| Everyone is growing up throughout his life.In the process of growth,one may be smooth sailing,and may also be full of frustrations.Sometimes we need to deal with the problems we face independently,and sometimes we need other people's help to get through the difficulties.Everyone is pursuing their own growth path,and the roads are different.Some people are actively involved in the process of growth,firmly grasp their fate in their own hands,and some let nature take its course,going with the flow.These are two different ways of growing,one is passive,and the other is active.Personal growth,especially the individual's active growth,is the topic what this study will talk about.Personal growth refers to a person's change in cognition,behavior and emotion in his life and this change may happen naturally with the individual's age increasing.It can also be an individual change caused by environmental factors,or by an individual's intentional change and growth.Robitschek defines this intentional personal growth process as personal growth initiative.Therefore,personal growth initiative means that the individual consciously and actively promotes and improves himself in the process of growth.However,most of the studies on personal growth initiative are concerned with college students or adults,and few studies with adolescent students.And the structures of personal growth initiative scale that different researchers compiled or revised are inconsistent.Simultaneously other issues on this research field are more cross-sectional researches,few longitudinal studies,poor intervention projects on personal growth initiative and fewer articles in domestic.Therefore,this study firstly attempts to give a definition of adolescent students'personal growth initiative based on the previous researches.Adolescent students'personal growth initiative refers that the young students plan their own path in life,overcome difficulties,strive to forge ahead,actively change themselves and chase the excellence in the process of their personal growth.Then this study tries to discuss adolescent students' personal growth initiative from multiple aspects of qualitative analysis,questionnaire development and test,developmental characteristics of adolescent students' personal growth initiative,developmental trajectory and intervention research.Specifically,this article includes 4 parts of research contents:(1)qualitative research based on grounded theory;(2)structure,characteristics,influencing factors of adolescent students' personal growth initiative;(3)relationship between adolescent students'personal growth initiative and mental health and its mechanisms;and(4)intervention research.Four major parts of the study are allocated to 7 chapters.Part 1:Qualitative research based on grounded theory(Chapter 3).To make the theory of adolescent students' personal growth initiative rooted in the personal growth of adolescent students,this part of the study encodes the text materials of adolescent students' personal growth by using grounded theory approach,to get the structure and influencing factors of adolescent students' personal growth initiative,and then the results are further discussed.This part can provide a theoretical basis for the next step of developing a measurement tool of adolescent students' personal growth initiative.Part 2:Structure,characteristics and influencing factors of adolescent students'personal growth initiative(Chapter 4,5,6,7).Chapter 4 focuses on the development of adolescent students' personal growth initiative scale,as well as its reliability,validity,factor structure and stability test across different groups.After the analysis based on grounded theory,this study,based on previous research literatures,compiles the initial items,then statistically analyzes and tests the items according to the general questionnaire development process.The study on developmental characteristics of adolescent students' personal growth initiative includes two parts.One is about developmental characteristics based on cross-sectional study(Chapter 5).This part focuses the analysis and exploration of the overall developmental trend and level of adolescent students' personal growth initiative mainly through simultaneously collecting the adolescent students' data of different grades and different age.The other is about developmental characteristics based on longitudinal study(Chapter 6).This part focuses the developmental trend of adolescent students' personal growth initiative with time through collecting the data from four time points at a certain time interval,and then discusses the time-invariant and time-variant covariates' influences on the developmental trend.The research on the influencing factors of adolescent students' personal growth initiative mainly investigates the influence of demographic variables(part of Chapter 5),individual and environmental factors(Chapter 7)on the adolescent students' personal growth initiative.Demographic variables mainly include the variables such as gender,family location,grade,study section,and only-child.Individual factors mainly contain the big five personality and core self-evaluations;environmental factors mainly are class and family environment.Part 3:Relationship between adolescent students' personal growth initiative and mental health and its mechanisms(Chapter 8).This part examines the relationship between adolescent students' personal growth initiative and mental health and its mechanisms in four studies.The first study discusses the relationship between adolescent students' personal growth initiative and the Keyes' mental health model.The second study discusses the relationship between adolescent