Designing Programs with a Purpose: To Promote Civic Engagement for Life

Curricular and co-curricular civic engagement activities and programs are analyzed in terms of their capacity to contribute to a common set of outcomes associated with nurturing civic-minded graduates: academic knowledge, familiarity with volunteering and nonprofit sector, knowledge of social issues, communication skills, diversity skills, self-efficacy, and intentions to be involved in communities. Different programs that promote civic-mindedness, developmental models, and assessment strategies that can contribute to program enhancement are presented.     

Preliminary Note on a General Purpose Recording Technique

The extent to which attitudes towards mental illness and the mentally ill were influenced by the respondent's own level of personal adjustment was studied for 77 female psychiatric aides. The data suggested that, for this sample, the two variables were relatively independent of each other.     

Purpose as personal

Ethics and Education R. S. Peters London: George Allen &; Unwin, Ltd., 1966 Pp. 333, $4.50     

Persevering with Positivity and Purpose: An Examination of Purpose Commitment and Positive Affect as Predictors of Grit

Grit, defined as a passion and perseverance for one’s goals, has been consistently demonstrated as an adaptive resource across multiple domains. Less explored, however, are the correlates of and sources from which grit is derived. The current studies examined two plausible candidates for promoting grit, positive affect and commitment to a purpose, using college student samples from Canada and the United States. Study 1 confirmed our predictions that grittier students tended to report greater positive affect and purpose commitment, and demonstrated that these variables appear to be unique and independent predictors of grit. Study 2 examined these claims using two-wave data collected across a semester, and found that while both purpose and positive affect were initially correlated with grit, only initial levels of purpose predicted grit at wave two. In other words, having a life direction may help more than positive affect when predicting who is likely to become grittier over a college semester. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Decision-Making: A Dilemma and a Purpose for Counseling

A goal of counseling is to help decision makers make good decisions. But what is meant by “good”? Two views are discussed: outcome and process. The former is concerned with real-life results after the decision is made, the latter with the quality of the deliberations during the decision-making process. The counselor's interaction occurs during the process and is in terms of the decision maker's statements about reality (rather than reality itself). These statements are often unrealistic in that they inaccurately reflect conditions in real life. Counselors should help decision makers change their inaccurate perceptions so that (1) process deliberations are more likely to lead to expected outcomes, and (2) the decision maker is more likely to be prepared for whatever outcomes occur.     

Purpose in Life, Satisfaction with Life, and Suicide Ideation in a Clinical Sample

This study examined the role of purpose in life and satisfaction with life in protecting against suicide ideation in a clinical psychiatric sample. Forty-nine psychiatric patients completed self-report measures of suicide ideation, purpose in life, satisfaction with life, neuroticism, depression, and social hopelessness. Zero-order correlations indicated significant associations between suicide ideation and the various predictors, in the hypothesized directions. Regression analyses illustrated that purpose in life and satisfaction with life accounted for significant additional variability in suicide ideation scores above and beyond that accounted for by the negative psychological factors alone. Purpose in life also mediated the relation between satisfaction with life and suicide ideation and moderated the relation between depression and suicide ideation. These findings demonstrate the potential value of attending to both resilience and pathology when building predictive models of suicide ideation and of attending to key existential themes when assessing and treating suicidal individuals.     

医学目的再思考

我国20年经济体制改革极大提高了我国的经济活力,目前我国的改革已经进入攻坚阶段,而医疗改革作为社会保障体系的重要环节却相对滞后。卫生改革初期所推行的一系列市场经济化措施曾起到过提高效益、稳定队伍等积极作用,但未从体制机制上解决医药卫生事业面临的深层次矛盾,随着改革的深入,以往的一些措施日显其弊端。为保证医药卫生事业的健康发展,重新思考和提出改革必须服从医学目的。     

Attribute Partitioning in Multiple Attribute Decision Making Problems for a Decision with a Purpose – a Fuzzy Approach

This work introduces a methodology to find solutions corresponding to different purposes in a multiple attribute decision‐making problem under fuzzy environment. The discernment of purpose‐based solutions becomes important when the problem is defined vaguely and solution is targeted to heterogeneous population. Depending on the purpose, for which the solution is sought, the attributes are identified and weighted in an appropriate proportion. The level of similarity between a pair of attributes plays an important role to determine the aggregated value of attributes specific to a purpose. Our work determines the similarity levels between a pair of attributes by calculating their maximum attainability in presence of each other. The achievement of an attribute in presence of another is represented as a fuzzy set in the unit interval. The crisp equivalents of the fuzzy sets in the unit interval are used to define their simultaneous satisfaction denoted as 1‐step relation. The 1‐step relation is extended to (m‐1)‐step relation to calculate the degree of attainability of the same pair of attributes in the presence of m (all) attributes. The different levels of (m‐1)‐step relations generate several partitions of the attributes corresponding to multiple purposes in the multiple attribute decision‐making problems. The degree of fulfilment of the purposes in the alternatives are numerically derived by first taking weighted average of attributes within the equivalence classes of a partition and then aggregating the values corresponding to equivalence classes through ordered weighted averaging. The methodology is illustrated with a numerical example. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mixed Methods in Youth Purpose: An Examination of Adolescent Self-Regulation and Purpose

