Parenting Reflection paper

The Development of Purpose During Adolescence

William Damon, Jenni Menon, and Kendall Cotton Bronk Stanford University

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 ar- ticle 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.

When Victor Frankl published the English edition of Man’s Search for Meaning in 1959, the book’s instant influence forced psychology to come to terms with the primary importance of high-level belief systems that had been considered derivative or epi-phenomenal by the major theories.1 The notion that ethereal constructs such as “meaning” and “purpose” could make a differ- ence—that they could motivate someone to do some- thing, or even shape a person’s basic choices about how to live—seemed impossibly soft-headed and sentimen- tal to mainstream psychologists of that time. If the be- haviorist and psychoanalytic schools (the two best-known bodies of psychological work at midcentury) agreed on anything at all, it was that mean- ing, purpose, and other such belief systems were the products of more fundamental drives; that they were de- pendant on the drives for their shape, substance, and very existence; and that meaning and purpose were no more than marginal factors in behavioral development.

To this entrenched materialist position, Frankl (1959) wrote (in the non-“degenderized” language of his day):

Man’s search for meaning is a primary force in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction for- mations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values! (p. 121)

Frankl’s vision was forged in the flames of Nazi cruelty. After the murder of his wife, parents, and grandparents, Frankl suffered through 3 years of slave labor, torture, starvation rations, and other harsh indignities, barely eking out an existence as concen- tration camp inmate #119104. (Frankl originally in- tended to publish his book under his inmate number alone, until friends persuaded him that the book’s message about how to bear inhumane circumstances would be better promoted by a named authorship.) In light of the horrific experience that fueled Frankl’s vi- sion, it is understandable that his analysis would em- phasize the ways in which high-level belief systems can enable people to endure life’s hardships. Frankl put meaning and purpose on the psychological map by assigning them the place that his own heroic strug- gles had prepared him best to recognize: the shelter- ing fortress in a world of constant threat.

A recent shift in academy psychology, led by Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi, and others in the “positive

Applied Developmental Science 2003, Vol. 7, No. 3, 119–128

Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Preparation of this article was supported, in part, by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The first author thanks the Thrive Foundation for Youth for support of his research on purpose and other related indicators of positive youth development. We also wish to thank Peter Osborn for his assistance in collecting materials for this article.

Requests for reprints should be sent to William Damon, Stanford University, School of Education , Cypress Hall, Bldg. “C”, Stanford, CA 94305-4145. E-mail: [email protected]

1The book’s initial 1946 edition was published in German under the title Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager—roughly translatable as “A psychologist experiences the concentration camp”—and was read more as a testimonial to surviving evil than a statement about psychology’s best future direction. Gordon Allport’s endorsement of the 1959 English edition helped make the book a force within both clinical and academic psychology, albeit to date more in the former than in the latter.

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psychology” movement, has opened the doors of the discipline’s perception to proactive as well as reactive sources of human motivation (see Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Much like Frankl, positive psychologists reject the idea that people’s goals and val- ues arise from basic drives such as hunger and sex, or from defense mechanisms such as sublimation and reac- tion formation. People can and do choose goals and val- ues that promote higher purposes, such as purposes of creativity, morality, and spirituality. Yet in contrast to Frankl, today’s emerging positive psychology move- ment does not assume that survival through psychologi- cal adaptation need be the ultimate desired direction, or telos, of human life. Leaders of the positive psychology movement use constructs such as “authentic happiness” (Seligman, 2002), “creativity” and “optimal experi- ence” or “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and “ulti- mate concerns” (Emmons, 1999) to capture the essence of our most lofty and enlightened desires.

The search for meaning and purpose is key to achieving the fortuitous ends envisioned by the posi- tive psychology movement, such as authentic happi- ness, flow, and creativity. In normal circumstances, it is a search that takes an offensive rather than defen- sive posture, especially when it is linked to external activities or accomplishments. As we note later, we believe that of the two terms (meaning and purpose), the purpose construct is the one that directly conveys the externally oriented quest that we have in mind. Our interest in youth purpose is triggered by a con- viction that it plays a powerfully generative role in development and, too, by our puzzlement over how seldom this role has been recognized in research or practice. For this reason, this article explores youth purpose, with special attention to its nature, signifi- cance, and developmental course.

