This work focused on investigating young adults during transition to a new educational environment. Emerging adulthood was approached from the context of two topical developmental tasks: finding a congenial social group and getting started in an education (Havighurst, 1948). The particular interest was to investigate the role of cognitive-motivational strategies, which young adults use to respond to the demands of this transition (Cantor, 1990; Nurmi, 1997). The results showed that achievement and social strategies contributed to individuals’ success in dealing with both the academic and the interpersonal challenges. Social strategies were also associated with online interpersonal behaviour and person perception, which mediated their impact on popularity and unpopularity. Moreover, strategies seemed to change on the basis of environmental feedback. However, they also showed high stability, and they formed reciprocal and cumulative associations with the feedback the individuals received on their success in dealing with educational transition: the use of functional strategies, such as optimism, defensive-pessimism and planning-orientation, increased their success, which in turn enhanced well-being and the further deployment of functional strategies, whereas the opposite was true in the case of dysfunctional strategies, such as self-handicapping and avoidance.
Although a considerable amount of research has been carried out on achievement strategies (see for reviews e.g. Abramson et al ., 1978; Burns & Seligman, 1991; Cantor & Kihlström, 1987; Dweck & Legget, 1988; Snyder & Smith, 1982), none of the studies have concentrated on finding out how typical the use of a certain strategy is. The first contribution of this study is to provide some answers to this question.
Four types of achievement strategy were identified in the two measurements reported in Article I . Optimistic strategy users were typified by an average amount of planning and a high level of positive affect, and a low level of negative affect in study-related situations. Defensive pessimists reported an extensive amount of reflective planning and a low level of positive affect, whereas those who deployed an impulsive strategy were typified by a high level of spontaneous task-initiation. Self-handicapping strategy users showed a high level of task-irrelevant behaviour and a low level of reflective planning.
The results showed that the majority of students displayed functional strategies in achievement contexts. Defensive pessimism was the most widely-used strategy: almost 40% of the students deployed it, whereas only 20% of them were classified as optimists. However, it is important to note that this study focused on young adults growing up in a particular culture and society, Finland. It has been suggested that individuals’ cognitions may vary across different cultures: for example, positive thinking is more common among American than among Finnish people (Nurmi, 1992b). There is also evidence of the cultural specificity of pessimism (Chang, 1996a; 1996b). Consequently, there is a need to replicate this study in other cultural contexts.
Only a small minority of students (15%) clearly displayed the maladaptive achievement strategy of self-handicapping in their first year at university. However, this figure increased to 23% in the course of their studies. This may reflect the dark side of academic freedom and competition: people who come to university have often been at the top of their class, and it may be frustrating for them to realise that, in the new environment, hard work may only lead to average success. This may explain some of the need for self-protective behaviour.
The deployment of impulsive achievement strategies declined from 27% to 19% among the students in the course of their studies. The reason for this finding can only be speculated, but it is possible that the unfamiliar and novel context made it difficult for them to plan their activities at the beginning of their studies.
The effectiveness of different types of strategy has been studied widely, but most of this research has been carried out in experimental settings. Therefore the second contribution of this work is that it has been carried out in real-life academic settings.
During the transition to the new educational environment the young adults’ achievement strategies systematically predisposed them to different types of environmental feedback. First, they predicted both academic success and satisfaction. Defensive pessimism was the most productive in the short term, but it was also the most emotionally stressful strategy. The opposite was the case with those, who deployed an optimistic strategy at the beginning of their studies. In the long term, these two strategies led to equally high achievement and well-being (a low level of depression and a high level of self-esteem).
These results show both similarities and differences with previous findings. Individuals who use optimistic strategies have been shown to have more positive and less negative affect than defensive pessimists (Norem & Illingwoth, 1993; Sanna, 1996; Showers, 1992), which was also the case in this study. However, previous studies have also documented some long-term costs of defensive pessimism (Cantor & Norem, 1989), which were not evident in this study. On the contrary, students who deployed this strategy of defensive pessimism in the third year of their studies showed similar levels of self-esteem and depression as the optimistic-strategy users. This result may be explained by the finding that high academic achievement increased the deployment of defensive pessimism, which means that the students who used this strategy in their third year had been highly successful.
