Theoretical And Empirical Research On Future Time Perspective Of University Students

Being a factor of time perspective, future time perspective is individual personality on grasping future, including cognition, emotion, and behavioral trend on future social and individual development, mainly on future individual developmental possibility. Facing to the future is the human being's nature. Studying future time perspective help us understanding the essential of personality. Up to now, in domestic or international there have been very few systematical and special exploration or investigation in the domain. Emphasizing theoretical and empirical study, this research program studied the future time perspective of university students systematically and deeply with multi-method strategy.On the basis of reviewing the existing literature on theoretical and empirical research of future time perspective, the research explored future time perspective with diversified means, and from multi-dimensionality, trying to investigate the structure, functional mechanism, and developmental law of future time perspective, to investigate the relationship between other mental elements such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, stress of life events and future time perspective, to investigate the effective pathway to cultivate university students' future time perspective. The research not only enrich the theory study on future time perspective, also increase the understanding of future time perspective.By investigating university students using individual interview, group interview, open-ended questionnaire, and referring to research literatures on future time perspective, the research put forward structural model of future time perspective of university students. On the basis, this research investigated undergraduates using the self-compiled general future time perspective and domain-specific future time perspective questionnaire for pretest, then explored and validated basic factors andmodel of university student's future time perspective by means of factor analysis.By investigating formally the university students, the research examined the university students' differences of general future time perspective and specific-domain future time perspective on the primary variables, such as sex, old, grade, performance level, father's education level and family's incoming per month, and explored the interaction effect of the primary variables. By means of correlation analysis, linear regression, and variance analysis, the research examined the total relationship among general future time perspective, specific-domain future time perspective, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and pressure of life events.The research examined the differences of sensibility of future outcome between university students with high and low general future time perspective using card choice task experiment. The research also explored individual differences of university students' everyday problem solving strategy by individual interview.The research also interviewed deeply representative individuals with high and low general future time perspective, revealed the differences of university students on past growth experiences, plan elaboration, and so on.In addition, using cognitive, affective, and behavioral indicators, the research designed three experiments to explore the influences of different styles of future thought on behavior commitment of university students. The main findings of the research are as follows:(1) Future time perspective includes general future time perspective and specific-domain future time perspective. The factor analyses show that general future time perspective of university students consist of five factors, namely behavioral commitment, future efficacy, far-reach goal orientation, future purpose consciousness, future image; specific-domain future time perspective of university students consist of three factors, namely goal (future extension), plan, evaluation. The study demonstrated the two questionnaires of future time perspective have good reliability and validity.(2) With respect to the behavio...