Studies of Youth Purpose

Youth is a formative period for cultivating a sense of purpose. Identity theorists, from Erikson (1968) to Loevinger (1976), have marked adolescence as the pe- riod in the life-span when people first begin to dedicate themselves to systems of belief that reflect compelling purposes. Of course, this does not always happen: Some people never find anything to believe in beyond self-preservation or self-advancement. The clinical ob- servations of Erikson and his followers demonstrate that, when young people find nothing to dedicate them- selves to while growing up, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to acquire motivating belief systems later in life (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1980). The result is a sense of “drift” that can lead to personal as well as so- cial pathologies. Research has shown that the personal effects of purposelessness may include self-absorp- tion, depression, addictions, and a variety of psy-

cho-somatic ailments, and the social effects may in- clude deviant and destructive behavior, a lack of pro- ductivity, and an inability to sustain stable interper- sonal relations (Damon, 1995).

On the positive side, it is likely that purpose dur- ing youth leads to a number of desired outcomes, such as prosocial behavior, moral commitment, achievement, and high self-esteem. Theory and re- search on the emergence of moral identity during ad- olescence is consistent with this hypothesis (Damon & Gregory, 1997). However, direct evidence remains scarce because the necessary studies have not yet been done. We do know that some young people be- gin to define themselves in moral terms during the adolescent years, and in doing so they often refer to grand belief systems (Damon, 1983; Damon & Hart, 1992; Hart & Damon, 1988). It seems likely that pur- pose would play a role in the moral quest, but this possibility has not been investigated empirically.

In fact, much like psychology in general, the field of child and adolescent development has been slow to rec- ognize the importance of purpose. Youth behavior, ac- cording to the major theories, has been seen to be driven by a combination of factors of the following sort: genetic disposition; gender; congenital and birth effects; macrolevel social, historical, and economic conditions; cultural practices; early experiences with caregivers; birth order; sibling and peer relations; neighborhood and community composition; and schooling.

Theories differ in the weight that they give to each of these factors and in how they characterize the inter- actions among them. However, virtually all major the- ories portray young people as adapting to these “fact of life” (or “markers”) variables through low-level emo- tional or behavioral responses such as anxiety and stress avoidance, aggression, attachment and affilia- tion, popularity and status-seeking, shame and guilt, and achievement motivation for narrowly defined tasks such as school tests. There have been exceptions to this line of theorizing, although these have tended to be rare and limited in scope. Nevertheless, these exceptions provide a useful starting point for an examination of purpose in youth. Next we offer a brief survey of the relatively scarce research to date.

Definitional Matters

First, and not surprisingly for emerging areas of study, research on purpose has not always used the construct in similar ways. Indeed, many times this term has been used differently within the same work, and no one has attempted to draw boundaries be- tween the related terms purpose and meaning. As a prelude to reviewing the research, we propose a defi- nition of purpose that contains important distinctions between it and meaning, distinctions that have been

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implicit in the way that researchers have used the two terms and that also are consistent with our com- mon-language understanding of these terms.

Frankl (1959) himself used meaning and purpose in- terchangeably. He refers to purpose as “inner strength” (p. 76), as that which is ultimately responsible for the state of one’s inner self, as that which has an “inner hold” (p. 78) on the moral and spiritual self and as the “why” (p. 88) or reason for living, that motivates a person’s life . In Frankl’s theory, all these claims apply in the same way to meaning, so Frankl introduces no operational distinc- tion in using the term purpose. Similarly, many of the lines of research that we review next begin with a virtual equation of meaning and purpose. Ryff and Singer (1998), for example, stated that having purpose in life means “feeling that there is meaning in one’s present and past life” (p. 707).

Still, some researchers use the term purpose in a special way that does distinguish it from the broader concept of meaning. In this common but unarticulated usage, purpose is seen to be one subset of meaning. Baumeister’s discussion of purpose or “purposiveness” for example, considered it to be one of the “four needs of meaning,” alongside value, effi- cacy, and self-worth (Baumeister, 1991): Purpose is therefore one piece of the bigger picture of meaning. Similarly, Reker and Wong (1988) used purpose as one of the three descriptors of personal meaning. They see purpose as a side of a triangle of factors that constitute personal meaning, in which meaning is de- fined as “the cognizance of order, coherence and pur- pose in one’s existence, the pursuit and attainment of worthwhile goals, and an accompanying sense of ful- fillment” (p. 221).

