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Exploring the Role of Social Factors on the Self-Construal of Indian Youths

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Abstract

The present paper aims to assess the self-construal of Indian youths. It further explores the role of various social factors such as gender, religion, type of university attended, type of family, socioeconomic status, and geographic region in shaping individuals’ self-construal. Data were collected from 1,660 Indian youths aged 18 to 30 from the north, south, and eastern parts of India. Data were collected with the help of the Twenty Statement Test (TST, Kuhn and McPartland in Am Sociol Rev 9(1):68–76, 1954), the Family Affluence Scale-II (FAS-II, Currie et al. in Young people’s health in context, WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2004), a parental education measure (Jeon et al. in Child Indic Res 6(3):479–492, 2013), and a sociodemographic sheet. We analyzed data with the help of percentages, t-tests, ANOVA, and Tukey HSD multiple comparisons of means. The results revealed that the predominant self-construal of Indian youths is reflective/independent. However, the social/interdependent self still remains critical. Various social factors such as gender, religion, and type of university participants attended have a significant impact on the self-construal of the participants. The participants’ type of family, SES, and geographic region did not directly impact their self-construal. The results suggest a need to take a more contextually grounded approach when studying the self-construal of Indians.

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles and news from researchers in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.

  • Indian Religions
  • Indigeneity
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Data Availability

Data are available with the corresponding author and can be shared on a reasonable request.

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Funding

No financial support was received for this study from any source.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Maria Zafar & Yashpal Jogdand

  2. Centre For Child And Adolescent Wellbeing, New Delhi, India

    Areeba Ahmed

  3. Department of Psychology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

    Md Ghazi Shahnawaz

  4. Department of Clinical Psychology, Manipal College of Health Professions, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India

    Sayma Jameel

  5. Department of Psychology, AMITY Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences, Noida, India

    Zuby Hasan

  6. Department of Applied Psychology, Sri Aurobindo College (Evening), New Delhi, India

    Pragyendu Yaduvanshi

  7. Department of Applied Psychology, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Neelakudy, Tamil Nadu, India

    V Vithya

  8. Department of Psychology, Patna College, Patna University, Patna, India

    Md Hassan Jafri

  9. Department of Psychology, Gauhati University, Assam, India

    Rita Rani Talukdar

Contributions

MZ, AA, and MGS contributed to conceptualization; MZ, AA, SJ, ZH, PY, VV, HJ, and RRT contributed to data collection; MZ, AA, and MGS contributed to data curation; MZ and AA contributed to scoring, data analysis, initial draft; and MZ, MGS, and YJ contributed to revision, and drafting the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Md Ghazi Shahnawaz.

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Conflict of interest

All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethics Approval

The research was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee, Faculty of Social Sciences, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was sought from the participants before going ahead with data collection.

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Zafar, M., Ahmed, A., Shahnawaz, M.G. et al. Exploring the Role of Social Factors on the Self-Construal of Indian Youths. Psychol Stud (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-025-00836-3

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  • DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-025-00836-3

Keywords

  • Self-construal
  • Independent self-construal
  • Interdependent self-construal
  • TST
  • FAS-II
  • Indian youth

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