The Development of Purpose During Adolescence

TLDR

Psychology has historically viewed purpose mainly as an adaptive response to threat and conflated it with personal meaning, overlooking its role as a motivator of positive youth development. The article seeks to answer urgent questions about how and whether contemporary youth develop positive purposes and what those purposes entail. It introduces a new operational definition of purpose that separates it from internal meaning and reviews relevant psychological studies on youth purpose development.

Abstract

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.