The role of family functioning in ethnic identity and well-being in Jewish late adolescent women

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore how late adolescent Jewish women identify, explore and commit to their Jewish ethnicity. Moreover, the importance of family to Jewish culture was assessed using measures of family togetherness and flexibility on ethnic identity and psychological well-being in Jewish females. A Multivariate analysis of variance was run to compare how Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jewish females differ on psychological well-being, general ethnic identity, and Jewish cultural and Jewish religious identity. No differences were found except on Jewish cultural and Jewish religious identity. Orthodox women had the strongest cultural and religious identities and Reform women had the least cultural and religious identities. In addition, several latent variable models were evaluated to evaluate the role of ethnic identity as a mediator between family dynamics and psychological well-being. Ethnic identity was not found to mediate this relationship. Rather, a better fit to the data was a predictive model in which family cohesion, family flexibility and ethnic identity were directly correlated with psychological well-being. ^