Chinese life purpose orientation questionnaire: assessing purpose orientations among Chinese college students

Abstract

Life-purpose orientations can highly influence people's life paths and well-being. However, existing psychological measurements tend to dismiss the need for assessing the individual’s life purpose orientations, especially in non-Western cultures. This study sought to develop a new measure to assess purpose orientations specific to the Chinese context. We first built the item pool of Chinese college students’ life purpose orientations (Study 1). This was followed by conducting an initial testing of the item pool, and developing a preliminary six-dimension Chinese Life Purpose Orientation Questionnaire (Study 2). Further revision supported a five-dimension questionnaire with adequate validity and reliability (Study 3). The measure's validity and reliability were discussed, and the limitations also were addressed.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express their gratitude to all colleagues who assisted in distributing the online questionnaire and all participants for their assistance. We would also like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for their English language editing. This study was funded by the Research Foundation from Shaanxi Normal University under Grant 100034/1301031955.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In fact, most of the work we cited in this paper is from the United Sates, we broadly call it “studies in Western culture” for convenience. However, we should clarify that not all Western cultures are the same, and the culture of United Sates also has its own particular characteristics.

2 This response time (RT) criteria was estimated by inviting several cooperators to finish the online questionnaire as fast as they can, with a serious attitude. Since these cooperators are quite familiar with the questionnaire, as well as the online assessment, we supposed their RT would be the lower bound that finishing the whole questionnaire seriously, and the RT criteria we adopted roughly is their mean RT time. Although there might be some exceptions that who seriously finished the questionnaire faster than our RT criteria, however, for the participants who are not familiar with these items, this would be a small probability event. Therefore, the data with an RT less than the RT criteria was discarded to avoid involving invalid data, although this criteria is rather strict and would need more participants involved. The same below.