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Category: Project

Description: Much work in personality and social psychology establishes that well-being is enhanced when people engage in meaningful goals and personal projects and maintain a high sense of self-efficacy for reaching those goals. This particular, pivotal moment in history (OSF posting 4/4/20) presents – in addition to its profound health threats – restrictions on established patterns of social life that, in turn, may degrade people’s self-efficacy for pursuing valued life goals. The present work is a mixed-methods study designed to survey people’s thoughts about their pursuit of life goals at this challenging time. Specifically, we are conducting a survey whose questionnaire, designed as a series of open-ended and scalar questions, asks people to consider and name an important goal they had before the world presented us with the current pivotal moment, and then to reassess their views of that goal now. Participants are asked to describe their self-efficacy beliefs (not named as such) toward the goal using words and rating it in numbers. They are asked if they care about the goal, and if they are still pursuing the goal to describe if and how this has changed. It is anticipated that links between self-efficacy, goals, and methods will be seen in individuals, that there will be polarity of decisions as to whether people quit or pursue their goal, and differences amongst ages and people from different countries. As of the time of OSF posting, data collection has begun. Data collection began on Friday 27 March 2020 online via a publicly accessible link ( https://chichpscyh.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9uHU1JblxmpAhOl ). Data collection will continue until a time point: Monday 6 April 2020. Participation is voluntary and anonymous. Restricting the data collection to this relatively small window of 10-days is anticipated to ensure data is collected while people are exposed to one set of conditions, namely restrictions on mobility (e.g. the directive/suggestion to 'stay at home’). After this date in the coming weeks, it is projected that medical facilities will rapidly reach capacity, and this could present added and complicated factors that could not be controlled with regard to people’s perception of their current situation, self-efficacy, and goals. The project is primarily exploratory in nature; it is not designed to test a singular hypothesis. The research team is trying to gather structured data on the question of how individuals are coping with significant life projects in the face of social disruptions. Write-ups of the project will describe it as such. Yet we do hypothesize that varying levels of self-efficacy for goal pursuit will be systematically associated with reports of commitment to, as opposed to abandonment of, goals and projects. We also plan *exploratory* analyses of the semantic content of goal descriptions. This project originated in, and was granted Ethical Approval approval through, the University of Chichester. The initial two researchers were Professor Laura Ritchie and Mr. Benjamin T. Sharpe. Data thus are initially stored in the UK, via the University of Chichester’s One Drive cloud, however participants have been informed that all data will be made publicly accessible in accordance with Open Access practices. The OSF posting is being done a collaborator on the project, Dr. Daniel Cervone of the University of Illinois at Chicago, because the senior investigator, Dr. Ritchie, encountered an obstacle at the OSF website (at which she could not enter England or United Kingdom as the storage of data location; this contributed to a delay in the posting of the project here at OSF). The storage of data at the OSF site thus has been selected as America. Data transfer will be in keeping with the ethics recommendations of both the University of Chichester and UIC.