As we discuss in the following, the notion of pur- pose also has been linked to other psychological pro- cesses in ways that the broader term meaning has not, again implying a special role for this particular com- ponent of meaning. In Emmons’s (1999) discussion of goals, motivations, and strivings, for instance, he claimed that goals that serve as a source of personal meaning can provide “unity and purpose” (p. 147) to peoples’ lives. Other researchers have linked purpose to identity development and future orientation, again in ways that go beyond claims about the role of meaning per se (see later). Benard (1991) pointed to a number of psychological outcomes specific to pur- pose, including goal-directedness, achievement, moti- vation, educational aspirations, healthy expectations, persistence, hopefulness, and a sense of a compelling future. We take this list as a preliminary yet telling indicator that purpose indeed has a special develop- mental role not captured by the more inclusive, dif- fuse, and pluralistic concept of meaning.

For our own operational definition of purpose, we offer the following: Purpose is a stable and general- ized intention to accomplish something that is at once

meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self. We choose this definition be- cause it highlights the following points:

1. Purpose is a goal of sorts, but it is more stable and far-reaching than low-level goals such as “to get to the movie on time” or “to find a park- ing place in town today.”

2. Purpose is a part of one’s personal search for meaning, but it also has an external component, the desire to make a difference in the world, to contribute to matters larger than the self.

3. Unlike meaning alone (which may or may not be oriented towards a defined end), purpose is always directed at an accomplishment towards which one can make progress.

This accomplishment may be material or nonmate- rial, external or internal, reachable or nonreachable: Its necessary characteristic is not its concreteness but the sense of direction that it provides in creating an objective for purpose.

Methods for Assessing Purpose and Its Development

Despite the relative scarcity of studies on this topic, methodological approaches used to study youth pur- pose and related constructs have been marked by great diversity. Approaches have ranged from qualitative ex- plorations of young peoples’ diaries and other sponta- neously written statements to more structured re- sponses to researchers’ specific questions and interviews. Because most instruments have been de- signed with adult, not adolescent, subjects in mind, and also because most do not operationalize purpose in the way that we do (or with any precision or even clarity), we have found that none of these measures captures all of the essential facets of purpose that we are interested in. Still, many of them have proven useful for particular aims; and, in the aggregate, they offer a valuable start- ing point for a more comprehensive methodology.

One early method was the use of private diaries to examine adolescent musings on purpose. Using the “fantasy life of adolescents, found in the diaries,” “es- says not written for public consumption,” and other “intimate documents” Inhelder and Piaget (1958, pp. 340–345) found that adolescents reflected on purpose without any prompting. The diary data were originally collected for a different research effort. Although this technique offers an effective way of seeing if young people contemplate purpose, the approach has limita-

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tions in that comments about purpose arise merely by chance and follow-up questions cannot be posed.

Crumbaugh and Maholick (1967) designed one of the most influential tools for evaluating purpose, or “the ontological significance of life from the point of view of the experiencing individual” (p. 184). Their instrument, the Purpose in Life (PIL) test,2 is a 20-item scale that uses the terms purpose and mean- ing synonymously. The PIL has served as the founda- tion for many instruments designed subsequently to assess purpose in various populations. For example, modified versions of the PIL have been administered to Chinese (Shek, 1993), geriatric (Hutzell, 1995), adult (Reker & Peacock, 1981), and adolescent popu- lations (Hutzell & Finck, 1994; Jeffries, 1995).

The PIL, and the measures based on it, have lim- ited applicability for our use. Based on the instru- ments, it appears as though life satisfaction is an im- portant aspect of Crumbaugh and Maholick’s (1967) definition of purpose. Including statements or ques- tions in the measures that relate to the concept pro- vide evidence for this assumption. For example, the PIL states, “Life to me seems - (1) completely routine - (7) always exciting” and “I am usually - (1) com- pletely bored - (7) enthusiastic, exuberant” (cited in Sayles, 1994, pp. 119–123). Similarly, modified ver- sions of the PIL ask, “In general my life seems dull (agree/disagree)” (Hutzell, 1995, p. 65) and “My life is running over with exciting good things - (1) strongly agree - (7) strongly disagree” (Reker & Pea- cock, 1981, pp. 266–267). These examples also dem- onstrate how closely measures designed subsequent to the PIL resemble the original survey. The concept of life satisfaction is not a requisite component of our definition of purpose. Further, an other-orientation, or a concern for the world beyond oneself, is an essen- tial part of our conception of purpose but is not a con- sideration of these instruments. Accordingly, none of these tools is designed to capture such a distinction.

