003).
Another finding was that young adults do not significantly differ in terms of perceived level of income in their life satisfaction.However, in studies in which there are different findings, it is stated that socio-economic status display relatively stronger relationships with subjective well-being than age or sex and perhaps the strongest socio-structural predictor of well-being is income and social status (Diener & Diener, 1996).As a matter of fact, in the studies in which there are similar consequences, it is determined that perceived economic status is a factor related to life-satisfaction of university students.It is determined that as the socio-economic level increases, life satisfaction increases; the levels of subjective well-being of university students significantly differ in terms of perceived economic status (Tuzgöl-Dost, 2007).In this study, young adults do not significantly differ in terms of perceived level of income in their life satisfaction and self-efficacy.The fact that the findings obtained in this study is different, and that the features about sampling group and the perception on economic status are taken as variables are thought to be effective.
In the other finding, it was found out that self-efficacy of young adults significantly predict their life satisfaction.When this finding is assessed in view of literature, it is found out that similar results were obtained and that high level of self-efficacy determined psychological well-being (Magaletta & Oliver, 1999) and psychosocial harmony (Cutler, 2005) and that life satisfaction is related to optimism and positive thinking (Caprara & Steca, 2006).O' Leary (1992) found that positive self-efficacy beliefs affect health directly, via reduction of psychological stress, and indirectly, via adoption of health-related behaviours.The positive relationship between self-efficacy and life satisfaction can be understood by the fact that the people with high self-efficacy have the ability to overcome stressful situations, because these people are reported to have the attitude "I can do this" (Azar, Vasudeva, & Abdollahi, 2006).On the contrary, the individuals with low self-efficacy believe that the things they will do are harder than they are in reality; such a thought increases the anxiety and stress at the same time narrows the viewpoint necessary for a person to solve a problem as necessarily (Pajares, 2002).The beliefs of general self-efficacy are mostly considered to be relative to psychological well-being (Tong & Shanggui, 2004).As emphasized here, depending on the results of this study, we can conclude that as the self-efficacy of young adults increase, their life satisfaction and thus psychological well-being increases.
Finally, life satisfaction of young adults is important factors from the stand point of their subjective well-being and mental health.For this reason, it is necessary to examine the factors regarding life satisfaction and subjective well-being in young adults.Because, it is possible for young adults to experience simultaneous changes in many fields and it is possible for their life satisfaction to be affected by many factors while they are trying to fulfil their exceedingly important task of growth such as making close relationships and making occupational decisions, period of getting independent of family and getting ready to undertake adulthood responsibilities.Therefore, in this period, the factors that young adults trust in their abilities to succeed through their high self-efficacy beliefs, adapt their own way of thinking and emotional reactions, become productive in studies with high level of hardship will contribute to their achieving the task of growth and to taking more satisfaction from their life.
The following suggestions are made in view of the obtained findings in the study; first of all, longitudinal analysis of the relationship between self-efficacy and life satisfaction in the young adults in our country can be

Table 1 )
Table 1.Descriptive statistics The Results of the Life-satisfaction and Self-efficacy of Young Adults Were Looked Out Whether There is a Difference among Groups Depending on the Perceived Level of Income It was seen that the values of arithmetic average and standard deviation of participants according to the perceived level of income.(see Table 2)

Table 2 .
Distributions According to the Perceived Level of Income

Table 3 .
Values of Arithmetic Average and Standard Deviation of According to Self-Efficacy and Life Satisfaction of Young Adults

Table 4 .
Regression Analysis of Self-Efficacy and Life Satisfaction