Student Perceptions of Teacher Support and Competencies for Fostering Youth Purpose and Positive Youth Development: Perspectives From Two Countries

Abstract

With the growing interest in the development of purpose in youth, one important role that requires attention is the school teacher. The current article explores student perceptions of the role teachers can play in fostering purpose in their students in the mid- and late adolescent years, and the teacher competencies that facilitate purpose development. The present investigation posits and tests a structural model in which student perceptions of teacher support predicts youth purpose, mediated by student perceptions of teacher competencies; in turn, youth purpose predicts broader positive youth development. Two samples of demographically diverse young people ages 13–18 were surveyed in the United States (n = 381) and Finland (n = 336). Results showed support for the role of teachers in fostering purpose, and provided evidence for the hypothesized model with some cross-cultural differences. Implications of these findings for developing purpose in schools are discussed.

Notes

Note. BTS = Beyond-the-self; FN = Finnish. U.S. sample: n = 381; Finnish sample: n = 336. The correlations above the diagonal represent the Finnish sample; those below the diagonal represent the U.S. sample. The figures in italics on the diagonal represent scale composite reliabilities for the U.S. and Finnish samples, respectively (these do not apply to the four single-item measures). All bivariate correlations were significant at p < .05, with nonsignificant exceptions noted by †.

¹The present SEM analyses did not include covariates, but separate SEM analyses not reported here were run including controls for age, gender, and social desirability; none significantly altered the results.

²The Satorra-Bentler scaled χ² was reported because all analyses used a maximum likelihood-robust estimator, as described in a following section.

³A similar method effect was found in a sample of Finnish youth by Zhang, Nurmi, Kiuru, Lerkkanen, and Aunola (2011).

⁴While there are other possible approaches to testing for mediation in complex models involving the influence of multiple exogenous variables, the Sobel test allows for a straightforward analytical approach using the readily available coefficients and standard errors of selected mediating paths. This approach accounts for the effects of the other paths in the model on the endogenous variables.

⁵An inspection of the modification indices showed that one indicator of PYD (life satisfaction) in the U.S. sample would have significantly cross-loaded on another construct (goal-directedness); this may not be surprising, given the high degree of correlation found in previous research between the constructs (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Though the loading for this indicator was about the same on either latent variable, since theory and previous research (Ryff, 1989) suggest the constructs are conceptually distinct—and allowing the indicator variable to crossload would undermine this conceptual distinction important to the present study—it was determined that it should indicate only its intended construct. None of the items in the Finnish sample would have significantly double-loaded.

⁶Indicators and covariates are not shown for ease of presentation.