Contextual Influences on personality development during the transition from university to work
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Final Report Abstract
This project has been carried out at New York University, New York, USA, at the Department of Social Psychology in collaboration with Columbia University, New York, USA, at the Department of Social Psychology, together with two experts in intensive longitudinal data. Objective: The goal of the project was to study personality development, with a focus on selfesteem, during the transition from university to work. The transition from university to work is a major developmental milestone in young adulthood. It brings sudden, profound changes in everyday life including changes in the environmental demands that provide ample opportunities and challenges relevant for the self. These environmental changes likely vary across individuals. The transition therefore provides an ideal opportunity to study personality development. To date, research on whether and how the transition to work impacts personality development is scarce. The proposed project had three interrelated research aims: Aim 1: To study the average personality change during the transition, Aim 2: To study the individual differences of personality change during the transition, Aim 3: To study the mechanisms underlying individual differences in personality change during the transition with a focus on daily life experiences. We assessed N=209 27-year old students in Berlin and nearby cities from a representative range of disciplines in their last year of their master’s program (T1). They were assessed 14 months later, when they had graduated and half of them had started a full-time job (T2). Those who did not have a full-time job at T2 were either unemployed, did internships or part-time work and formed the comparison group. An intensive longitudinal design was applied that combined these long-term with high-resolution short-term assessments (i.e., 14-day daily diaries) at both T1 and T2. We compared mean-level change, rank-order stability and correlated change of personality and daily experiences of full-time job beginners and the comparison group. Aim 1: Our results suggested that starting a full-time job after university graduation does not generally lead to a considerable boost in self-esteem within the first year, but possibly to a small increase. Our findings suggest that young adults are, similar to the into-college experience, able to adapt to the university-to-job experience and thus maintain or even increase in their self-esteem. Aim 2: The results provided initial evidence that the transition from university to work can destabilize self-esteem: The comparison group had a stable sense of self-esteem typical for their age group. The full-time job group, however, followed different self-esteem trajectories: some increased but many individuals also decreased or stayed stable. This finding is in contrast with the assumption that self-esteem is highly stable in young adulthood. Aim 3: The changes in daily satisfying achievement-related experiences were related to changes in selfesteem: those who experienced an increase in success in daily life when transitioning from university to work increased in their self-esteem. The findings provide first evidence suggesting that the transition to work can modify self-esteem trajectories, which seem to depend at least partly on the degree to which job beginners succeed in their workrelated tasks in everyday life. The findings have important implications for future research on life transitions: Instead of considering life transitions as binary indicator of whether a life transition is accomplished or not, it seems to be more promising to take a closer look at people’s unique experiences during the transition. The findings also have important implications for future research on self-esteem development: Self-esteem could be considered as an indicator of developmental success: successful mastery of the transitional challenges in a certain life phase may convey a sense of accomplishment and hence, impact self-esteem. Practical Implications: This work has valuable implications for potential applications. Findings can help employers and educators to design prevention and treatment programs tailored at young adult’s unique needs, environments and developmental phases in order to help them successfully navigate the work transition. Several follow-up studies and two funded projects are underway that extend this line of research in several ways (including more waves, larger samples, different countries and richer information to illuminate the causal change processes).
Publications
- (2019). Self-esteem change during the transition from university to work. Journal of Personality
Reitz, A. K., Shrout, P. E., Denissen, J. A., Dufner, M., & Bolger, N.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12519) - (2020). Routinely randomize potential sources of measurement reactivity to estimate and adjust for biases in subjective reports. Psychological Methods
Arslan, R. C., Reitz, A. K., Driebe, J. C., Gerlach, T. M., & Penke, L.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000294)
