Positive and negative self-related goals and subjective well-being: A prospective study

To examine whether having self-related personal goals, or rather whether positive or negative appraisal of them, is associated with subjective well-being, 311 students were asked to complete the Personal Project Analysis (PPA) and revised Beck Depression Inventory, first at the beginning of their studies, and then 2 years later. After 3 years they were asked about the use of mental health services. Two groups of students were identified: (1) those with positive self-projects and (2) those with negative self-projects. The results showed that both positive and negative self-related projects showed stability across a 2-year period, but only negative ones were prospectively predicted by earlier depressive symptomatology. Although neither positive nor negative projects predicted depressive symptomatology, both predicted the use of mental health services.     

The Significance of Parents' Evaluations of their Own School for their Educational Attitudes

The study set out to examine parents' evaluations of the school they had attended and the role of these evaluations in the formation of parental attitudes towards education. A group of vocationally educated (N = 343) and a group of academically educated (N = 231) parents were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate the functioning of their school; they were also requested to indicate their opinions on a set of attitude statements and to predict their preschool-aged child's future direction in secondary education. The parents' evaluation of their schools averaged at satisfactory, with the highest grade given to the quality of the instruction and the lowest grades to the giving of encouragement and the capability of taking individual needs into consideration. The school evaluations were organized by the school generation and, in particular, by the educational position of the subject, so that those parents who had gone to the (new) comprehensive school and those who were university-educated gave more positive evaluations of their schools than did those who had gone to the (old) folk school and those who were vocationally educated. The critical educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the academically educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was negative, whereas the positive educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the vocationally educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was positive. With the vocationally educated parents, their school evaluation also organized their prediction of their child's secondary education: a positive evaluation raised and a negative evaluation lowered the likelihood of vocational education as the predicted alternative.     

The role of parents' self-esteem, mastery-orientation and social background in their parenting styles

In order to examine the extent to which parents' levels of education, financial resources, self-esteem, and their mastery-orientation versus task-avoidance are associated with their parenting styles and parental stress, data from two studies were analyzed. In Study I, parents of 105 6 to 7-year old children were asked to fill in scales measuring their parenting styles and parental stress, mastery-orientation, financial resources, and their level of education. In Study II, 235 parents were asked to fill in the same scales. An identical pattern of results was found in the two studies. Parents' self-esteem and their use of mastery-oriented strategy were found to be associated with authoritative parenting and low parental stress, whereas parents' low level of education was related to an authoritarian parenting style. The results further showed that the impact of parents' self-esteem on authoritative parenting and parental stress was partly mediated by their use of a mastery-oriented strategy.     

Expressions and Projections of Evil in Mass Violence

This article examines two recent school shooting cases in Finland, and the use of the concept of evil as a tool to discern the violence and cruelty of the incidents. The analysis is based on qualitative, focused interviews with local residents. Participants used the notion of evil to describe and understand school shootings and their perpetrators. Evil was mostly associated with the act of violence and with the perpetrators. Processing the experience of evil included the projection and externalization of evil. This process was associated with the fear of being labeled and reluctance to work through the traumatic experiences.     

“You be Sure Now to be Honest in Your Assessment”: Teaching and Learning Self-Assessment

When taking part in the everyday practices of the school, the pupil ‘metalearns’ implicit institutional knowledge about educability and its proper criteria. The aim of this study was to examine one important school practice, self-assessment: How is self-assessment ‘taught’ to children, what is assessed through the self-assessment method, how is self-assessment introduced to children, and how do they perceive those situations? The ethnographic research focused on the classroom situations of one class of first-graders during one autumn term. The data were collected by means of regular observation, video recordings, short interviews, documents, and informal conversations with the teachers, pupils and parents. The findings indicated that the frequency of self-assessment episodes was particularly high in the domains of writing, mathematics, and social skills and behaviour; self-assessment situations were a ‘natural’ part of everyday teaching practices. According to our observations, the result of the self-assessment was considerably explicit. The teacher made sure that the pupils assessed their performance in the way she wanted. The teaching of self-assessment also teaches the child what assessment criteria the school regards as important and how well the child fulfils these criteria. According to our analysis, these important assessment criteria are objectiveness (compliance to standard), honesty, and individuality (a product that ‘looks like’ its author). The children practised self-assessment actively and were apparently capable of assessing their own performance. Our results suggest that ‘the self’ in self-assessment is paradoxical: you can assess yourself as long as you assess the right things in the right way.     

