The Influence of Purpose Content on Purposefulness in Chinese and American Young Adults*

1. The Influence of Purpose Content on Purposefulness in Chinese and American Young Adults* Fei Jiang Jenni Menon Mariano Northeast Normal University, China/Stanford University University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee Method and Results Figure 1. Mean Purpose Content Scores by Country ANCOVA results using the remaining items dropped from the final PCA solution support country differences in purpose content endorsement when controlling for gender and year. Americans endorsed creativity-oriented items like “make things more beautiful” (F(1, 275) = 15.32, p < .001) and “change the way people think” (F(1, 275) = 8.44, p < .001) significantly more than their Chinese peers. In contrast, Chinese students endorsed duty-related items such as “support my family and friends” (F(1, 275) = 4.37, p < .05) and “earn the respect of others” (F(1, 275) = 14.15, p < .001) significantly more than Americans. Youth in both countries however, endorsed the item “help others” to the same degree. The item “live life to the fullest” was endorsed more by Chinese youth (F(1, 275) = 10.47, p < .001). Yet its meaning is rather more difficult to interpret. American youth endorsed “serve God or a higher power” significantly more than Chinese (F(1, 275) = 13.78, p < .001), perhaps reflecting the rather Western notion of God represented by this item. Linear Regression Analyses To address question 2, the data file was split by country. Several linear regression models were fit wherein purpose content scores were entered separately as predictors and identified purpose was the outcome variable. Success, Duty, and Creative purposes all predicted the ability to identify a purpose among Chinese youth. Success and Duty purposes predicted identified purpose among American youth: Table 2. How purpose content predicts identified purpose by country Introduction Method and Results (continued…) Discussion This study reveals insights about Chinese and American young people’s life aspirations and the implications of these aspirations for education in China and the United States. First, we find evidence for three interpretable purpose components, reflecting three types of purpose content endorsed by Chinese and American college students: Success, Creativity, and Duty. The Success component indicates purposes that are directed toward fulfilling personal and achievement needs, while the Creative and Duty purposes are directed toward impacting the world beyond the self. Notably, young people in China and the United States both express beyond the self purpose types, equally endorsing the desire to “help others”, for instance, and showcasing evidence of pro-social goals among both groups. Chinese youths’ significant higher scores on Success may be influenced by the historical and cultural context. Living in a country with a huge population like China, youth face fierce competition from peers in career and academic achievement domains. This type of competition is present, yet less pronounced in American culture. Educational and cultural influences may in part explain the different focus of students’ pro-social purposes across the two countries. Chinese society emphasizes the value of interdependence among individuals. Feng (2009) notes that educators in China view the possession of duty-related purposes among their youth as associated with the positive future of the nation. Consequently, various programs have been developed to cultivate a sense of duty among Chinese youth. In contrast, American society values independence, placing importance on attending to the self. Furthermore, the diversity of American society highlights the importance of appreciation of individual differences. Nurturing the creative impulse is viewed as key to fueling economic development and sustaining democratic values (Tepper & Kuh, 2011). Curricular programs for cultivating creativity are therefore relatively more prominent in American education (Sandeen & Hutchinson, 2010). Our findings thus support recent concerns in Chinese education to promote greater creativity and individual initiative. In comparison, American educators and social scientists constantly lament the lack of a common sense of duty to the goods of country and community among their youth, thus emphasizing the need to promote allegiance to traditional purposes like family, faith, and country in curricula. In spite of educators’ concerns, this research found differences in the power of some purposes, over others, to predict a sense of purposefulness by country. This is important because a sense of purpose is associated with well-being. Educators should attend closely to the types of things that young people themselves say provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Educational policies and programs in both countries will benefit from knowing more about young people’s perceptions of what it means to thrive, based on young people’s first-hand knowledge about the social, historical, and economic environments in which they are coming of age. The