Disentangling the Relations Between Self-esteem and Subjective Well-being in Emerging Adults: A Two-wave Longitudinal Study

Previous studies have found that self-esteem is linked to subjective well-being (SWB), but little is known about the longitudinal relationship between self-esteem and the bi-factor structure of SWB which has been demonstrated to include three specific factors and a general factor of SWB. This study used four competing structural models of SWB (i.e., the three-factor model, the causal model, the hierarchical model and the bi-factor model) to investigate the relationships between self-esteem and SWB in a total of 997 emerging Chinese adults (Mage = 19.79 years; 65.20% females) through a two-wave longitudinal study. From the point of view of the fit index, the results showed that the bi-factor model fitted our data better than the other three models. Importantly, results for the vast majority of models demonstrated the existence of the reciprocal link between self-esteem and subjective well-being in emerging Chinese adults. Specially, the results of bi-factor model suggested that there was a bidirectional link between self-esteem and the general factor of subjective well-being. To sum up, our findings provide new support for studying the longitudinal relationship between self-esteem and SWB using four models including the bi-factor model.