The finding that the optimists passed fewer courses than the defensive pessimists during the first two years of their studies was unexpected, because in previous studies both strategies have been described as equally successful (e.g. Cantor & Norem, 1989; Norem & Cantor, 1986a; 1986b; Norem & Illingworth, 1993; Sanna, 1996; Showers, 1992), and optimistic expectations have been shown to have more benefits than negative consequences (for a review, see Armor & Taylor, 1998). However, since it has been suggested that defensive pessimism may be a more efficient strategy than optimism in situations in which anxiety is unavoidable (Cantor & Norem, 1989; Norem & Illingworth, 1993), it is possible that the availability of defensive pessimism is especially advantageous during the transition to a novel environment, which makes most people nervous and prone to stress (Caspi & Moffitt, 1993). Moreover, the overconfidence showed by the optimists may have deleterious effects if the new environment requires higher effort than the previous one (as might be expected when secondary school and university are compared), whereas the extensive amount of planning showed by defensive pessimists may facilitate their performance in a similar situation. Furthermore, it has been suggested that optimism may have maladaptive consequences when it is naive or passive, in other words, when it represents a belief that everything will be fine without the taking of any reasonable course of action (Armor & Taylor, 1998; Epstein & Katz, 1992; Epstein & Meier, 1989). Still, the constant planning showed by defensive pessimists may be psychologically debilitating, suggesting that in some cases the relationship between strategies and performance may be different to that between strategies and affect (Norem & Illingworth, 1993). After the students had spent three years at university, both strategies were equally successful, implying that, in the long run, optimism showed its benefits. The environment was also more familiar to the students at that point of time, which may partly explain the diminished importance of reflective planning.
Self-handicapping strategies had the most negative consequences for students’ well-being in the long run. Those who deployed them showed average levels of self-esteem, depression and satisfaction with their studies at the beginning of their first term, but those who still deployed them two years later showed the lowest levels of self-esteem and satisfaction with their studies, and the highest levels of depression. Overall, these findings are well in line with previous ideas that self-handicapping may offer some short-term, such as attributional, emotional and motivational, benefits which may even enhance performance (Deppe & Harackiewicz, 1996; Rhodewalt & Davison, 1986). However, in the long run, self-handicapping has been suggested to lead to a performance record that falls short of one’s true abilities, and these repeated failures may also lower individuals’ well-being (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Baumeister & Scher, 1988).
Impulsive strategy users showed an average level of academic achievement and well-being throughout the study. Since the deployment of an impulsive strategy showed no stability, nor was it explained by environmental feedback, it is possible that it is more situation-specific than the other strategies.
The results reported in Article III revealed that achievement strategies also predicted the positive and negative life events students experienced in the course of their first years at university. Moreover, it seems that different people are faced with different patterns of positive and negative events. A quarter of students enjoyed mainly positive life events during their first years at university, whereas approximately 10% faced mostly negative events. A similar number of students experienced many negative and many positive events, whereas about half of the participants had largely uneventful lives: they faced only a few positive and a few negative events. These findings provide novel information, suggesting that there are some people who mainly face either good or bad life events. Hence, the notion of lucky and unlucky people is not just groundless lay belief, as has sometimes been implied (e.g. Suh, Diener & Fujita, 1996). However, for most students, good and bad events occurred together, as has been found previously (Magnus, Diener, Fujita & Pavot, 1993; Suh et al ., 1996).
It was also shown that students who experienced mostly positive life events deployed the most active strategies and had the highest levels of well-being at the beginning of their studies. In achievement situations they were typified by a low level of pessimistic avoidance and a high level of self-serving attributional bias. They had high self-esteem and low levels of depression. The opposite pattern was true for those who faced many negative and only few positive events, whereas the strategies and well-being of the students who faced many or few positive and negative events were in between these two extremes. Overall, therefore, the results showed that the more functional achievement strategies the young adults deployed, and the higher their sense of well-being, the more positive life events they were predisposed to and vice versa.
