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

长期以来，人们一直认为人格是稳定的。直到最近的纵向研究才表明，人格在一生中会发展和变化，人们的人格发展各不相同。然而，这项研究在很大程度上仍然是对平均和差异变化的描述。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背景的作用来解决这个问题。整合寿命理论和人格心理学的方法，我计划调查一个主要的生活转变，从大学到工作的转变，如何推动人格发展在年轻的成年人，人格变化最大的生命阶段。具体来说，我的目标是研究如何在日常生活中展开这种过渡，以获得洞察过程中的上下文变化触发的过渡。这需要使用高分辨率前瞻性纵向研究，结合联合收割机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，在工作过渡期间每年和每天评估广泛的个性和背景结构。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）工作的过渡如何影响规范人格的发展？2)在向工作过渡的过程中，个性发展的个体差异是什么？（3）工作过渡后的规范变化和个体差异变化的机制是什么，如人格状态、社会关系、动机和情感的变化？在两位日记法专家的支持下，我将运用多层次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大大有助于我们理解从大学到工作过渡期间人格发展（个体差异）的机制。因此，这个项目可以帮助提供新的见解，为什么性格在整个生命周期中会发生变化。

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.