Purpose Orientations Of Contemporary Chinese College Students:Psychological Perspective

Purpose in life is a stable and lasting motivational psychological disposition to something.It concerns about the reason one is living for,and different answers to this question directly determine individual's attitude toward to life and the way to live.Many discourses about purpose in life have been proposed by Chinese and Western philosophers,psychologists also have concerned about this issue for a long time,and empirical researches pay more and more attention on it in the contemporary era.Purpose in life has significant importance to both individual and social development.Most existing researches on purpose in life followed the view of existentialism psychology,which mainly focused on the extent to which one felt his/her life has purpose and direction.However,it is also important to understand the content of purpose systematically since it could set the direction for the purpose cultivation.In addition,most existing researches on purpose were based on western cultures,since purpose is culture-specific,their conclusions maybe not suitable for Chinese.Besides,Chinese college students are the important force to realize the Chinese Dream,however,some investigates have shown some of them were drifting and lacking of purpose.In this context,we reported a four-study program which took Chinese college students as samples and designed to figure out the factor structure of their purpose orientations,to descript their characteristic of purpose,to compare the ability of acquiring well-being of different purpose orientations,and also try to preliminary figure out the important influencers of purpose orientations.In Study 1,based on philosophical and psychological view related to purpose orientations,as well as empirical investigations,we proposed our theoretical construct,based on it,we developed and evaluated a muti-item scale of purpose orientations,the final scale included six factors whichnamed pleasure request,self-strengthening,quality improvement,family harmony,social achievements and social dedication.The reliability and validity of this questionnaire were satisfactory,it could be used as an effective tool for understanding college students' purpose orientations.In Study 2,taking 1238 Chinese college students as samples,we descripted the characteristics of contemporary college students' purpose orientations.It includes two sub-studies,one was reflecting the overall characteristics of college students' purpose orientations and also comparing their scores on purpose of different students divided by different demographic factors,the second sub-study was trying to classify college students into several types according to their purpose orientations.Results of Study 2 showed: in general,those college students were eager for all of six factors of purpose especially on family harmony,different students with different demographics,such as school type,major,family location or only-child or not,showed different characteristics on purpose;classification results showed that college students can be divided into four categories based on data-driven,one of which was dominated by the pursuit of quality improvement,represented 5% of the population,the other three types were more similar,all of them were dominated by family harmony,and the difference between them only was the importance of self-strengthening for them.Generally,Study 2 descripted the characteristics of contemporary Chinese college students' purpose orientations from various perspectives.On the foundation of Study 2,we explored whether the ability to acquire well-being of different purpose was various or not in Study 3,since we have hypothesized well-being was the ultimate goal of human being.Two sub-studies were designed to research this question.The first sub-study was a quantitative research,which adopted three kinds of well-being from different perspective—subjective well-being(SWB),psychological well-being(PWB)and social well-being—as indicators of well-being.The second sub-study was a qualitative research,which aimed to further repeatedly test and elaborate results of the quantitative study,since one or two of the results seemed contrary to the common sense.The overall results showed that most results from those two sub-studies were consistent,however,the relationship between pleasure request and SWB,and the relationships between social dedication and SWB or PWB were inconsistent,and this may be due to the difference of methods.In general,Study 2 showed: from the perspective of SWB,pleasure request and quality improvement seems to be less advantageous than other purpose orientations;from the point of view of PWB,it seemed that the pursuit of self-strengthening and social dedication were more advantageous,and the pleasure request and quality improvement seemed to be even less advantageous than others;from the perspective of social well-being,social purpose such as family harmony,social achievements,and social dedication were moreadvantageous than individual purpose orientations such as pleasure request,quality improvement and self-strengthening.This study maybe valuable in determining the direction of purpose cultivation.Study 4 probed the important determinants of purpose orientations preliminary,which included two sub-studies: first,we conducted in-depth interviews to explore the important factors that affected the purpose orientations;second,we explored the influence of one of them—inclusion of other in the self—on the purpose orientations in details by regression analysis.The qualitative findings showed that important factors affecting the purpose orientations included not only external factors such as community,family and transformative life events,but also internal factors such as knowledge about oneself,personal curiosity and exploration.Especially,to a large extent,the view on life(i.e.the relationship between oneself and others,the time perspective one holds)based on the interaction of external and internal factors determined purpose orientations.Quantitative results further confirmed that the degree of inclusion of other in the self affected purpose orientations,specifically,the greater the degree of including mother in the self,one was more likely to pursue family harmony and less to pursue pleasure request,besides,the higher including familiar others in the self,the more likely to pursue social achievements.All in all,we explored the purpose orientations of contemporary Chinese college students from the perspective of psychology systematically,this has a certain value both in theory and in application.In theory,the hierarchical structure and the scale of purpose orientations we have developed would contribute to the systematic classification of purpose.At the application level,the exploration and conclusion of this study would contribute to the purpose cultivation system.Nonetheless,this study has the following limitations,for example,the factor structures are not fit the theoretical hypothesis perfectly,and the comparison of the function only adopted well-being as the indicator,besides,the exploration on the influencers are quite primary.Future studies should improve the theoretical thinking,evaluate the function of different purpose orientations from various perspectives,and also should research on the influencers of purpose in life deeply and systematically.Besides,from the point of constructing perfect purpose cultivation system,the content we researched should be enriched such as including the pathway to pursue purpose,and researches could be conducted from different perspectives such as evolutionary or psychodynamics perspective.