Purpose and goal pursuit as a self-sustaining system: Evidence of daily within-person reciprocity among adolescents in self-driven learning

Objective: Despite long-standing assumptions that a sense of purpose in life and goal pursuit are mutually supportive, empirical evidence of their reciprocity remains deficient. In the context of a unique out-of-school time program that empowers youth to pursue passions through self-driven learning, we examined whether purpose and one aspect of goal pursuit—perceptions of goal progress—work together to sustain themselves and each other over time. Method: Adolescents (N = 321) completed daily surveys throughout program enrollment (M_enrollment = 69.09 days). Through dynamic structural equation modeling, we derived within-person patterns of day-to-day prediction as well as individual differences in these patterns. Results: We found purpose and perceived goal progress exhibited significant daily inertia (i.e., autoregressive prediction) and reciprocity (i.e., cross-lagged prediction) at the within-person level. We also found initial evidence suggesting (a) tighter reciprocity was related to greater perceived goal progress overall and (b) people with greater purpose inertia may rely less on making goal progress to sustain momentum. Conclusions: With evidence of daily purpose-progress reciprocity, the field can look forward to replicating this work in other contexts, diving deeper into interesting patterns of within-person dynamics, and developing interventions to support youth striving.