| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 96 === Aspiration is one of the critical components of‘self’. Markus and Nurius (1986) adopt‘future self’ and ‘possible self’ to describe what adolescents choose for their future. Aspiration expresses one’s hopes, personal values, and so it refers to personal life goals which in term provide a function of motivation to shape people’s behaviors. Various aspirations may also be related to different stable traits/personalities because we observe different people possess dramatically different life goals. Many researchers (Grouzet, Kasser, Ahuvia, Dols, Kim, Lau,
Ryan, Saunders, Schmuck & Sheldon, 2005; Kasser & Ryan, 1996; Schwartz’s, 1992) have examined contents of goals as a way of understanding how people organize their lives and the types of aims for which individuals strive. In this study, we use aspiration as the synonym for goal contents and the author aims to study whether Taiwan college students possess the goal contents drown from Western participants.
Based on the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000), Kasser and Ryan (1996) suggest that various goal contents specified by previous studies are scattered along an axis with one end as the ‘intrinsic’ goals (self-acceptance, affiliation, community feeling, and physical health fall in to this end) and the other, the‘extrinsic’ goals (financial success, image, and popularity). Grouzet, Kasser, Ahuvia, Dols, Kim, Lau, Ryan, Saunders, Schmuck and
Sheldon (2005) examine literature on motivation and personal goals leading them to broaden arrays of goals in Kasser and Ryan (1996) for four additional goals. Three of which were inspired by Schwartz’s (1992) work on values (i.e., conformity, safety, and hedonic), and the fourth goal is ‘spirituality’ which often emerges as an important striving for people (Emmons, 1999). Together there are 11 life goals revealed in several psychological models and empirical studies of American college students.
Three purposes of this study are, firstly, to translate and modify the Aspiration Index of Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996, 2001) and Grouzet et al. (2005) for use by Taiwan college
students. Secondly, the importance rating of and estimated chance of achieving various goals were compared between men and women. Finally, the relations and subjective categorization of 11 goals of Taiwan college students are sought.
Nine hundred and seventy college students (532 female and 438 male) volunteered to participate in fall of 2007. They were presented with 57 different “goals that you may have for the future” and were asked to rate (1) how important each goal is to you and (2) how many chances that each goal can be achieved by you, on two scales ranging from 1 to 9.
First, the proposed 11-factor structure of the Aspiration Index was examined by a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); however, the proposed measurement model was failed. ‘Physical health’ was highly correlated with ‘safety’, so did ‘conformity’ and ‘popularity.’Therefore, these 4 factors cannot be distinctively identified and 2 compositional factors (‘Physical health/safety’ and ‘conformity/popularity’) were extracted. This finding suggests that only 9 types of goals were separated and organized in Taiwan college students. This 9-factor measurement model of Aspiration Index had acceptable internal reliability and the convergent validity and discriminant validity were proved to be acceptable as well.
Second, Taiwan female college students paid much more attention to the goals of affiliation, self-acceptance, physical health/ safety and image; while males stress more on goals of hedonism. Males and females place the least weight on and estimate the least possibility to obtain the goal of spirituality which is obviously different from the results in the US university students.
Third, to examine the spatial structure of relations among 9 goal domains two statistical techniques were used, (1) MDS analyses for the test of the hypothesized two-dimensional goal structure and (2) Browne’s (1992) circular stochastic modeling (i.e., CIRCUM; Browne, 1995) for the test of the circumplex component of the hypothesized goal structure. The results of the MDS analyses suggest that two dimensions best summarized the
organization of the 9 goals. The perceptual map illustrates two dimensions, the first - intrinsic versus extrinsic. Five goals, affiliation, community feeling, physical health/safety, self-acceptance, conformity/popularity, were in the intrinsic end; while three other goals, financial success, image, and hedonism, are in the extrinsic end. Spirituality alone was singled out for the second dimension, self transcendent. In order to examine whether 9 goals organized themselves into a “circumplex structure”,
the author hypothesized that they could be ordered along the circumference of a circle. No matter for the whole sample, female only, or male only, the relationships among goals can be orderly placed along the circumference of a circle. The spatial structure of the goals was very similar to the circumplex fashion in which some goals were relatively closer (more coherent) to each other whereas others were far apart (in conflict) from each other.
The limitations and future directions of this study are in the following. First, because the samples came from some of the universities of Taiwan, it should be cautious to infer the results to other samples. Second, because the Aspiration Index was designed by Western researchers, it is possible that some goals that Taiwanese may pursue are different from the US college students. It would be worthwhile to develop an indigenized Taiwan version of
Aspiration Index. Third, this study adopted survey method, so it provides merely quantitative descriptions of college students' personal life goals and their relationships. Thus, a further qualitative, interview study in the future is suggested. Fourth, it would be worthwhile to investigate how those goals relate to a variety of other psychological constructs (i.e., happiness, well-being), and how the importance that people place on different goals changes
throughout the life span. Finally, spiritual issue becomes more and more important in modern Taiwan society in which conflict values approach this young generation. Colleges hardly include courses about spiritual issues in liberal art programs in the past 4 decades and it may need an alternation.
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