We want to help people improve their lives by setting good goals and help them to use optimal strategies to pursue their goals. However, the question about what good goals are is still an open debate, and measuring the impact of good goal pursuit is not a trivial question! With these projects, we aim to develop and evaluate new and existing measures of goal characteristics, proactive goals, proactive goal-pursuit, metacognitive knowledge, and much more.
Most studies in goal achievement literature measure only a few characteristics of goals, such as being specific, measurable, and relevant. However, goals can have many other characteristics such as the level in the hierarchy, their short and long-term usefulness, the required competence to achieve them, and so on. The aim of this project is to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a comprehensive self-report questionnaire of goal characteristics that can be used in any context. Having a comprehensive measure will help researchers to evaluate interventions and investigate which characteristics are important to achieve goals.
Proactivity is a remarkable human potential. People can make everyday decisions to keep following their goals or reacting to their immediate environment. Being proactive takes a lot of effort and we want to be able to quantify how proactive a person is. With this project, we want to develop a measure to capture not only individual differences in proactivity but intra-person variability as a first step to understand why and how people are proactive. In the future, we aim to help people become more proactive.