Objective: This study examined the state of mental health, partnerships, and sexual activity of German university students after the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants and methods: In June and July 2021, 928 students (23.6 years; 63.5% female) from four universities in Germany participated in an online survey that assessed…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are applied to reduce response biases in self-report surveys on sensitive research questions (e.g., on socially undesirable characteristics). However, there is evidence that they cannot completely eliminate self-protecting response strategies. To address this problem, there are RRTs specifically designed to…

The importance of close social contacts in the educational process has been widely documented, but mainly for the school sector. The present article examines the importance of close relationships on university students' dropout tendencies. Using longitudinal panel data collected at a medium-sized German university, students (N = 7,169) were…

Personality predicts how we interact with others, what partners we have, and how happy and lasting our romantic relationships are. At the same time, our experiences in these relationships may affect our personality. Who experiences specific major relationship events, and how do these events relate to personality development? We examined this issue…

This longitudinal study addresses the role of support given by parents and peers during the transition from university to work life. A sample of 64 German university students in their last year at the university completed scales from the Network of Relationships Inventory regarding general support, namely, instrumental aid and intimacy with…

General well-being is known to deteriorate sharply at the end of life. However, it is an open question how rates of terminal change differ across affective and evaluative facets of well-being and if individual difference correlates operate in facet-specific ways. We examined how discrete affective states (happy, angry, fearful, sad) and…

Guided by concepts from a relational developmental perspective, this study examined intra- and interpersonal associations between self-esteem and depressive symptoms in a sample of 1,407 couples surveyed annually across 6 years in the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relations and Family Dynamics (pairfam) study. Autoregressive cross-lagged model…

This study compared control striving with regard to two developmental goals in adolescents with visual impairment and sighted peers. A matched-pair design was used with 158 adolescents with visual impairment and 158 sighted peers by using age, gender, habitation (living with ones' parents vs. other forms of living), and socioeconomic status as…