Francis and colleagues, interested in adolescent purpose, have explored purpose with a 1-item scale that asks adolescent participants to agree or disagree to some degree with the following statement: “I feel my life has a sense of purpose” (Francis, 2000; Fran- cis & Burton, 1994; Francis & Evans, 1996; Robbins & Francis, 2000). Recognizing the shortcomings of a single-item measure, Francis and colleagues later tried to use Crumbaugh and Maholick’s (1967) PIL test but found it unsuitable to working with adoles- cents. Consequently, they developed their own instru- ment, the Purpose in Life Scale (PILS; Robbins &

Francis, 2000). Unfortunately, neither the 1-item test nor the PILS test includes a concern for the external world in its conception of purpose.

Another group of research methods focuses on the broad construct of meaning. Reker and Wong (1988) constructed an instrument, the Sources of Meaning Profile (SOMP), to measure the sources and degree of personal meaning in one’s life at different ages. Ten years later, through a series of studies, Wong (1998) developed the Personal Meaning Profile (PMP) which aimed to gauge meaningfulness in life in gen- eral.3 De Vogler and Ebersole (1980) explored mean- ing through their Meaning Essay Document, a ques- tionnaire that asked participants to describe and rank their three most important meanings and to list a con- crete experience associated with each. Each of these methods, the PMP, the SOMP, and the Meaning Es- say Document, are useful guides for us, but they mea- sure meaning not purpose. Meaning, as described previously, encompasses a larger sphere of important life aspirations, whereas purpose denotes only those goals that touch the lives of others.

Another cluster of instruments, although looking at purpose in somewhat distinct ways, all point to a con- nection between psychological health and purpose. For example, Antonovsky (1987) developed the Sense of Coherence construct in an attempt to understand why some people are less likely to be adversely affected by stressful environments than others. This construct ad- dresses an individual’s perceptions of the comprehen- sibility, manageability, and meaningfulness of his or her environment and is based at least partly on the idea that those who find meaning in life or in an event are both psychologically and physically healthier than those who do not. To measure the construct, Antonovsky developed the Orientation to Life Ques- tionnaire, which can be administered in a number of forms. Battista and Almond (1973) also included an as- pect of well-being in their vision of purpose. Accord- ing to Battista and Almond, a meaningful life, or a pos- itive life regard, is “an individual’s belief that he is fulfilling his life as it is understood in terms of his highly valued life-framework of life-goals” (p. 413). In a critique of Battista and Almond’s study by Debats (1998), scores were found to correlate positively with happiness and self-esteem and negatively with psycho- logical distress. Shortly thereafter, Debats created the Life Regard Index–Revised version (LRI–R), which changed some of the wording and the response mecha- nism. Carol Ryff’s (1989) research regarded purpose as an indicator of psychological well-being. Ryff de- veloped the Scales of Psychological Well-Being in- tended to measure well-being in middle-aged popula-

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2The PIL test can be found in Sayles, M. L. (1994). Adolescents’ purpose in life and engagement in risky behaviors: differences by gender and ethnicity. (Doctoral Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Greensboro.) Dissertation Abstracts International, 55, 09A 2727.

3The SOMP can be found in Prager, E. (1998). Observations of personal meaning in sources for Israeli age cohorts. Aging and Men- tal Health, 2, 2, 128–136.

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tions. Her instrument can be administered in a variety of forms.

Three chief problems exist with using this group of tools to gauge youth purpose. First, purpose need not be necessarily associated with psychological well-being. Although we may surmise that purposeful people will often be psychologically healthy, it is not a necessary condition, according to our definition. Second, the conception of purpose espoused by these measures does not always include the orientation to- ward the external world that our definition does. Finally, these scales are designed with adult partici- pants in mind, not adolescents, and some statements, although not entirely irrelevant to youth, are not as appropriate for younger participants as for older ones.

Instruments designed for younger populations do exist. Two are used in conjunction with Chickering and Reisser’s (1993) work on the seven vectors of college student development and are geared for 17- to 25-year-old college students. According to Chickering and Reisser, the seven vectors of devel- opment map identity development during the college years with each vector representing a series of de- velopmental tasks and desired outcomes. The vector most relevant to our work is one that focuses on de- veloping purpose. Two instruments exist to measure the extent to which college students have embraced a life purpose. The first one, The Student Develop- mental Task and Lifestyle Assessment is designed to assess three developmental tasks including estab- lishing and clarifying purpose, developing auton- omy, and developing mature interpersonal relation- ships (Winston, Miller, & Cooper, 1999). The second instrument, the Developing Purpose Inven- tory, was created by Barratt in 1977 to assess three distinct aspects of purpose: vocational recreational interests, vocational interests, and life style. For our purposes, these instruments’ focus on adolescents is useful, however, they were designed for use in uni- versities to assess student growth; not as tools for scholarly research. Further, both are inherently in- wardly looking. Neither probes the degree to which participants demonstrate a concern for others.

