关键词: 青少年, 未来取向, 自陈问卷法, 行为测试法, 作品分析法

Abstract: Future orientation is ability that individual's thinking and planning for the future. The ability to foresee, anticipate, and plan for future desired outcomes is crucial for well-being, motivation, achievement, adjustment, and behavior. Future orientation of adolescents increases with age. Studies had shown that the younger adolescents demonstrated a weaker orientation to the future than the older. Now, the main measure of future orientation is the questionnaire method. However, the questionnaire method is not suitable for the study of development trends in that younger adolescents overestimated with their abilities. Behavioral testing method can make up for the disadvantage of questionnaire but only can measure one of respects of future orientation. Therefore, it is to propose a new measurement method, namely work analysis method. The study aimed to examine the advantages and disadvantages of existing methods of future orientation measurement(questionnaire method, behavior test method) and the effectiveness of new methods(work analysis method). Participants were 307 adolescents including primary school students(84), junior high school students(78), high school students(71) and college students(74), we used three methods to measure future orientation and choose school engagement ,academic achievement as validity criterion. The questionnaire tool is adolescents future orientation questionnaire; the behavior test method used to delay the task, the task The paradigm measures whether the subjects can give up the present reward for greater rewards in the future; the work analysis method allows students to write their own future road in 10 minutes, from the students’ writing content to assess the future orientation of the development; At the same time, exploring the relationship between future orientation and school engagement and academic achievement compared with the advantages and disadvantages of the three measurement methods. The results showed that: (1) questionnaire survey found that the future orientation level of primary school students was the highest, followed by college students, junior high school students, and the senior high school students have the lowest level of future orientation. That means younger adolescents overestimated their ability. (2) Both behavior test method and work analysis method found that the future orientation level of college students was the highest, followed by junior high school students , high school students and primary school students is the lowest. That means the development of adolescents' future orientation gradually increases with age.(3) The correlation analysis showed that the work analysis method was positively correlated with questionnaire and behavior method. The questionnaire is more related to the index of subjective evaluation such as school engagement, the behavior measurement is more related to the index of objective evaluation such as academic achievement, and the work analysis method is both related to the subjective and objective evaluation indexes. The present study provides a new valid method to measure the future orientation of adolescents. This method not only can make up the disadvantage of questionnaire method when we study the development trends of future orientation, but also can measure more aspects of future orientation than behavior method.

Key words: adolescents, future orientation, questionnaire method, behavior test method, work analysis method