The Use of Social Psychology in Rural Development? Two Readings of Rural Business Owners' Values

Rural development refers to diverse attempts being made to address the problems of rural communities. In Finland, rural development leans heavily on entrepreneurship and small business development. Rural development processes have a strong social psychological component that entails that psychological knowledge is crucial for rural development agents. Nevertheless, psychological knowledge has also been criticised for simplifying highly complex development processes and overstating the role of internal psychological factors. In this paper, we argue that, regarding the relevance and utility of psychological knowledge, the question is not only how extensively different factors are taken into account but also how knowledge about psychological factors is read and interpreted. In this paper, we focus on Finnish rural business owners' values and demonstrate that value survey data can be read from two different social psychological perspectives: those of substantialism and relationalism. Although data and the conducted analyses are kept constant, the two readings produce differing types of knowledge of rural business owners' values; one reveals what business owners ‘truly’ are like and the other informs how to best communicate with business owners. Both readings are potentially useful for rural development work. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finnish parents’ attitudes toward entrepreneurship education

This study set out to investigate parental attitudes toward entrepreneurship education as evaluative directing components of social representations. A nationwide sample of parents (N = 625) was asked to indicate their opinions on a set of statements about entrepreneurship education. The parents’ attitudinal orientation suggested that they would rather avoid entrepreneurship education than approach it. Additionally, parental evaluations contained indecision and polarised opinions, and most parents saw it as unlikely or were unsure whether their children would become entrepreneurs. Parental attitudes correlated with the established representations of education and subsequent policy stands, suggesting that entrepreneurship education has been made familiar by anchoring attitudes in the field of educational debates. It was suggested that current trends in educational policy and work life may stimulate the formation of polemical social representations pertaining to entrepreneurship education.     

Identity processing style and cognitive attributional strategies: similarities and difference across different contexts

Identity processing style refers to the manner in which individuals approach or manage to avoid identity relevant problems and decisions. Two studies were designed to investigate the relationship between identity style and the specific cognitive and attributional strategies youth deploy in achievement and affiliative contexts. In Study 1, 198 American late adolescents filled in the revised Identity Style Inventory and a Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire. In Study 2, 109 Finnish late adolescents filled in the same measures. Study 1 revealed that diffuse/avoidant‐oriented American youth relied on maladaptive strategies in both contexts. Information‐oriented youth engaged in more strategic planning than did their normative and diffuse/avoidant counterparts. Study 2 indicated an identical pattern of associations among the identity processing styles and cognitive and attributional strategies for Finnish youth in achievement but not in interpersonal settings. The results are discussed in the context of a social–cognitive theory of identity development. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Burnout among Finnish and Chinese university students

In this study the levels of experienced burnout of Finnish and Chinese university students are compared using School Burnout Inventory (SBI). This study is motivated by earlier studies, which suggest that the level of student burnout is different in the culturally distinct Finnish and Chinese university systems, but which are based on different research instruments for the two groups. The sample studied consisted of 3,035 Finnish students and 2,309 Chinese students. Because of the cross‐cultural nature of this study the level of structural equivalence of SBI between the cultural groups was examined and the effect of different response styles on the results was taken into account. Both standard and robust statistical methods were used for the analyses. The results showed that SBI with two extracted components is suitable for cross‐cultural analysis between Finnish and Chinese university students. Virtually no difference was found in experienced overall burnout between the Finnish and Chinese students, which means that both university systems contain factors causing similar levels of student burnout. This study also verified that controlling for the response styles is important in cross‐cultural studies as it was found to have a distinct effect on the results obtained from mean‐level comparisons.