Meaning & Purpose Through Contribution

What the research says about developing a sense of meaning and purpose through contribution during adolescence:

• Cognitive and social changes in adolescence increase both our ability to contribute to others and the positive feelings we get from kind and helpful behaviors toward others.
  
  
• Contributing can help us earn the respect and appreciation of our peers, and can help us develop a sense of meaning and purpose in our own lives.
  
  
• Opportunities to make meaningful contributions support our own positive development as adolescents while helping our friends, family members, social groups, or communities.

Cognitive and social changes in adolescence increase our ability and our willingness to contribute to others. The network of areas in our brain that activates in social interactions matures rapidly during our adolescent years, deepening our understanding of the complex feelings, perspectives, and needs of other people. We become better able to determine who needs our help and what kind of help they might need.

In addition, brain regions associated with our sensitivity to rewards become more reactive during and after puberty, increasing the positive feelings we get from novel experiences as well as kind and helpful behaviors such as contributing to others. Connections between these regions also improve during adolescence.

Socially, we become more motivated to find a respected place and role among our peers. Contributing is one way to earn that respect: studies have shown that students who are helpful, cooperative, and sharing tend to be more appreciated and liked than those who use fear or intimidation to gain status.

Our social environments also play a role in encouraging contribution. For example, some ethnic and immigrant communities emphasize the role of adolescents to contribute in large and small ways to their families. Young people from families where contributing is a particular value seem to feel more of a sense of reward when helping.

Being marginalized as a result of our race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion can also motivate us toward a sense of purpose to help others in our families, schools, or communities through activism or civic engagement.

We can make different types of contributions in the different contexts of our lives. For example, we can provide emotional support to peers by making them laugh or being a shoulder to cry on. In our families, we can do household chores, help our siblings, and participate in family decision making. At school, we can be active in student government, clubs, or sports teams. We can work with organizations like 4-H or Boys and Girls Clubs of America that guide activities that make a real difference in our communities.

Opportunities to make meaningful contributions and to have those contributions recognized support positive development for us as adolescents and also benefit our friends, family members, social groups, or communities. As adults, we need to make sure those opportunities are available to all young people.

What the research tells us about programs to support a sense of meaning and purpose through contribution:

• Programs that give young people a chance to make meaningful contributions can have positive effects on their mental and even physical health.
  
  
• The chance to reflect on their service–such as through journaling, art, essay writing, or group discussion–can help adolescents build a sense of meaning from the experience.
  
  
• Programs that encourage youth to consider their sense of purpose in academic pursuits have been shown to support persistence through difficult tasks and improve grade point averages.

Researchers and educators have created and studied programs that provide opportunities for youth to contribute. One of these programs, the school-based volunteering intervention Try Volunteering, focused on developing new skills and existing talents, boosting self-worth, and connecting youth with volunteer opportunities in their community. After completing the program, youth participants showed greater competence, confidence, and feelings of social connection.

Other school-based programs have focused on promoting adolescents’ prosocial behavior (that is, behavior intended to help others). These programs often include activities like writing a letter to a friend in need, performing an act of kindness, or roleplaying a scenario with a peer. Research suggests that these kinds of prosocial interventions can be effective in promoting helping behavior in adolescents. However, they tend to be most effective when the focus is on building adolescents’ skills and social competence, instead of attempting to prevent problem behaviors.

Health & Wellbeing

Programs that give adolescents a chance to make meaningful contributions can also have positive effects on youths’ mental and even physical health.

Sports-based community service and mentorship programs can strengthen adolescents’ prosocial values, such as social responsibility, and promote their mental wellbeing while increasing physical activity.

Even volunteer activities that don’t involve physical activity may have physical health benefits. For example, a Canadian high school program found that students who were assigned to volunteer had subsequently lower levels of risk markers for cardiovascular disease compared to youth who did not volunteer.

Research suggests that the opportunity to reflect on the experience of volunteering might be essential to ensuring positive developmental impacts from the activity. Reflecting on their service–which can take place through journaling, art, essay writing, or group discussion–can help adolescents consider the broader impacts of their contribution and attach meaning to the experience.

Learning & Education

Feelings of purpose can also promote other positive developmental outcomes, such as academic achievement.