There are no previous studies that focus on the prevalence of young adults’ social strategies, and the present work makes a contribution in this respect. Article II described how three types of social strategy were identified in two measurements, and replicated in one subsample. A planning-oriented strategy was typified by a high level of planning and a low level of negative feelings. Avoidant-strategy users showed high levels of social avoidance and negative affect, and a low level of positive affect. Impulsive-strategy users were typified by high levels of spontaneous task-initiation, positive affect and secondary-benefit seeking.
The results further revealed that planning-oriented and impulsive social strategies were the most widely used: 40% of the students deployed a planning-oriented strategy at the beginning of their studies, and this proportion increased to 57% during the first two years. The deployment of an impulsive strategy decreased in an interpersonal context: 51% of the students used them at the beginning of their studies, and this number declined to 29% during the study period. It seems that individuals show spontaneous activity in social situations immediately after the transition into a new interpersonal environment, whereas after a few years they plan their actions more carefully on the basis of their experience.
Only a small minority of the young adults (less than 10% at the beginning of the first semester) deployed an avoidant social strategy. This figure increased slightly to 14% in the course of their studies. On the basis of this study we can only speculate about the reasons for this finding, but it is possible that when students have spent a few years at university their interest in having a busy social life is lower than at the beginning of their studies, and therefore a more passive type of strategy is adopted. On the other hand, it is also possible that interpersonal problems increase during university studies, and this may explain the finding.
According to the findings of this work, social strategies predict young adults’ interpersonal success and satisfaction in a novel environment. The results reported in Article II showed that the students who deployed planning-oriented or impulsive strategies had equally high levels of well-being and social satisfaction: their self-esteem, popularity and satisfaction with peer relationships were higher, and depression and loneliness lower, than was found among avoidant strategy users. These findings are well in line with those that have highlighted the risks of social avoidance, which is typical of various types of maladaptive strategic patterns (e.g. Arkin et al., 1986; Juvonen, 1991; Langston & Cantor, 1990; Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Lord & Zimbardo, 1985). Moreover, the results reported in Article III showed that the deployment of an avoidant social strategy at the beginning of their studies was typical of students who faced many negative life events during the next few years. Positive life events, on the other hand, were predicted by a high level of optimistic planning, and a low level of social avoidance. Finally, the results reported in Article IV revealed that social strategies prospectively predicted subsequent sociometric status. For example, a high level of approach-orientation predicted popularity, and a low level of social avoidance predicted a controversial status, whereas a low level of approach-orientation predicted a neglected status.
Previous research on adults’ social strategies has relied more on self-report measures than external sources of information, such as peer nominations, and this made it difficult to compare the existing results with those obtained with children (Asher, Hymel & Renshaw, 1984). The findings reported in Article IV showed that peer nominations and sociometric status are useful and valid measures in adults, too: they were related to individuals’ social strategies, well-being and behaviours in ways that were theoretically meaningful and similar to what has been reported for children (Aydin, 1988; Coie & Kupersmidt, 1983; Crick & Ladd, 1993; Ladd, 1999; Newcomb et al ., 1993; Ollendick, Weist, Borden & Greene, 1992; Rose & Asher, 1999; Sletta, Valås & Skaalvik, 1996). Overall, social strategies were found to provide a basis for young adults’ success in initiating peer relationships, and for their subjective satisfaction with these relationships.
