The roles of personal investment and reasoning competence in career-relevant everyday problem solving

Abstract

To examine developmental differences in practical problem-solving, 51 late adolescents and 52 young adults were presented measures of everyday problem-solving that were either self-relevant or self-neutral. Results indicated: (a) a developmental shift in everyday problem-solving strategies, such that adolescents rated higher than adults those strategies that involved reconsideration of the problem situations and adapting to the conditions of the problems. By contrast, young adults rated higher more goal-defensive strategies than adolescents; (b) reasoning competence was more strongly related to ratings of self-relevant problems than to ratings of self-neutral problems, but only for the adolescents, providing some support for a relation between reasoning competence and everyday problem-solving; and (c) relevance effects on strategy ratings were clearly evidenced as both age groups rated planning for the future and shaping the present environment to correspond to their current goals higher for self-relevant than for neutral problems. These findings are discussed in terms of the possible roles of domain specifically, personal investment, age, and reasoning competence in adolescent and adult everyday problem-solving.