The Development of Purpose During Adolescence

By W. Damon, Jenni Menon, Kendall Cotton Bronk. Beyond the Self, 2003

697 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The field of psychology has been slow to recognize the importance of purpose for positive youth development. Until recently, purpose was understood, if at all, as a means of adapting to threatening conditions rather than as a motivator of good deeds and galvanizer of character growth. Moreover, in most psychological studies, purpose has been conflated with personal meaning, a broader and more internally oriented construct. This article offers a new operational definition of purpose that distinguishes it from meaning in an internalistic sense, and it reviews the existing psychological studies pertinent to the development of purpose during youth. The article identifies a number of urgent questions concerning how-and whether-young people today are acquiring positive purposes to dedicate themselves to and, if so, what the nature of today's youth purposes might be.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Safety Research, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/691e52b9ae789d27c4ae40fdcd9476d971037737

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Safety Research

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Claremont Purpose Scale: A Measure that Assesses the Three Dimensions of Purpose among Adolescents (2018, background): “In addition, findings reveal that the CPS is not as strongly correlated to life satisfaction or depression as the PIL, which has been a frequent criticism of that measure (Damon et al., 2003; Dyck, 1987).”
Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context1 (2019, background): “Purpose, defined by Damon, Menon, and Bronk (2003) as “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” (p. 121), contributes to greater prosocial behavior, self-esteem, achievement, and moral…”
Testing multidimensional models of youth civic engagement: Model comparisons, measurement invariance, and age differences (2017, background): “conceives of civic engagement broadly (Damon et al., 2003; Malin et al., 2015).”