A cluster of instruments designed to explore a de- sire to positively impact others has emerged around the issue of generativity. The Loyola Generativity Scale, the Generativity Behavior Checklist, and the Life Course Interview are three tools designed to as- sess the level of generativity in adults (McAdams, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c). The Loyola Generativity Scale includes a list of 20 statements that participants either identify as personally relevant or not. The Generativity Behavior Checklist is a list of activities from which participants identify the ones they per- form. Finally, the Life Story Interview is an in-depth interview in which the participant weaves a life narra- tive complete with chapters, characters, and themes.

The interviewee is asked to “play the role of the sto- ryteller”(McAdams, 1995b) and share his or her past, present, and future in story form with the interviewer.

Although the three forms of generativity instru- ments may be applicable to research on youth pur- pose, there are conspicuous problems with using these particular measures. These instruments were designed for adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, not ad- olescents in their teens and 20s (McAdams, 2001). Generativity defines Erikson’s seventh stage of psychosocial development, appropriate for the former age range. However, adolescents are typically still working out issues of identity and intimacy, and an instrument designed to capture youth purpose would have to be designed with the appropriate develop- mental stage in mind. Additionally, these instruments are constructed to measure generativity, not purpose. Although similarities exist, the terms are not synony- mous. Generativity describes adults’ concerns for leaving behind a positive legacy and for making con- tributions that will outlive themselves. For example, one could reflect on her role as a mother as a genera- tive act. In this way generativity is backward looking whereas purpose is forward looking. Questions de- signed to survey purpose need to focus on issues of future orientation, goals, and guiding forces that di- rect a young person through life.

Empirical Research on the Development of Purpose in Youth

The research that we review below most often follows the same pattern as Frankl’s original treatise in emphasizing the defensive and healing roles of purpose. So, for example, Benard’s (1991) observa- tions about research on psychological attributes re- lated to purpose are in the context of her program of research on youth “resiliency.” This assumes a back- ground of danger, stress, and deficit in young peo- ple’s lives, all of which must be overcome by the de- velopment of a personal resiliency borne of protective factors such as purpose. By the same logic, Erikson (1968) pointed to purpose as an effec- tive means of helping to resolve a young person’s identity “crisis.” Again, the basic vision is that of a youngster “up against it,” in danger of falling into the swamp of “identity diffusion,” with the acquisi- tion of purpose offering one lifeline out. Similarly, Inhelder and Piaget (1958) concluded that the ex- pressions of lofty aspirations, which they had ob- served in adolescents—such as becoming great thinkers, world leaders, and solution-finders for hu- manity’s deepest philosophical and societal prob- lems—were merely manifestations of youths’ “ego-

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tism,” or a “sophisticated game of compensation functions” (pp. 344–345).

Accordingly, although we find much value in the in- sights of the writers whom we review, we note here their pervasive negative bias towards the situations and ca- pacities of young people. Possibly such a bias is natural for an initial psychological foray into unexplored terri- tory, but it clearly is a bias that needs to be corrected by future studies that reflect a more positive view of young people and a vision of purpose’s proactive as well as de- fensive roles in behavioral development.

Studies of youth purpose have been scattered across inquiries into cognitive, emotional, moral, motiva- tional, and religious development. What we know about purpose comes to us from findings provided by application of the various measures discussed. They provide some insight into its possible variations across age, gender, ethnicity, and other variables and show that purpose is not an illusory feature of youth develop- ment but really exists and can be probed for.

Fry (1998) observed that purpose, as interpreted as nonselfish and other-oriented, is salient for youth. Fry’s interviews revealed that most youths’ “valuation systems,” although biased toward self-enrichment, combined with concerns of cooperation with others outside of themselves. Of course, most researchers do not identify purpose primarily with intentions that transcend the self as Fry and we do. Two better-docu- mented exceptions have been carried out with adults, however, and are worth mentioning because they give us some insight into how nonselfish intentions and commitments might affect youth. In an examination of the postadolescent years, a study by Daloz, Keens, Keens, Parks, and Parks (1996) traced the lives of in- dividuals who committed themselves to the common good and concluded that it is important for self-devel- opment in all phases of life for people to dedicate themselves to causes greater than the self. The finding is in accord with an earlier study by Colby and Damon (1992) that looked at adults with high levels of moral commitment.

