Who Matters the Most? The Differential Role of Parents, Teachers, and Peers’ Supportive Relationships in Early Adolescents’ Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

Adolescent well-being is a multifaceted construct embedded in family, school, and peer socialization contexts. By adopting a social-psychological perspective we examined associations between three sources of support (parents, teachers, and peers) and specific components of subjective well-being (cognitive, affective, global, and domain-specific), to determine whether there is a functional specialization of the role that these socialization agents play in early adolescents’ perceptions of affective well-being and satisfaction with life in different domains. Albanian data from Wave 3 of the Children’s Worlds International Survey were used, including 2339 early adolescents (age range 9–13; girls = 49.3%). A structural equation model (SEM) was employed to examine associations between supportive relationships with parents, teachers, and peers and specific subjective well-being components. Results support a functional specialization hypothesis: Parents’ support was significantly related to global cognitive and affective well-being; teacher support was significantly related to school satisfaction; and peer support was significantly related to all subjective well-being variables (global and domain-based life satisfaction and affective well-being). The present findings contribute to a finer-grained understanding of the role of supportive relationships with adults and peers in proximal socialization contexts (family, school, peer groups) in how early adolescents perceive and evaluate their affective well-being and satisfaction with life globally and in specific domains.