First-year Rural College Student Development In The Interpersonal Dimension:From The Perspective Of Self-authorship

The expansion of higher education made rural college students a growing body in college.Rural college students' interpersonal relationship has become a hot topic these years.A number of studies used survey data and descriptive statistics to reveal the purposes and types of their relationships,while little is known about how they understand these relationships during the process.The purpose of this study is to investigate student perceptions of their learning and development in interpersonal relationships.A holistic student development model,self-authorship,was used as the theoretical lens to examine and interpret the data.The theory emphasized the intertwining of cognitive,intrapersonal,and interpersonal developmental dimensions,which demonstrated three phases of the journey toward self-authorship: following external formulas,at crossroads,and self-authorship.From the perspective of self-authorship,this study follows a cohort of first-year rural college students over a year,and examines their developmental capabilities in meaning making in interpersonal dimension including the developmental characteristics and the influencing factors.It is found that most of the rural students' developments in interpersonal dimension stay in the following external stage.However,internal voices begin to emerge during the year.The influencing factors include provocative incident and how college students make meaning of it,having a supporting partner or not,the meaning-making capacity of students.Limitations and implications are also discussed.The thesis is sponsored by Shanghai Pujiang Program(13PJC069)and MOE Youth Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences(13YJC880002).