Adaptation to the Transition out of Upper Secondary Education: Experiences, Memories, Self-Beliefs

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Neubauer
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455583836

This project examines the adaptation of emerging adults to the transition out of upper secondary education. This transition can be understood as a critical life event that provides both opportunities for positive development and growth, but also the risk for maladjustment and ill-being. Recurring on Self-Determination Theory, the project targets autonomous motivation and the fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as central predictors of adjustment. It is anticipated that need fulfillment and autonomous motivation are reciprocally related on different time scales (within days, across days, and across weeks), and that this mutually reinforcing circle is a central motor driving adaptation to this normative critical life event. In addition to research questions targeting antecedents and downstream consequences of emerging adults’ adaptation to this transition, this project will also test a novel theoretical account aiming to explain, how momentary experiences, memories of experiences and self-beliefs are related and become integrated across time. Prior research has shown that self-beliefs (such as general beliefs about one’s feelings and behaviors, or anticipatory beliefs about future outcomes) are non-perfectly related to actual feelings or behaviors when assessed on a momentary level and aggregated across time. How experiences become integrated into self-beliefs is not fully understood yet. The proposed framework emphasizes the crucial role of memories of experiences that are hypothesized to longitudinally translate accumulating experiences into more stable self-beliefs. Furthermore, the framework predicts that self-beliefs and experiences differentially predict different outcomes, with momentary experiences accounting for automated responses, and self-beliefs predicting deliberate future choices. The project employs a longitudinal design consisting of several intensive longitudinal measurement bursts: Participating students will be assessed twice before graduation and seven times after their transition out of upper secondary education, spanning a measurement period of more than three years. Repeated assessments of momentary experiences will be collected via ambulatory assessment in study participants’ daily lives. The focus of this work will be on both short-term adaptation measures (e.g., daily well-being and motivation) and long-term outcomes of the transition experience (e.g., psychopathology, drop out). By repeating 3-week long ambulatory assessments several times, it will be possible to examine within-person change in within-person dynamics across the transition, and thereby to address questions of short- and long-term adjustment to this transition, developmental processes that underlie a successful transition, as well as questions about the interplay of experiences, memories of experiences, and self-beliefs.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups