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Understanding how youth develop a purpose: A qualitative study among Chinese emerging adults

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Abstract

Understanding how youth develop a purpose in life could provide guidance for cultivating a positive purpose. This study explored this topic in a Chinese cultural context using in-depth interviews of 41 participants. Furthermore, we identified factors that are particularly important to a beyond-the-self purpose by comparing this with a self-oriented purpose. The findings revealed three pathways to purpose: proactive processes, involving active effort characterized by self-exploration and deepened self-knowledge; transformative processes, characterized by negative or positive major transformative life events; and reactive processes, involving the formation of purpose through external cultural and personal influences. Additionally, the findings indicate that compassion, gratitude, and family support are of particular importance for the development of a beyond-the-self purpose. These findings extend the existing theories and findings of purpose development; consequently, could help develop purpose-fostering interventions that aim to cultivate a positive purpose among youth.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated for this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. As Burrow, Hill, Ratner and Sumner (2018) suggested, a clear scientific criterion for distinguishing “youth” is necessary, and “youth” now must focus on choices related to long-term commitments such as worldviews, career paths, and mate selection. This theme of commitment carries through to emerging adulthood, though in different forms. Therefore, emerging adults are included in this study.

  2. In the following interview, two participants who scored high in self-strengthening on the CLPO Questionnaire reported that their dominant purpose was family harmony, with self-strengthening being their second or fourth dominant purpose. The findings from the interview were included in the study since these offered a deeper understanding on the matter.

  3. As there were exceedingly few participants who had social dedication as the dominant purpose, we instead chose participants who had adopted it as their second or third most important purpose. In fact, in a previous study of ours with a larger sample (N = 1238), only 0.8% of participants had social dedication as their dominant purpose.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to all fellows who assisted us to give out the online questionnaire and all respondents for their assistance. We also want to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18ZDA333).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China

    Tong Wang, Xu Qun You & Ying Li

  2. Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Xi Ting Huang

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  1. Tong Wang
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Correspondence to Xi Ting Huang.

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Wang, T., You, X.Q., Li, Y. et al. Understanding how youth develop a purpose: A qualitative study among Chinese emerging adults. Curr Psychol 41, 7824–7834 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01273-3

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