Research Contexts, Designs, and Participants
Our electronic and manual searches yielded 38 studies carried out in 14 different countries. The majority were conducted in the US (n = 22), while nine took place in Europe (one each performed in Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, England, and United Kingdom; and two each in Italy and Netherlands). The remaining ones were done in Australia (n = 2), Israel (n = 3), South Africa (n = 1), with one cross-cultural study undertaken in four countries (Fingerman et al., 2016). Most of the selected studies were cross-sectional (n = 26), with 12 employing a longitudinal design. Quantitative methods were adopted in most studies (n = 21), while nine studies adopted a qualitative methodology. Eight studies adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods, out of which five were categorized as mixed-method studies and three as multimethod studies (Anguera, Blanco-Villaseñor, Losada, Sánchez-Algarra, & Onwuegbuzie, 2018). Out of the 17 studies applying qualitative methods, nine conducted interviews, six included open-ended questions, one included both interviews and focus-groups (Crocetti & Meeus, 2014) and another included family observational tasks (Walkner & Rueter, 2014).
In terms of participants, all studies included emerging adults in their samples, except for one study with interviews of emerging adults’ parents only (Kloep & Hendry, 2010). Out of these 37 studies, 12 included other participants in addition to emerging adults: nine studies included their parents; three compared independent groups of adolescents with emerging adults, one of which had also included participants’ mothers and siblings (Scharf, Shulman, & Avigad-Spitz, 2005). Seven longitudinal studies included assessments of emerging adults when they were still adolescents.
Regarding sex, the samples predominantly featured female participants in 29 studies and male participants in five studies (with two studies not providing this data). Within the studies that included emerging adults and/or their parents as participants, one study included mothers exclusively (Scharf et al., 2005) and 10 included both fathers and mothers, even though more mothers participated.
As for the structure of emerging adults’ families, considering the 17 studies that provided this data, 13 two-parent families were the most frequent, with three studies exclusively involving families with this structure. Seven studies included divorced families, two of which included families with this structure exclusively; four studies involved adoptive families, with one study involving only emerging adults’ adoptees as participants (Farr, Grant-Marsney, & Grotevant, 2014). As for ethnicity, half of the studies provided this information: participants were mainly Caucasian or European-American (n = 15), except in four studies in which African-American, Asian, and Hispanic-American ethnicities prevailed. In terms of SES, within the 11 studies that reported this information, three included samples from a low SES, one from a low-medium/medium, five from a medium, and two from a medium-high/high SES.
Within those studies reporting emerging adults’ occupational status (n = 22), all of them included college students as participants, out of which 13 did so exclusively. On the topic of living arrangements, within the 17 studies that clearly specified this sample characteristic, nine reported that most of the participants no longer lived in the family home, whereas six reported that most of their participants co-resided with at least one parent, and two exclusively included emerging adults co-residing at the parental house. Finally, most studies (n = 19) included participants older than 25, and seven included participants over the age of 29, with no emerging adult identified as being older than 35. Table 1 displays the main data regarding the context and design of the studies. [insert Table 1]