So far, studies investigating the mechanisms through which social strategies influence peer relationships have been sparse, especially among adults, and this was focused on in Article V . The results revealed, first, that social strategies were reflected in individuals’ on-line behaviours and perceptions in consistent ways (see also Eronen, 2000). The more approach-oriented strategy the students displayed, the more approach-oriented behaviours they showed according to their class mates. Avoidant strategy use increased both anxiety-avoidant and conflict-oriented behaviours. It also reflected a decreased tendency to perceive others as approach-oriented, and an increased tendency ro perceive them as conflict-oriented. Furthermore, it was through these on-line behavioural and perceptual processes that strategies influenced the popularity and unpopularity of the students. For example, approach-oriented strategy use increased approach-oriented behaviours, which increased popularity and decreased unpopularity. Therefore, social strategies, which constitute the database of one’s prior behaviour and success in social situations, seem to influence on-line perceptions and behaviours, which then influence the kind of feedback the individual receives from the environment (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Jones, 1986).
The findings of this dissertation suggest that achievement and social strategies develop on the basis of the feedback people receive about their success in dealing with developmental challenges (1) . These strategies also showed substantial stability throughout the transition period, which implies that they may be described as important aspects of individual personality.
When achievement strategies were focused on, it was found that high academic achievement increased the use of a defensive-pessimistic strategy, which predicted high academic achievement in the first place. Social strategies also seemed to form cumulative cycles involving environmental feedback: a planning-oriented strategy increased positive life events, which again increased the use of this style later on. Moreover, an avoidant strategy both decreased and was decreased by making new friends. Similar cycles were also identified when self-esteem and depression were studied: high self-esteem and low depression predisposed young adults to positive life events, which again made their self-esteem higher and depression lower than it was originally. The opposite was true among those who faced many negative life events during their studies.
High stability in achievement and social strategies and the way individuals seemed to sustain themselves through progressive accumulation of the consequences could be considered an example of cumulative continuity of personality (Caspi et al., 1989). This could be conceptualised in numerous other ways, such as the Matthew effect, a self-perpetuating cycle, a downward spiral, the snow-balling effect, a vicious circle and a coercive circle (for a review, see Aunola, Leskinen, Onatsu-Arvilommi & Nurmi, 2000).
The results reported in Article V provided information about the mechanisms promoting continuity in social strategies and well-being. First of all, avoidant strategy use was related to rather self-protective and restricted behaviours, and to perceptions of others. Theses types of behaviours and perceptions may make it difficult to establish novel friendships, and, consequently, they lowered students’ popularity and increased their unpopularity. Moreover, it seems as if the positive or negative tone of an individual’s perceptions is signaled to others through behaviour, which again creates self-fulfilling prophesies maintaining and reinforcing the type of strategy he or she deployed in the first place (e.g. Jones, 1986). This could be considered an example of interactional continuity , which has been suggested to arise when an individual’s interactional style evokes reciprocal, sustaining responses from others in ongoing social interaction, and thereby reinstates the behaviour pattern across the individual’s life course (Caspi et al., 1989). These transactions could also be conceptualised as evocative effects of personality (Scarr, 1992). Similar types of process were also captured in the cross-lagged longitudinal study (Article IV ), in which social strategies, loneliness and evaluations of the group atmosphere predicted sociometric status, which again predicted the original variables.
According to the dynamic-interactionist paradigm, both personality and environment may change over longer periods of time, and such change may be due to both environmental influences on personality and personality influences on the environment (Magnusson, 1990). The findings of this study give some support to this view. For example, high academic achievement made students change their previous achievement strategy to defensive pessimism, satisfaction with their studies made them change from self-handicapping to some other strategy, and positive life events made them adopt a planning-oriented social strategy.
Whereas personality traits of young adults have been shown to be immune to changes in the environment (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998), the results of the present work showed that they influenced on achievement and social strategies (see also Caspi, Herbener & Ozer, 1992). This may be caused by their higher situation specificity (Cantor, 1990). Conceptualising personality from the social-cognitive framework may emphasise its flexibility more than if personality differences are described as stable personality traits (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Showers & Cantor, 1985), and therefore this framework may be especially useful when reciprocal processes of interaction with the environment are studied, or when intervention programmes are being developed. After all, individual personality is characterised by enormous adaptability alongside its stability (Epstein, 1990), and it may be the level of personality measure chosen that tilts the balance in favour of either one.