Utilizing a relational developmental systems approach to examining character strengths, this article examines the connection between adolescents’ intentional self-regulation (ISR) with youth sense of purpose, using data from a large-scale evaluation of a youth development program in Scotland. Data were triangulated from multiple sources, including youth surveys and interviews as well as teacher assessments. Surveys were collected from 783 S2 (approximately seventh grade) pupils; teacher survey data were collected for 732 of these pupils. Telephone interviews were conducted with a subset of 29 adolescents. The data were analyzed with an innovative mixed-methods technique that allows qualitative interview data to underscore consistencies and disconnects with quantitative findings from both teacher and adolescent surveys. Results demonstrate a strong connection between ISR and purpose and many consistencies across measures of purpose.     

Time Structure and Purpose as a Mediator of Work-Life Linkages

This study explores time structure and purpose as a mediator of the relationship between the experience of work and well-being in life, taking into account personality factors. A recursive model is presented in which value attainment at work and job satisfaction are expected to positively affect life satisfaction directly and indirectly through their effects on time structure and purpose. A test of the model using questionnaire responses from 336 workers generally was supportive of the hypothesized relationships suggesting that one mechanism through which work may affect well-being is through work's influence on people's sense of time being spent in purposeful and meaningful ways. Support for the hypothesized role of personality in the model also was obtained. In general, these results are consistent with top-down and bottom-up theories of well-being suggesting that both types of processes likely operate in tandem. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Purpose as a form of identity capital for positive youth adjustment

Having a sense of purpose has been discussed as a developmental asset for youth and as an outgrowth of establishing a sense of identity. Using the identity capital model as a theoretical framework, 3 studies examined purpose as a mediator in the relationship between identity and well-being among adolescents and emerging adults. In Study 1A, (n = 110), purpose commitment was positively associated with positive affect, hope, happiness among adolescents, and fully mediated associations between identity commitment and these indices of well-being. These findings were replicated in Study 1B (n = 398), with a sample of emerging adults and using different measures of well-being. In Study 2, multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses examined the role of identity and purpose in the daily lives of adolescents (n = 135). Results showed that purpose commitment fully mediated the relationship between identity and changes in daily positive and negative affect. Overall, findings suggest that cultivating a sense of purpose in life may be an important mechanism through which a stable identity contributes to well-being.     

A Better Tomorrow: Toward a Stronger Science of Youth Purpose

Having a sense of purpose in life has been discussed as a psychological asset for promoting positive youth development. Yet confidence in the benefits of purpose has accumulated faster than rigorous confirmation of their existence among youth, using instruments and methods calibrated to the developmental stage of those under study. Here, the authors illuminate four problems this asymmetry creates for drawing inferences from extant research on youth purpose, namely its reliance on (1) unclear scientific criteria for distinguishing “youth” and measures that include developmentally presumptuous items, (2) single-informant and self-report methods, (3) misapplication of cross-sectional designs to test prospective or causal theories, and (4) analytic techniques insensitive to purpose content. In delineating these problems, the authors consider the extent to which the three empirical contributions included in this issue are responsive to each and may provide templates to guide future studies of youth purpose.     

Risk Behaviors Among Young Mexican American Gang-Associated Females: Sexual Relations, Partying, Substance Use, and Crime

This research focuses on young Mexican American girls who are not formal gang members yet participate in street-based activities of male gangs and engage in risk behaviors. These females comprise a larger proportion associated with male gangs in inner-city neighborhoods than actual female gang members. Using a qualitative design, the article presents a typology of Mexican American females that reveals a hierarchy based on exposure to four risk-related activities: sexual relations, partying, substance use, and crime. Findings illustrate how outcomes associated with these activities vary according to the girl's relationship to the male gang and status within the community. Also, regardless of their relationship to the gang, participation in these activities resulted in different degrees of negative outcomes. The study concludes that problems associated with these females must go beyond being viewed as individual problems but rather seen within the social, cultural, and economic conditions of their environment.     

Claremont Purpose Scale: A Measure that Assesses the Three Dimensions of Purpose among Adolescents

The 12-item Claremont Purpose Scale (CPS) was designed for use with adolescents, and it gauges all three dimensions of the purpose construct, including goal-directedness, personal meaning, and a beyond-the-self orientation. Repeated administration reveals promising psychometric properties. For instance, the CPS demonstrates excellent internal consistency (α = .916?.935) and convergent validity. In exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, items fell onto the three dimensions, and the measure accounted for variance on indicators of a beyond-the-self orientation above and beyond the PIL. In addition to discussing the measure’s creation and validation, suggested uses of the CPS are also addressed.