The Role of Goals in Navigating Individual Lives During Emerging Adulthood: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Number 130(J–B CAD Single Issue Child & Adolescent Development)

Emerging adulthood is a period of life during which individuals are faced with more transitions and life decisions than at any other stage of their lives. Such transitions require a substantial amount of individual effort, such as goal setting, planning, explorations, decision making, and commitments, through which young people handle their current life situation and direct their future lives. The authors in this volume shed light on these key psychological mechanisms by which young people navigate their lives by focusing on the role that goal setting and expectations play in directing emerging adults in the movement across this developmental stage. Considering the complexities and distinctive developmental nautre of this stage, the authors discuss questions such as which goals support and direct development and which may lead to adverse outcomes, and when are continued efforts to attain an aspired goal constructive and when are disengagement and the setting of a new goal preferred. Based on longitudinal data sets collected in different countries, the authors provide a discussion of these questions and offer new understandings in teh inevitable dilemmas young people face when required to balance between normative expectations and individual aspirations. This is the 130th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. The mission of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in the field of child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific "new direction" or research topic, and is edited by an expert or experts on that topic.

Table of Contents:
1. Understanding Emerging Adulthood from a Goal-Setting Perspective (Shmuel Shulman, Jari-Erik Nurmi). In this introductory chapter, the authors describe the role of goal setting and aspirations in individual development during emerging adult- hood and discuss ways in which goal processes affect individual trajectories and outcomes. 2. Personal Goals and Well-Being: How Do Young People Navigate Their Lives? (Katariina Salmela-Aro). The author addresses the role of personal goals to well-being from adolescence to emerging adulthood. 3. Goal Attainment, Goal Striving, and Well-Being During the 27 Transition to Adulthood: A Ten-Year U.S. National Longitudinal Study (Emily E. Messersmith, John E. Schulenberg). The authors analyze longitudinal relations between goal striving, goal completion, well-being, and self-efficacy during the transition to adulthood. 4. Holding On or Coming to Terms with Educational Underachievement: A Longitudinal Study of Ambition and Attainment (Mayumi Uno, Jeylan T. Mortimer, Minzee Kim, Michael Vuolo). The family of origin and early occupational experiences influence young adults propensity to maintain or give up on earlier, yet unrealized, aspirations to graduate from college. 5. Dynamics of Goal Pursuit and Personality Make-Up Among Emerging Adults: Typology, Change over Time, and Adaptation (Shmuel Shulman, Jari-Erik Nurmi). The authors show that the capability of setting realistic work and love goals during emerging adulthood reflects inner strengths and is associ- ated with adaptive outcomes. 6. Models of Developmental Regulation in Emerging Adulthood and Links to Symptomatology (Christian Skaletz, Inge Seiffge-Krenke). Based on a longitudinal study, different models of developmental regulation are tested in a sample of German emerging adults and are linked to indicators of psychological well-being. 7. Finding the Authentic Self in a Communal Culture: Developmental Goals in Emerging Adulthood (Miri Scharf, Ofra Mayseless). The authors argue that in post-modern Western cultures an autonomous time bubble that focuses on the present allows youngsters to forge a sense of authentic self, which contributes to their well-being and assists them in reintegration of long-term life goals. 8. The Ontogeny of Career Identities in Adolescence (Oksana Malanchuk, Emily E. Messersmith, Jacquelynne S. Eccles). The authors examine the increasing complexity in the development of occupational identity from early to late adolescence and relate early career identity formation to psychological well-being at ages nineteen and twenty-one. Index.