students' personal growth initiative and posttraumatic growth.This part includes two topics,one of which is to examine the rumination's mediating effect between adolescent students' personal growth initiative and posttraumatic growth,the other of which is the examination of adolescent students'personal growth initiative's mediating and moderating effects between general self-efficacy and posttraumatic growth.The third study discusses the adolescent students'personal growth initiative's mediating and moderating effects between adolescent life events and depression.Part 4:Study on the intervention of adolescent students' personal growth initiative(Chapter 9).In this part,we will develop an intervention program or course suitable for young people to promote their personal growth initiative,and test whether it helps to improve the level of young students' personal growth initiative.An experiment is designed to carry out the intervention test with a total of 8 times in 2 months and then the effectiveness of intervention is assessed with statistical analysis.This study draws the following conclusions:1.The factors that affect adolescent students' personal growth initiative can be attributed to the internal causes and the external causes of growth.The structure of adolescent students' personal growth initiative is divided into 4 dimensions,namely,intentional change,growth path,growth resilience and growth barrier.2.The reliability and validity of adolescent students' personal growth initiative scale with 22 items and 4 dimensions were in conformity with the psychometrics standard.The fit index of the second-order single-factor model is very good.Meanwhile,the first-order four-factor model and the second-order two-factor model fit a good standard,which supports the four-factor structure of personal growth initiative and the division of cognitive components and behavioral components of personal growth initiative.3.The overall developmental level of adolescent students' personal growth initiative is relatively high from the analysis results of cross-sectional research data,and growth resilience,intentional change and growth path of young students are at a high level,while growth barrier is at a moderate level.From the angles of view of age and grade,adolescent students' personal growth initiative is a "W" trend in general.After analyzing the longitudinal research data,we find that developmental trajectory of junior high school students' personal growth initiative is a linear downward trend.The initial level and subsequent developmental trend have significant individual differences,and the trend of development is significantly related to the initial level.In the time-invariant covariate model,gender and grade have no significant effects on the initial level of adolescents' personal growth initiative.Sex has a non-statistically significant effect on slope,but grade has a significant effect on it.The higher the grade,the larger the slope.In the time-variant covariate model,positive affect has a significant positive impact on adolescent students' personal growth initiative,and negative affect has a significant negative impact on them at the four time points.4.Male and female students have significant differences in growth resilience,growth path and growth barrier,and there is no difference in intentional change and personal growth initiative.There are no differences in intentional change,growth path,growth resilience and growth barrier and personal growth initiative between the subjects from different family locations.There are significant differences in growth resilience,growth barrier and personal growth initiative among the subjects from different study sections,and no differences in intentional change and growth path.The scores of four dimensions and adolescent students' personal growth initiative are statistically same no matter whether the subjects are the only-child or not.Core self-evaluations,big five personality,family environment and class environment have a significant positive impact on adolescent students' personal growth initiative independently.The interaction between the individual and the environment factor is not significant when both factors are considered,and the dominant factors affecting adolescent students' personal growth initiative is the individual factors,especially personality.5.Adolescent students' personal growth initiative has a significant positive predictive effect on emotional,social and psychological well-being.Teenagers' personal growth initiative has a significant impact on posttraumatic growth,promotes posttraumatic growth through deliberate rumination and hinders it through intrusive rumnation.Adolescent students' personal growth initiative plays a significant mediating role between general self-efficacy and posttraumatic growth,however has no moderating effect between them.Adolescent students' personal growth initiative plays a significant mediating role between adolescent life events and depression,however has no moderating effect between them.6.The intervention program of 4 modules of growth education activities,inspirational education activities,group activities and career education activities help to improve the level of adolescent students' personal growth initiative.Finally,this article further discusses the main research results based on the theories of personal growth initiative,ecological systems theory,developmental contextualism,self-efficacy theory,depression's diathesis-stress model and posttraumatic growth theory,summarizes the main innovative points of this research and points out the limitations and prospects. |
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