There are a few reasons to be cautious in making generalizations about the results presented here. First, all the participants in the study reported in Articles I , II and III were university students. People who come to university are well-educated and have been successful in their previous studies. This may have influenced the identified patterning of achievement and social strategies and life events and, consequently, there is an evident need to use a person-oriented approach to study the types of achievement and social strategy young adults deploy in other environments, such as comprehensive and vocational schools.
Second, the identification of four achievement and three social strategy groups in Articles I and II was based on the CAST method. Since this is a projective type of measure, it was difficult to compare the results found in this study to those that have been obtained in the United States using questionnaire-types of measure. However, similar types of achievement and social strategy were identified using the CAST as have been described before (Jones & Berglas, 1978; Langston & Cantor, 1989; Norem & Cantor, 1986a; 1986b), and this gives some support to the findings of this work. Moreover, the fact that the same achievement and social strategies were identified in two measurements, and that they were associated in expected ways with independent strategy measures, provides further support.
The sample size of students included in Article IV was relatively small. This was due to the fact that participants who did not meet the criteria of the sociometric-status classification were omitted from the analyses, and therefore the final sociometric-status groups were small, which in turn decreased the power of the statistical testing. However, because one of the main purposes was to compare the results found here among adults to those reported previously for children, sociometric-status groups were used instead of the separate variables popularity and unpopularity.
The greatest limitation of the analyses presented in Article V is their correlational nature. Although popularity, unpopularity, loneliness and class atmosphere were predicted in path analyses by social strategies, interpersonal behaviours and person perception, it is possible that some outcome variables may, in fact, influence the predictors rather than vice verca. For example, Nurmi and Salmela-Aro (1997) found recently in a longitudinal study that loneliness decreases approach-orientation. It has also been shown that feedback from the peer group shapes individuals’ self-perceptions (Boivin & Hymel, 1997). Consequently, there is an evident need to replicate some of the findings in a cross-lagged longitudinal study.
The fact that achievement and social strategies seemed to play an important role in the context of topical developmental tasks, the accumulation of positive and negative life events, and online behavioural and perceptual processes, provides a basis for the development of clinical applications. The stabilility of these patterns suggests that, at least partly, they are a dispositional part of individual personality. However, they also seemed to develop according to environmental feedback, which implies that there are situational factors that modify individuals’ cognitive-motivational patterns.
In academic environments, students’ desires to achieve good grades and avoid negative evaluation are often encouraged by the teachers because it has been thought to enhance their motivation to study. However, this may also reinforce their performance goals rather than their striving to learn (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). This, again, has been shown to have detrimental side effects: if students are oriented towards achievement and evaluation instead of learning, they have been shown to deploy helpless strategies if they assess their present abilities as low (Diener & Dweck, 1978; 1980). This fear of negative evaluation may create the need to prove certain abilities instead of improving them, which does not facilitate learning. This striving may be especially strong at university, where the competition among students is high. People who come to university have often been at the top of their class, and it may be frustrating for them to notice that, in the new environment, hard work may lead only to average success. Since they have not been used to coping with negative feedback, it might be useful, paradoxically, to teach them how to fail instead of teaching them ways to succeed.
It has been reported that people start to use immature strategies when they face unsolvable tasks (Diener & Dweck, 1978; 1980). Therefore it would seem to be essential to create a supportive atmosphere where failures are seen as a natural part of the learning process. This could be done by utilising principles of reattribution therapy: helping people to make external and unstable attributions of failure (e.g. I did not try hard enough, the task was too difficult) and internal and stable attributions of success (Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale, 1978). Moreover, it might also be useful to give students individual guidance and feedback during the time they are studying for an exam or writing an essay instead of giving them a grade after the final work has been done. This could also diminish intermittent feedback (e.g. getting a good grade after a low level of effort or vice versa), which has been shown to increase the deployment of self-handicapping strategy (Berglas & Jones, 1978; Berglas, 1990). Finally, group learning has also been suggested to be an effective way to encourage students to participate in and commit themselves to rather than competing with each other’s success (for a review, see Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson & Skon, 1981). This type of behaviour might be expected to facilitate the deployment of functional achievement strategies and to enhance learning. It could also enhance students’ peer contacts and therefore support their interpersonal well-being and the development of active social strategies as well.
