Représentations sociales de la vie quotidienne et bien-être chez des adolescents italiens

This study looks at the relationship between the representations of everyday life in young adolescents (14-16 years old) and their family daily practices with the aim of highlighting paths of wellbeing or distress. We distributed a battery of questionnaires (family routines and rituals, parent-adolescents communication, rule breaking, self esteem) and a task of free associations to the stimulus “everyday life” to a sample of 558 adolescents who attend schools in Matera (Italy). We hypothesize that adolescents with a positive representation of everyday life have supportive and well structured daily family practices and report higher scores of self esteem. A cluster analysis carried out on the results of the free associations task identified three groups of subjects: the “Concretes”, the “Realists” and the “Pessimists”. For each cluster we analysed the family climate (routines, rituals and communication with parents) and the levels of rule’s transgression and self-esteem. Our hypotheses have been partly confirmed.