Within the framework of achievement motivation, the authors assessed gender and ethnic differences for preferential choices of social situations of achievement (e.g., academic, sport, art) and motivational goals pursued. A contents analysis of the essays of 202 pupils (boys and girls of Maghrebian and European origin) from a suburb of Paris was used. The subjects of Maghrebian origin tended to ...

Identity is a central focus of research in the social sciences, national and international politics, and everyday discourse. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary set of social scientists who study personal and social identity. The chapters span childhood through emerging adulthood. This chapter introduces the three goals of the volume: (1) illustrating how the study of identity deve...

The authors analyze data from the European Social Survey (ESS3, 2006) with the framework of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST, Carstensen, Fung & Charles, 2003). In order to explore the extent to which future time perspective (FTP) is related to social goals, they test SST in a representative sample of adults from of 23 countries (43000 individual responses). The study also analyses the be...

Four experiments examined the effect on achievement motivation of mere belonging, a minimal social connection to another person or group in a performance domain. Mere belonging was expected to increase motivation by creating socially shared goals around a performance task. Participants were led to believe that an endeavor provided opportunities for positive social interactions (Experiment 1), t...

When it comes to tools serving as knowledge management instruments, social software has gained increasing importance. Whereas corporate social software is almost unanimously recognised to have enabled a fundamental shift in the ways of interacting and communicating within a company, the implementation approaches taken vary a lot from company to company and have not yet been examined in detail. ...

'GirlPower,' a participatory action research project, explored how participation in recreation might contribute to the achievement of BC's Health Goals and nurture social capital. After identifying their health issues, up to 43 young women participated in recreational activities for 10 months, gradually taking responsibility for the planning of the weekly sessions. Data collection methods inclu...

The emergence of dialogue on social medial neccessitates the development of new dialogue processing models. We argue that to address coherence and to infer the implicatures of social dialogue it is vital to understand the social aspirations of the dialogue participants. One key aspect of understanding social dialogue is to understand the intentions and goals of participants. In this paper, we p...

Personal goals, that is, ideas of what one wants to maintain, attain, or avoid in the future, are pursued within social contexts and may influence the social systems a person belongs to. Focusing on romantic partnerships as one of the most important social contexts in adulthood, this longitudinal study investigated the role of partners' mutual goal knowledge for partnership development (T1: N=6...

AIM The study aims to evaluate the efficacy of an Outdoor Adventure Group (OAG) for young people with a mental illness. It was hypothesized that participating in OAG would result in an increase in self-esteem, sense of mastery and social connectedness, compared with those who attended other Psychosocial Recovery Group Program groups based at Orygen Youth Health. In addition, those in the OAG wo...