There are several possibilities for clinical intervention in the cognitive and motivational patterns that regulate the interpersonal behaviour of individuals. Prominent approaches have been described in the context of the information-processing perspective (e.g. Daleiden & Vasey, 1997; Lochman & Lenhart, 1993). The model assumes that there are four points of entry for effective change in individuals’ cognitions: (1) attempting to change the encoding-stage process so that attention is no longer excessively allocated to one type of stimulus, such as that which signals the possibility of threat. The second point of entry (2) emphasises correction at the biased and distorted interpretation stage, such as when ambiguous information about other people is seen in a negative light, which was typical of the avoidant strategy users, and which has also been shown to be typical of anxious, aggressive and depressive individuals (e.g. Daleiden & Vasey, 1997; Hall & Davidson, 1996; Quiggle, Garber, Panak & Dodge, 1992; Waldman, 1996). Other common distortions during the interpretation stage include adopting a negative attributional style and expecting negative outcomes (Daleiden & Vasey, 1997). More adaptive self-talk and attributional style instead of anxious or threatening interpretations could therefore be encouraged (Abramson et al ., 1978; Kendall, 1994). The third stage of the model (3) involves interventions aimed at changing individuals’ goals. It has been shown that anxious, avoidant and depressive people usually want to avoid anxiety-provoking situations (Daleiden & Vasey, 1997; Quiggle et al ., 1992), and that they appraise their interpersonal goals negatively (Salmela-Aro & Nurmi, 1996). Consequently, interventions that encourage individuals to adopt a new goal, for example to confront the situation despite their anxious feelings, have been suggested to be useful (Daleiden & Vasey, 1997; Kendall, 1994). Finally, (4) increasing individuals’ ability to generate, select and enact effective responses and behaviours should result in improved performance (Daleiden & Vasey, 1997; Kazdin, 1987). It would be fruitful to practice both the production and deployment of adequate social strategies and interpersonal problem-solving skills.
The results of strategy research could be especially useful when community-based interventions are planned. The major idea is that they are conducted within the community, and therefore schools and universities are ideal places for them. These approaches emphasize the need to integrate and treat ``problem individuals" and adaptively behaving peers together (Kazdin, 1987). Various psycho-educational programmes that focus on learning about personal development, strategies and skills may be useful and not too time-demanding (see Brown, 1998). Supporting socialization into adulthood is a challenging task for teachers and other professionals involved young adults’ lives. If we are able to help them to accomplish their interpersonal and academic goals, we might expect such help to have cumulative and long-lasting positive effects on their future life-span development, behaviour and well-being.
The findings of this dissertation lead to the following conclusions. First, the achievement strategies young adults deploy contribute to their success in dealing with academic tasks, whereas social strategies influence their success in dealing with interpersonal challenges. Second, achievement and social strategies seem to change on the basis of environmental feedback. Third, both achievement and social strategies also showed high stability. Moreover, various kinds of positive and negative cycles between strategies and environmental feedback were identified, suggesting that adaptive strategies and high well-being facilitate young adults’ success in dealing with educational transition, which again maintains and increases the further deployment of adaptive strategies and a high level of well-being. Maladaptive strategies and low well-being seem to be sustained and enhanced by negative feedback during the transition.
Finally, social strategies were associated with online interpersonal behaviour and person perception, which mediated their impact on peer relationships. These findings emphasize the importance of investigating social strategies as complex factors that are interrelated with perceptual and behavioural processes, and this may help us to understand some of the key mechanisms that are responsible for the impact of social strategies on peer relationships.
1. It has been shown that inborn temperament also contributes to the development of cognitive-motivational strategies (e.g. Derryberry & Reed, 1994; Rothbart, 1989), and therefore I do not mean to suggest that environmental factors are the only thing that affect them, although present work they were concentrated on.