Purpose is expressed differently by young people than it is by adults. Inhelder and Piaget’s (1958) work showed how adolescents express their other-oriented aspirations in grandiose and intense manners, much the way a child with a new physical skill parades it flamboyantly for all to view. It is likely that with fur- ther development comes both a more balanced per- spective on the skill during one’s youth and a declin- ing need to show it off. They also state that sometimes the life programs that youth adopt have “a real influence on the individual’s later growth, and it may even be that a person discovers in his adolescent jottings an outline of some ideas which he has really fulfilled since” (pp. 334–335). This conclusion was supported by Erikson’s (1968) observations on the developmental significance of belief systems for ado-

lescent identity formation and the life choices that follow.

The most common work on purpose is a variety of studies that utilize Crumbaugh and Maholick’s (1967) PIL. In the original study conducted by the authors, results revealed that the PIL distinguishes significantly between psychiatric patient and nonpatient populations. A consistent progression of scores was found, with graduate students scoring highest and hospitalized patients scoring lowest. This was the beginning of a trend that looked at the rela- tion between purpose and a number of maladaptive behaviors and outcomes. For example, studies sug- gest a relation between lower scores on the PIL and drug involvement (Noblejas de la Flor, 1997; Padelford, 1974), young peoples’ participation in risky and antisocial behaviors, (Sappington & Kelly, 1995; Sayles, 1994), and alcoholism (Schlesinger, Susman, & Koenigsberg, 1990; Waisberg & Porter, 1994). On the more positive side, the PIL has been related to young people’s commitment to social ac- tion (Butler, 1968) and is a mediating factor between religiosity and happiness (French & Joseph, 1999). Thus a sense of purpose is connected to health and productive behaviors in all their manifestations—psy- chologically, socially, and physically.

This finding tends to be confirmed by other mea- sures too, although its finer details need to be revis- ited given that these measures differ in their ap- proaches and frequency of use. Although seldomly used, Hutzell’s Life Purpose Questionnaire (Hutzell, 1995; Hutzell & Finck, 1994) shows that purpose is negatively correlated with psychopathology (Kish & Moddy, 1989): Higher scores on McAdam’s (2001) three complementary scales of “generativity” are as- sociated with better parenting, as well as higher levels of social activity and political activism, higher life satisfaction, happiness, self esteem, less depression, and greater well-being; and work using Carol Ryff’s (Keyes, Shmotkin, & Ryff, 2002) Scales of Well-Be- ing associates a subjective sense of well-being with psychological well-being, the latter which includes purpose. Using the Chinese Purpose in Life question- naire (C-PIL), Shek, Ma, and Cheung (1994) discov- ered that youth with lower purpose more frequently engage in antisocial behaviors and are more aggres- sive. Shek (1993) found in another study that high scores on the C-PIL were predictive of psychological well-being in Chinese undergraduates. Battista and Almond’s (1973) Life Regard Index suggested that experienced meaning in life correlates with self es- teem, although it has been observed that results with this scale and its revised form (Debats, 1998) are un- certain (Harris & Standard, 2001). Antonovsky’s (1987) Orientation to Life Questionnaire has also generally found associations between coherence or purpose and physical and psychological health.

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Studies have also investigated age, gender, socioeco- nomic and cultural differences in purpose, but findings in these areas suggest that much work is still needed. Findings are also ambiguous when they are compared with studies using other measures. Whether there are gender differences in purpose for example, is uncertain. Some studies using the PIL, generativity scales, and the Developing Purpose Inventory suggest gender differ- ences (Barrat, 1977; Coffield & Buckalew, 1986; McAdams, 2001; Schlesinger, Susman & Koenigsberg, 1990), whereas other studies using the PIL and the Life Attitude Profile do not show differences (Meier & Ed- wards, 1974; Reker & Peacock, 1981; Sayles, 1994). Similarly, it is generally observed that older participants score higher on the PIL than do younger participants (Meier & Edwards, 1974; Sato & Tanaka, 1974), yet Ryff’s Well-Being Scales report age differences in the opposite direction (Ryff & Keyes, 1995).

Cultural and ethnic differences in purpose are also difficult to determine with great certainty from current research. One study suggests that young people across cultures develop similar levels of meaning and coher- ence (Bowman, 1996). Different measures and defini- tions of purpose make it difficult to determine cultural and ethnic differences for the most part. If there are dif- ferences in purpose across cultures, future work will need to determine just exactly where and why these differences exist.

