High school students’ tenacity and flexibility in goal pursuit linked to life satisfaction and achievement on competencies tests.
- 1 April 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Educational Psychology
- Vol. 114 (3), 622-636
- https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000667
Abstract
Using the dual process theoretical framework (Brandtstadter & Rothermund, 2002), we examined whether the tendency to pursue goals tenaciously (TEN), in conjunction with the tendency to flexibly adjust one's preferences (FLEX), would be beneficial or detrimental for high school students' self-reported life satisfaction and achievement on tests of academic competencies. We used data from a sample of German high school students (N = 10,957) from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), and a combination of machine-learning-based psychometrics and latent structural equation modeling. The results showed that the interaction of TEN and FLEX was negatively associated with both outcomes of life satisfaction and test performance. Having high levels of both TEN and FLEX appear to have no benefit for students' life satisfaction and seem to be counterproductive for their achievement on competencies tests. The findings are consistent with the theory that having high levels of both TEN and FLEX would represent a regulatory dilemma in which the two tendencies work against each other. The results suggest the need for targeted interventions that build on students' personal strengths in tenacity or flexibility to minimize their regulatory dilemma of tenaciously pursuing goals while flexibly adapting them at the same time.Keywords
Funding Information
- German Federal Ministry for Education and Research
This publication has 53 references indexed in Scilit:
- Accommodative coping in early adolescence: An investigation of possible developmental componentsJournal of Adolescence, 2013
- How to Find an Appropriate Clustering for Mixed-Type Variables with Application to Socio-Economic StratificationJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics, 2013
- Probing for the multiplicative term in modern expectancy–value theory: A latent interaction modeling study.Journal of Educational Psychology, 2012
- Goal adjustment capacities, coping, and subjective well-being: The sample case of caregiving for a family member with mental illness.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011
- The abbreviation of personality, or how to measure 200 personality scales with 200 itemsJournal of Research in Personality, 2010
- Missing Data Analysis: Making It Work in the Real WorldAnnual Review of Psychology, 2009
- Adolescent goal content and pursuit: A review of the literature from the past 16 yearsDevelopmental Review, 2008
- The Tenacious Goal Pursuit and Flexible Goal Adjustment Scales: Examination of their ValidityEducational and Psychological Measurement, 2004
- The Life-Course Dynamics of Goal Pursuit and Goal Adjustment: A Two-Process FrameworkDevelopmental Review, 2002
- Developmental regulation across adulthood: Primary and secondary control of age-related challenges.Developmental Psychology, 1997