f Dr. William Damon brings a tangible sense of determination and long-term planning to his scientific work, 
that is appropriate since his chosen field of study is purpose. His current program, entitled “The Scientific Study and Practice of Youth Purpose,” is the second phase of a grant to fund the study of purposefulness among young people, conducted at the Stanford Center on Adolescence.
Damon has described purpose in life as an “ultimate concern.” What does he mean? “What I mean by that is purpose is a transcendent goal that is the ultimate reason why people pursue other shorter-term goals,” he explains. An example would be a young person motivated to find a cure for cancer. “The pursuit of this ultimate concern is a long-term direction that shapes a lot of the shorter-term choices the young person will make.” These might include going to medical school, studying biology, but these events would simply be ancillary choices dictated by the long-term purpose.
His program is based on strict definitions. Adolescence is defined as the period from the onset of puberty to adopting a full social role, and it can last well beyond the “teen” years—especially these days, when many young people are deferring commitments to work and family until they find a purpose to guide them. Purpose is equally rigidly categorized. “Purpose, to us, has two primary components. First of all it has to be a long-term, stable intention or goal,” declares Damon. “Second, it has to be meaningful in itself.” It also has to engage the individual in something beyond himself, rather than the pursuit of personal happiness for its own sake. “It has to be something to do with making some difference in the world.”
Damon divides his work into three components: a research plan, a field-building plan, and an educational plan. During Phase I, the earlier grant that finished in 2006, the research was confined to a limited sample of 400 surveys and 60 in-depth interviews, including about a dozen interviews with young people who were extraordinary exemplars of purpose. “For the second grant we expanded the number of interviews to 300 and the number of surveys to 1,200 and we followed up with the youngsters we interviewed the first time, including the youth purpose exemplars.”
“We’re following up with all the previous subjects we can locate on the second grant,” says Damon. “That’s one of the features of it, it’s a longitudinal project.” The follow-up will be conducted in the fall of 2008. The field-building component saw the award of two $10,000 grants to young scholars in 2007 and four more in 2008. “I think we’ve really encouraged and supported the idea of taking a look at this concept of purpose, which previously had really not been on the radar screen of developmental science because people thought it was so elusive and difficult to study.”
Besides the research, a further outcome of the first grant was a conference attended by scholars from around the world, and a book written by Damon. “I have just completed a book that largely drew on the findings from the first wave of data collection.” Entitled The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find their Calling in Life and published in April 2008, at least 90 percent of the data was produced by the Phase I research, with just a few examples towards the end culled from the initial findings of research under the second grant.
Damon estimates the proportion of contemporary adolescents with a full sense of purpose at 20 percent, with no difference between the sexes. Some 55 percent to 60 percent have a fragmentary sense of purpose and “may arrive at something”; but 25 percent appear to be drifting, with no discernable purpose at all.
To pursue the third program component, education, Damon is moving into a few schools to do preliminary work on introducing purpose into the classroom. “We’re using these institutions—to use Arthur Schwartz’s term—as Petrie dishes, to watch things happen that we introduce, in collaboration with the teachers.” In this endeavor, his team is cooperating with the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA), working in schools in Montana, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and, from spring 2008, in Britain, where there is already a national schools program on personal and character development.
What are the big questions relating to youth purpose? “The first is: What are the conditions that foster it? I think we’ve made some progress on that. The second is: What difference does it make—how important is it for a young person to have a sense of purpose and what happens if they don’t?” Bill Damon does not want to be too definitive about the answers he has found to these and other questions, because of the limited scope of the early research. But he does not expect his findings to be significantly changed by his latest work whose outcomes we shall learn at the end of this new longitudinal study.
