Examining quarterlife crisis among active students and graduates of counseling

The quarter life crisis, which refers to the ups and downs between adolescence and adulthood, which is also called emerging adulthood, has to do with developmental challenges and tasks experienced by individuals in the 17-28 age range. The group demographically comprises a significant portion of contemporary societies. Hence, the purpose of the current study was to compare active counseling students with graduates according the following variables: Psychological symptoms; existential loneliness; hope; and pro-active personality along with a set of sociodemographic variables (i.e., place of residence; employment status etc.). Participants of the study (N=341) consisted of a convenience sample of volunteering counselors in training at various universities as well as graduates of counseling undergraduate programs. Personal Information Form, Brief Symptom Inventory, Existential Loneliness Questionnaire, Dispositional Hope Scale and Multi-Measure Agentic Personality Scale were used as data collection instruments. Independent samples t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and hierarchical regression analysis were used in the Jamovi program in accordance with the problems addressed in the research. According to the findings, while psychological symptom levels do not show a significant difference according to student/graduation and residence; It differed in depression according to romantic relationship, in anxiety accordint to gender and in all sub-dimensions and total score according to perception of crisis, working status and job satisfaction. According to the hierarchical regression analysis, hope and active personality predicted the psychological symptoms of the participants in a negative way, while this significant effect disappears when existential loneliness is included in the analysis, and existential loneliness predicts a significant and high degree of psychological symptoms. The findings were discussed and interpreted in line with the literature, and recommendations were presented to researchers and practitioners.