It’s no secret that PRYDE is crazy about purpose. That is, studying purpose and its helpful effects on youth development. In the past few years, PRYDE’s director, Dr. Anthony Burrow, and Dr. Patrick Hill, faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, have organized and hosted multiple conferences discussing the latest research related to purpose across multiple disciplines and ecologies. Through these conferences, PRYDE brought together preeminent researchers from across the country to discuss the role of purpose on everyday life and its associations with health, well-being, and youth development. Each conference included opportunities for speakers to communicate their findings to PRYDE’s practice communities, which stand to benefit from understanding how purpose operates in their settings.

To consolidate the discoveries and ideas from these talks, Dr. Burrow and Dr. Hill have co-edited a book that includes chapters written by conference speakers exploring the meaning of living purposefully and the associated benefits across the domains of life. This volume, the Ecology of Purposeful Living Across the Lifespan, contributes a new, multidisciplinary perspective on purpose by introducing research evidence from studies that consider how purpose influences people’s ability to navigate diverse challenges and environments. Topics such as identity, diversity, youth programing, aging, and health are critically examined to inspect how purpose has impacts on our wellbeing as individuals navigating society.

Dr. Burrow and Dr. Hill view this volume as a step to address existing gaps in the literature on purpose. “In recent years, purpose has enjoyed significant research attention as a psychological resource. That is, studies routinely depict those sensing greater purpose as experiencing greater life satisfaction, more positive adjustment, higher quality social relationships, and even living longer than those who lack this sense. In this way, purpose has become a kind of coveted asset – something easy to advocate that all people should obtain. But too often missing from this advocacy is attention to the everyday contexts in which people live and go about their lives. We’ve somehow arrived at an understanding of purpose that looks primarily at the individuals who are fortunate enough to have it without saying much about the ecologies surrounding people that enable its cultivation,” says Dr. Burrow.

“To illuminate this issue, we decided to collect expert perspectives on the ecological features of purposeful living. That is, we invited experts who study purpose within schools or afterschool programs, or who consider the development of purpose in specific kinds of neighborhoods or in workplaces. Across this edited volume, contributing authors demonstrate that the experience of purpose is not solely contained within the minds of individuals, but constantly interacts with features of their social and physical environment.”

“The motivation for this new volume was a desire to situate people within their surroundings. The power of purpose appears to go well beyond a purely psychological exercise – it instead reveals something important about the embeddedness of people and their environments. Viewed this way, purpose is not merely an aim a person has for themselves, but is also a revelation into the challenges and opportunities a person sees along their path, and a sense of responsibility they feel for addressing those in a meaningful way.”

The book is out now and is available both in hardcover and eBook formats through Springer Publishing here. For more information about the book, visit the publisher’s page or contact Dr. Burrow and Dr. Patrick Hill at alb325@cornell.edu and patrick.hill@wustl.edu.