influence of context is a recurring theme in research on youth thriving. These contexts include the family, the school, and the neighborhood, but expand wider to a country’s values as represented in social policies, history, and culture (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). People and their sociocultural environments mutually constitute one another (Lewin, 1948; Mead, 1934). An expanding volume of research shows that people think, feel and act in culture-specific ways — ways that are shaped by patterns of historically derived meanings, practices, products, and institutions (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007; Heine, 2008). This study therefore examines one specific indicator of thriving in young adults: Purpose (Bundick, Yeager, King, & Damon, 2010). Purpose is examined in two very different sociocultural contexts: China and the United States. Important Notion: Purpose is “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at once meaningful to the self, and of consequence to the world beyond the self” (Damon, Menon, & Bronk, 2003, p. 121). Thus, purpose is a far reaching type of goal that is personally important. Frankl (1959) discussed how a purpose is personal, and individually constructed. We expect therefore, that the content of one’s purposes is particularly important to the structure of purpose. A set of goals that make one person feel a deep and fulfilling sense of purposefulness may not have the same function for other people. Furthermore, these individual differences may occur across contexts that provide different avenues for purpose discovery and fulfillment. Thus, this study examines the association of purpose content to a sense of purposefulness among Chinese and American students. Measures Portions of the Revised Stanford Youth Purpose Survey (Bundick et al., 2006) were administered in English and Mandarin. The measure has been used extensively with American youth populations. For this study, the measure was translated into Mandarin by Chinese youth development experts fluent in English and Mandarin and first piloted with the Chinese college students: Categories of Identified Purpose Scale: measured purpose content (17 potential answers rated on a seven-point scale from 1 = strongly disagree – 7 = strongly agree) Identified Purpose Subscale: measured a sense of purposefulness, by examining the individual’s ability to identify a salient purpose in his or her life (5 items rated on a seven-point scale from 1 = strongly disagree – 7 = strongly agree; full sample α = .875; China α = .816; US α = .903) Analyses Principal Components Analysis (PCA) To address question 1, we sought to reduce the number of variables in the 17 item Categories of Identified Purpose Scale to a succinct set of purpose content types for more interpretable results. PCA was run in several iterations, discarding items with low communalities (< .5). No items were highly correlated. Orthogonal (varimax) rotation was used over an oblique method so as to utilize the emergent components as discrete variables in further analysis. Three highly interpretable purpose content components emerged. Cronbach’s alphas were satisfactory for exploratory analysis: Success: “have a good career”, “make money”, and “be successful” (α = .839) Creative: “discover new things about the world”, “have fun”, “create something new”, and “make the world a better place” (α = .683) Duty: “serve my country”, “do the right thing”, and “fulfill my duties” (α = .686) One Way Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVAs) We next examined differences in purpose content endorsement by country, while controlling for gender and year in college. In a series of ANCOVAs, scores on each purpose content type were run as dependent variables, country as the independent variable, and gender and year in college as covariates. We found statistically significant differences between Chinese and American youth on all three purpose component scores. Chinese youth, when compared with their American peers, endorsed more Duty purposes (F(1, 275) = 41.57, p < .001) and Success purposes (F(1, 275) = 4.79, p < .05) . American youth, on the other hand, endorsed more Creative purposes than Chinese youth (F(1, 275) = 19.33, p < .001). Purpose Score Means China Success: 17.54 Creative: 21.26 Duty: 18.22 United States Success: 16.97 Creative: 23.13 Duty: 15.90 Research Questions 1. What is the content of young people’s purposes, and is this content different for Chinese and American young adults? 2. How much does purpose content predict a sense of purposefulness, and are there differences in this association by country? Sample Participants were 279 students attending two universities in China and several universities in the United States: Table 1. Participant Demographics by Country Contact:Fei Jiang: hilary4444@yahoo.com Jenni Menon Mariano: jmariano@sar.usf.edu *This research is supported by grants to William Damon from the John Templeton Foundation and Thrive Foundation for Youth. We thank colleagues at Northeast Normal University and Stanford University for help with data collection.