The Relationship Between College Students' Sense Of Purpose In Life And Healthy Behaviors:A Moderated Mediation Model

Sense of purpose in life is the degree to which individuals feel that his or her life has meaning,purpose,and direction.Sense of purpose in life is a motivation system,which can organize a series of goals in individual life to serve life goals.Individuals with a higher sense of purpose have better physical and mental health,more positive behavior,and higher achievement.Teenagers are regarded as the critical period for the development of the sense of purpose in life.Therefore,a great deal of research has been done.However,there are still important development contents of sense of purpose in life during university.The physical health of college students is the foundation of their study and achievement.Individual health level is closely related to health behavior.Many foreign studies have proved that the level of sense of purpose in life can positively predict healthy behaviors.It is worth exploring whether this relationship still exists in Chinese culture.At present,there is no tool to measure the sense of life purpose in China,so it is necessary to develop a Chinese version of the scale.The mechanism of the relationship between a sense of purpose and healthy behavior is unknown.The rubicon model constructs four different stages of an individual's pursuit of goals.In particular,there is a pre-action process from "thinking to doing",that is,making specific plans and arrangements for one's actions,which is the key to producing actual actions.Therefore,this study intends to explain the mechanism of the relationship between sense of life goal and health behavior based on the rubicon model.Based on this,this study has three main purposes:The first is to preliminarily revise professor Reker's life sense of purpose scale to form the Chinese version of life sense of purpose scale,which is used to evaluate college students' life sense of purpose;The second is to verify the relationship between college students' sense of purpose in life and healthy behaviors in Chinese culture;The third is to try to explore the specific relationship between college students' sense of purpose in life and their health behaviors.On this basis,a moderated mediation model is established to discuss the mediating effect of goal prioritization and the optimism moderating effect.This study took Chinese college students as the research object,and on the basis of consulting a large number of English literature,completed the preliminary revision of college students' sense of purpose in life scale and the construction of the relationship model between life sense of purpose and healthy behavior.The first part of the work includes:Based on professor Reker's sense of purpose in life scale,the Chinese version of sense of purpose in life scale applicable to college students was initially revised through translation,item analysis,questionnaire survey,statistical analysis and other methods.The second is to explore the relationship between college students' sense of purpose in life,goal prioritization,optimism and health behaviors through subjective reports.The findings for this study are as follows:(1)The preliminary revised Chinese version of the life sense of purpose scale has good reliability and validity,which can be used as a tool to measure college students'life sense of purpose.(2)sense of purpose in life has a significant positive predictive effect on healthy behaviors,that is,the higher the level of sense of purpose in life,the more healthy behaviors.(3)the relationship between life sense of purpose in life and healthy behaviors is mediated by goal priority,that is,sense of purpose in life predicts the level of healthy behaviors through goal priority.(4)optimism moderates the relationship between goal priority and healthy behaviors.That is,when the individual's optimism level is high,the goal priority will lead to more healthy behaviors;when the optimism level is low,the level of healthy behaviors has no significant difference in the level of goal priority.