For example, one school-based intervention asked students to write about how learning the class material could help them make a contribution to the world. Youth who participated in this program were better able to persist through difficult tasks and were less likely to drop out. Additional academic interventions have found that students who feel a strong sense of purpose and view school as a means of achieving long-term goals have higher grade point averages.

Other researchers have looked at the combination of purpose-based interventions and academic mindset interventions. Mindset interventions teach students that intelligence grows when they persevere through difficult tasks. Interventions that focus on both mindset and purpose have been shown to help students who are at risk for dropping out persevere through academic challenges.

Conclusions

When adolescents are able to make meaningful contributions to their community they feel more purpose and hope for their future. And these experiences likely come with mental and physical health benefits that continue into adulthood.

Current programs that promote prosocial behavior and purposeful contributions during adolescence are promising; however, there is still much to be understood on how to make these programs most effective. Many interventions aimed at facilitating positive youth development are not rigorously evaluated or adequately reported, which can make it challenging to identify which specific parts of a program make it effective.

Future research assessing the effectiveness of these kinds of interventions can help communities build evidence-based programs that support adolescents’ developmental need to contribute.

Following are examples of studies that have examined adolescents’ need to contribute, that demonstrate the kind of programs that promote meaning through contribution.

Providing Volunteer Activities to Promote Adolescent Health Outcomes

Dr. Hannah Schreier and colleagues designed a volunteering program for tenth-grade students at a Canadian public high school. The research team’s main question was whether providing opportunities for adolescents to contribute through volunteering would benefit the health of the adolescent volunteers.

To answer this question, the research team divided high school students into two groups: one group volunteered during the fall semester and a second group waited to volunteer until the spring semester. As a part of the volunteering program, adolescents were asked to spend an hour each week helping out at a local elementary school. This included helping out with activities like homework club, sports programs, science, cooking, cards and games, and arts and crafts. At the beginning and end of the fall semester, the research team measured different markers of adolescents’ cardiovascular health, such as body mass index (BMI), cholesterol, and inflammation. They also measured aspects of adolescents’ wellbeing, such as their mood and self-esteem.

At the end of the fall semester, they found that adolescents who volunteered had significant decreases in markers of cardiovascular risk. They also found that youth who volunteered had a more positive mood than youth who had not yet participated in the volunteering program. This study, and others like it, suggest that encouraging youth to volunteer can have benefits not only for our communities, but also for adolescents’ health and wellbeing.

The students were asked to write about an issue in the world that they care about and how they can help address it. They then read and reflected about how education could provide them with skills to make positive contributions to the world. Students wrote brief testimonials to future students about their reasons for learning, such as, “Science will give me a good base for my career in environmental engineering; I want to be able to solve our energy problems.”

Promoting Meaning Through Academic Contributions

Developmental psychologists conducted a series of studies to assess whether a prosocial, purpose-based intervention could improve academic outcomes among adolescents. The intervention program had more than 300 ninth-grade students complete a series of activities aimed at promoting greater purpose for learning.

The students were asked to write about an issue in the world that they care about and how they can help address it. They then read and reflected about how education could provide them with skills to make positive contributions to the world. Students wrote brief testimonials to future students about their reasons for learning, such as, “Science will give me a good base for my career in environmental engineering; I want to be able to solve our energy problems.”

Later in the school year, the research team found that the intervention raised students’ grade point averages in math and science coursework; students who had low grades before the intervention showed the most improvement. This research suggests that providing adolescents with opportunities to reflect on their purpose for being in school and the contributions they want to make in the world can support learning and achievement.

Intervening to Increase Prosocial Behavior

Researchers have tested various interventions aimed at boosting prosocial behavior in adolescents. For example, researchers at the University of Carolina Greensboro conducted a prosocial intervention for more than 200 female undergraduates. Participants were asked to write an encouraging letter to another student experiencing a difficult situation. A comparison group of undergraduates were simply asked to write a letter about their day.

Later, the research team had participants complete a computer game in which they were told they were fishing with other students in different rooms. Participants could choose to keep fish to finish the study early or release fish to allow other players to leave early.

Those students who had written the letter to help another student gave away more fish than those in the comparison group, and had improvements in their mood after the intervention.

This research provides preliminary evidence that even a brief, prosocial writing activity may be effective in encouraging helping behavior in adolescents.