Socioeconomic and social-status differences could also influence meaning and purpose, at least indirectly. Zeitchik (2000) used the PIL and found that having a higher income and being married correlated with a higher sense of purpose or meaning. The LRI is also strongly associated with marital status, a finding that makes sense considering that relationships is a fre- quently cited category in the literature (Debats, 1999; Debats, Drost, & Hansen, 1995; Debats, Van Der Lubbe, & Wezeman, 1993).

Another question about purpose is what kinds of in- tentions in life do people—including youth—express? This has led to some findings about categories of meaning and purpose. The PMP (Wong, 1998) has generally found that people have a wide range of expe- riences when asked to describe an “ideally meaningful life.” These categories of experience included goals, relatedness, and experiences like self-transcendence. The SOMP reveals that people of all ages agree that personal relationships, personal growth, meeting basic needs, participation in leisure activities, and the preser- vation of values and ideals are some common sources of personal meaning (Prager, 1996, 1998).

An even more extensive effort to address categories of purpose is the research program of De Vogler and Ebersole (1980, 1981, 1983). In their initial study (De Vogler & Ebersole, 1980), the investigators asked col- lege students to describe in writing the three most meaningful things in their lives and to rank these in or-

der of importance. The eight categories within which most young people’s meanings could be classified were relationships, service, growth, belief, existen- tial-hedonistic, obtaining, expression, and understand- ing. Thirteen and 14-year-olds also discussed meaning in life significantly when completing De Vogler and Ebersole’s (1983) tasks, and this group mentioned three new categories: activities, school, and appear- ance, and rarely mentioned the category of belief. Ear- lier, De Vogler and Ebersole’s (1981) research on adults’ categories of meaning added the categories of health and life work, and although the authors claimed that systematic comparison of this sample with their younger groups is not possible because of these new categories, it is evident that relationships is the most frequently mentioned category across age groups. Also, all age groups studied were similar in that they did not find significant meaning in materialism, mo- mentary pleasures or understanding for its own sake (p. 89). Showalter and Wagener (2000) replicated DeVogler and Ebersole’s 1983 study with a group of youth from a Christian summer camp in order to find out whether belief would be more important for reli- gious youth. Consequently, they hypothesized cor- rectly that for their group of youth, belief was a more outstanding category of meaning.

Values and beliefs, both religious and otherwise, affect scores on the PIL. Religiosity and spirituality predict higher scores on the PIL (Molcar & Stuempfig, 1988; Paloutzian, 1981; Zeitchik, 2000), yet the ways in which religiosity is viewed and ap- plied differs somewhat across studies. Students scor- ing low on the PIL are likely to have more investment in hedonistic values such as personal pleasure, excite- ment, and comfort (Crandall & Rasmussen, 1975), as well as happiness, mature love, and freedom (Paloutzian, 1981), and apparently, students with reli- gious beliefs also score higher on the C-PIL. The work of Francis and his colleagues show a connection between behavioral counterparts of religious beliefs and values. Francis and Burton (1994), for example, found that perceived purpose in life tends to increase with frequency of both church attendance and per- sonal prayer—behaviors that reflect religious beliefs. Francis and Evans (1996) found similar variable rela- tions when they analyzed the responses of youth in the United Kingdom, and Francis (2000) found posi- tive relations between purpose in life and religiosity.

Looking Forward: What We Need to Know About Youth Purpose and Its

Development

Our review of the prior research on youth meaning and purpose demonstrates that, despite the elusive-

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ness of these concepts, valid measurement not only is possible but has been in some part realized, at least to explore certain limited and preliminary questions. Also, the studies indicate that meaning and purpose are robust components of youth psychology: They are easy to elicit, even in open-ended research in which they are not the main focus and in studies in which the two constructs are loosely defined and distin- guished from one another, and operationalized by the most cursory of instruments (including, in one set of studies, a one-item indicator).

As for the findings, they confirm the centrality of meaning and purpose in adolescent lives. Moreover— and of special significance for our own thesis—the findings legitimize the special focus that we have placed on purpose, as distinct from the broader con- struct of personal meaning. Young people who express purpose, in the sense of a dedication to causes greater than the self, show high degrees of religiosity, consoli- dated identities, and deeper senses of meaning than those who do not experience purpose. In addition, the value of purpose to the self continues well beyond the adolescent period—indeed, throughout the rest of the life-span. All of this suggests that purpose plays a posi- tive role in self development as well as a generative one for the person’s contributions to society.

