Abstract
Quarter-life crisis (QLC) is a popular term for developmental crisis episodes that occur during early adulthood (18–30). Our aim was to explore what linguistic themes are associated with this phenomenon as discussed on social media. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets written by over 1,400 users from the United Kingdom and United States that referred to QLC, comparing their posts to those used by a control set of users who were matched by age, gender and period of activity. Logistic regression was used to uncover significant associations between words, topics, and sentiments of users and QLC, controlling for demographics. Users who refer to a QLC were found to post more about feeling mixed emotions, feeling stuck, wanting change, career, illness, school, and family. Their language tended to be focused on the future. Of 20 terms selected according to early adult crisis theory, 16 were mentioned by the QLC group more than the control group. The insights from this study could be used by clinicians and coaches to better understand the developmental challenges faced by young adults and how these are portrayed naturalistically in the language of social media.
Highlights
Quarter-life crisis (QLC) is a phenomenon that has become widely discussed in the media and in popular writings about the challenges of early adulthood (Robbins and Wilner, 2001; Rosen, 2019)
This fits with the fact that accounts of QLC mainly revolve around problems with finding, or adapting to, work
With regards to the use of first person pronouns in QLC tweets relative to the control as shown in Figure 1, this fits with previous findings showing a heightened use of personal pronouns on social media by users with mental health issues relative to a control (De Choudhury et al, 2013)
Summary
Quarter-life crisis (QLC) is a phenomenon that has become widely discussed in the media and in popular writings about the challenges of early adulthood (Robbins and Wilner, 2001; Rosen, 2019). The present study explores how the phenomenon is linguistically rendered in the social media space of Twitter, with the aim of better understanding the popular conception of the phenomenon and how that may help to convey the nature of key developmental challenges pertaining to being a young adult. The theory of emerging adulthood proposes five defining developmental features of the age range of 18–28. These are: (1) feeling ambiguous in terms of adult status – young people in this age range typically describe themselves as in some ways
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