Contextual Influences on personality development during the transition from university to work

长期以来，人们一直认为个性是稳定的。直到最近，纵向研究才表明，个性在一生中会发展和变化，人们的个性发展是不同的。然而，这项研究仍然在很大程度上描述了平均和差异的变化。人们对性格变化的原因知之甚少。在拟议的项目中，我的目标是通过研究不断变化的社会环境的作用来解决这个问题。结合生命周期理论和人格心理学的方法，我计划调查一个重大的人生转变，从大学到工作的转变，如何推动青年时期的人格发展，这是人格变化最大的生命阶段。具体来说，我的目标是研究这种转变是如何在日常生活中展开的，以便深入了解转变过程中由环境变化引发的过程。这就需要使用高分辨率的前瞻性纵向研究，结合长期和频繁的短期评估（即密集的纵向数据）。因此，我计划使用这样一个密集的纵向数据集，在每年和每天的基础上，在过渡到工作的过程中，评估广泛的个性和上下文结构。这些数据将使我能够解决三个主要的研究问题，这些问题将指导我提出的研究：1)向工作的过渡如何影响规范性人格发展？2)在向工作过渡的过程中，个性发展的个体差异是什么？3)职场转型过程中规范变化和个体差异的机制是什么，如人格状态、社会关系、动机和情感的变化？在两位日常日记方法的权威专家的支持下，我将运用多层次的建模方法来分析这些问题。总之，我相信这个项目的结果有可能对我们理解从大学到工作过渡期间人格发展的潜在机制（个体差异）做出重大贡献。因此，这个项目可以帮助提供新的见解，为什么性格会随着人的一生而改变。

Personality has long been thought to be stable. Only recently longitudinal research demonstrated that personality develops and changes over the lifespan and that people differ in their personality development. However, this research remains largely descriptive of the average and differential changes. Not much is known about why personality changes. In the proposed project, I aim to address this question by studying the role of the changing social contexts. Integrating approaches from lifespan theory and personality psychology, I plan to investigate how a major life transition, the transition from university to work, drives personality development in young adulthood, the life phase in which personality changes the most. Specifically, I aim to examine how this transition unfolds in daily life in order to get insights into the processes triggered by the contextual changes during the transition. This requires the use of high-resolution prospective longitudinal studies that combine long-term and frequent short-term assessments (i.e., intensive longitudinal data). I therefore plan to use such a intensive longitudinal data set that assessed a broad range of personality and contextual constructs both on a yearly- and a daily-basis across the transition to work. This data will allow me to address three major research questions that will guide my proposed research: 1) How does the transition to work affect normative personality development? 2) What are the individual differences in personality development during the transition to work? And 3) What are the mechanisms underlying the normative change and individual differences in change upon the transition to work, such as changes in personality states, social relationships, motives, and affect? With support from two leading experts on daily diary methods, I will apply multilevel modeling methods to analyze these questions. In sum, I believe that the results of this project have the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying (individual differences in) personality development during the transition from university to work. Hence, this project can help to provide new insights into why personality changes across the lifespan.