Yet the existing research leaves most of the press- ing questions unaddressed. The first of these is an essential one: What are the types of purpose that in- spire young people today? This question is ad- dressed by the “categories of purpose” research that we summarized in the prior section; however, as we noted in that summary, the findings thus far have been sketchy, inconclusive, and confounded with categories of the broader (and, we believe, less de- terminative) construct of personal meaning. More- over, exiting research on categories of purpose does not shed light on cultural, socioeconomic, or histori- cal-cohort differences that might affect the kinds of purposes that young people resonate to. It is reason- able to expect, for example, that a Muslim-American girl of the 21st Century may find causes to dedicate herself to which might have seemed unfamiliar to the mid-20th Century Swiss youngsters whose dia- ries Inhelder and Piaget examined. Or, possibly, there are common purposes that would inspire all these youngsters. We simply do not know. For the sake of scientific understanding as well as educa- tional and child-rearing practice, gaining knowledge about this matter is the first order of business. Among many reasons for this is that such under- standing will help us provide realistic and psycho- logically useful guidance to young people who are having difficultly finding purpose in today’s world.

A second order of business, especially urgent in our post-9/11 world, is answering the question of how to draw—and deal with—the crucial distinction between

purposes that promote the good and those that promote antisocial, inhumane, and destructive acts? As we know from recent world events, young people can be inspired by ignoble purposes—such as killing others and themselves in a spirit of hatred—just as they can be inspired by noble purposes. Any developmental analy- sis needs to distinguish between the two in order to es- tablish a telos (or developmental direction) for pro- cesses such as moral identity (see Cairns, 1998, for the rationale behind an apriori definition of developmental direction). That is, to determine whether a young per- son is on track in developing a positive moral identity, we first must make clear the distinction between noble purposes that serve humanity and ignoble purposes that stem from a desire to destroy.

One means of making this distinction was offered in Colby and Damon (1992) in their study of moral com- mitment among living moral exemplars. In collabora- tion with 20 distinguished scholars representing a wide range of ideological, moral, and religious beliefs, Colby and Damon developed criteria for identifying moral, as opposed to nonmoral, commitment. Among the criteria were the use of moral means in the pursuit of moral ends (i.e., a refusal to commit a wrongful act in the service of a supposedly rightful cause); a sense of perspective about one’s own limited capacity to know and do the right thing (i.e., the virtue of humil- ity); and a dedication to the common good (i.e., a com- mitment to decent and humane behavior without dis- crimination). We suggest here that these criteria, and perhaps others in the same vein, can be used to distin- guish ignoble from noble purposes, just as they can be used to weed out a Hitler or an Osama Bin Laden from those who legitimately can be called moral exemplars (Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa).

In the course of youth development, it may be that acquiring noble purposes discourages the acquisition of ignoble ones. For example, when a youngster is filled with a sense of purpose based on love, the young- ster may become too well-centered to drift towards ha- tred. In contrast, a youngster without a noble purpose may be like a vacuum that can be filled with unwhole- some elements of all kinds.

For this reason, it is important that we understand the processes and conditions responsible for cultivat- ing noble purposes in the young. Among the questions that the scholarship needs to answer are as follows:

1. What noble purposes have inspired young peo- ple throughout the course of history?

2. How have young people traditionally been in- troduced to these purposes?

3. What kinds of noble purposes are inspiring to- day’s young?

4. What kinds of noble purposes are youth today not responding to?

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5. What kinds of noble purposes are today’s edu- cational institutions advancing?

Answers to these questions will provide guidance both for theory building and practice in the field of youth development. For example, the historical com- parisons may reveal changing patterns of purpose that affect individual and societal development in ways that we may barely recognize at present. Traditional categories of youth purpose, such as family, commu- nity, faith, work, and country, may seem obsolete to today’s young; moreover, major educational and me- dia influences on the young may no longer support such purposes. If so, we would ask what, if any, pur- poses are replacing the traditional ones. If this is not the case then we need to determine which of the tra- ditional categories still have resonance and why. Per- haps certain categories—patriotism and faith come to mind—retain their importance to some populations of youth but not for others, whereas categories such as work, community, and family continue to be more universally held. Until the research is done, we can only speculate about this central driving force of per- sonal growth and social change.

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Received September 30, 2002 Final revision received January 27, 2003 Accepted January 28, 2003

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