Interest in Development

Abstract

What interests have you been involved with in the past two hours? And what did you think was or was not interesting about it? Three hundred young people answered those questions daily through a smartphone app. They did so for a total of ten weeks spread across a period of three years. Previous research already showed that interest allows someone to learn easily, and is also related to study and career choices, social development and well-being. Thus, for providing guidance to young people, for example in school, interest is a valuable starting point. However, existing research does not do full justice to the fluidity and multiplicity of interest. Jael Draijer's doctoral research showed that young people are interested in many different things (for example space sciences, baking cookies, design). Chapter 2 of this dissertation focuses on interest in daily life. In everyday life, interest is unpredictable: all kinds of circumstances, expectations and unforeseen events (such as a pandemic) can lead to someone not being as interested in something that could otherwise interest them. While this can be inconvenient for a teacher, it helps to know that this cannot always be avoided. Chapter 3 explored different developmental manifestations of interest. Whereas existing research mainly makes a distinction between situational and individual interest, we found more heterogeneous manifestations of interest, endorsing the complexity of the construct of interest. In Chapter 4, we saw that young people's interests can develop in various ways over time. For example, interests can disappear (temporarily), specify or split into multiple interests. This is different for each interest and each person. These patterns of continuity and transformation indicate that research and educational practice would benefit from a more flexible understanding of adolescents’ interests. Chapter 5 shows how interests also develop in relation to each other: sometimes a new interest emerges from another, or interests are combined in an engagement. In addition, two interests can have a similar meaning or gain meaning in relation to each other. Whereas interest theory typically speaks of interest development as a process of deepening of a single interest, the results of this dissertation illustrate how interest development can also reflect broadening and connecting of multiple interests. In Chapter 6 we therefore look at the development of the totality of someone’s interests over time. Here we saw different developmental trajectories. Some adolescents pursued the same set of interests during the research, though always with minor changes. Others kept exploring: these adolescents often pursued new interests and dropped other interests. Yet other trajectories showed specialization, where the adolescent seemed to increasingly realize what interested them most. The results therefore show that it is important to look at the overall picture of a young person's interests, paying attention to possible changes and relations. Here it is especially important to continue to talk with the young people themselves, and give them the space to develop their own interests.