Which Factors Are Associated with Monitoring Goal Progress?

Chang, Betty P. I.; Webb, Thomas L.; Benn, Yael; Stride, Chris B.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00434

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol., 24 March 2017

Sec. Personality and Social Psychology

Volume 8 - 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00434

Which Factors Are Associated with Monitoring Goal Progress?

$\r\nBetty P. I. Chang*$ Betty P. I. Chang^1*

Thomas L. Webb²

Yael Benn³

Chris B. Stride⁴

¹Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
²Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
³Department of Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
⁴Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Three studies examined how people assess their progress on personal goals (e.g., whether they compare their progress to the past and/or to a desired target state), along with factors that might influence the nature of progress monitoring (e.g., whether the goal involves attaining a positive outcome or avoiding a negative outcome). Study 1 involved semi-structured interviews with 40 participants, in which we examined how participants monitored their progress and whether this was related to: (a) their level of self-efficacy, (b) whether the goal was prevention focused, and (c) whether goal progress was represented in quantifiable terms. Studies 2 (N = 492) and 3 (N = 481) were conducted online and additionally examined whether how participants monitored their progress differed as a function of the domain of the goal (i.e., whether it was related to physical development/health, finances, work/study, or social relationships). The findings suggest that participants: (i) were less likely to monitor their progress toward goals that were related to avoiding negative outcomes, (ii) were less likely to monitor their progress toward goals related to finances, work, or study with reference to the past, than progress toward other goals (e.g., those relating to physical development and health), (iii) found it easier to monitor their progress toward goals that they felt confident of attaining, but harder to monitor their progress toward goals related to work or study. Finally, the more participants thought about their goal in quantifiable terms, the more likely they were to monitor their progress, and the easier they found monitoring their progress to be. Taken together, these studies begin to describe the nature of progress monitoring and the factors that influence this important self-regulatory process.

Introduction

People often want to know how they are progressing on their personal goals. For example, an employee with the goal to succeed at work might ask her boss for feedback, reflect on whether she is performing better than before, and keep track of whether her deadlines are being met. Theories of goal pursuit such as Control Theory (Carver and Scheier, 1981, 1982), Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977), and Goal Theory (Locke and Latham, 1990), suggest that people assess their goal progress by noting the attributes of their behavior or associated outcomes and comparing these with salient reference values (Carver and Scheier, 1990). Many studies have shown that monitoring progress helps people to achieve their goals (e.g., Bandura and Cervone, 1983; Schunk, 1983; Renn and Fedor, 2001; Harkin et al., 2016). However, despite the theoretical and practical importance of monitoring, little research has investigated how people monitor their goal progress, the likelihood of progress monitoring and the factors that influence this, despite evidence that doing so can inform interventions designed to encourage the use of monitoring, with a view to promoting goal attainment (e.g., Verhoeven et al., 2014; for a review, see Harkin et al., 2016). The present research, therefore, sought to identify how people monitor their goal progress, along with the factors that influence whether and how people do so, and how difficult they find monitoring their progress to be.

Monitoring goal progress involves comparing the current state with a reference value (Carver and Scheier, 1982, 1990). This reference value may be a desired target or goal (e.g., to weigh 55 kg) or a reference value in the past (e.g., weight last year); with the latter being known as a temporal comparison (Albert, 1977). While certain types of motivations may affect the reference values against which people evaluate their progress (e.g., the motivation to self-enhance may make people more likely to make temporal comparisons, since comparing current performance to the past tends to highlight improvement, Zell and Alicke, 2009), it is not yet clear whether other individual- and goal-related factors also influence the type of reference value that people adopt. Therefore, one aim of the present research is to identify other factors that influence the choice of reference value. We also investigate whether these factors influence the frequency with which people monitor their progress, as it has been demonstrated that more frequent progress monitoring can increase the likelihood that people will achieve their goal (e.g., Harkin et al., 2016). Furthermore, we examine whether these factors influence how easy monitoring goal progress is perceived to be; not least because people may avoid monitoring their progress when doing so is perceived as difficult (Liberman and Dar, 2009; Webb et al., 2013).

What Factors Influence How People Monitor Their Goal Progress?

One factor that may play a role in monitoring goal progress is whether people think about their progress in quantifiable terms, such as how much weight has been lost (where the goal is losing weight), or how many essays have been marked (where the goal is marking a set of exam papers). Progress on some goals, such as having a rewarding relationship, may be more difficult to represent in quantifiable terms. Evidence suggests that people have a tendency to judge their performance based on quantifiable information, even in cases where that information is not diagnostic of the characteristic that they are evaluating (e.g., counting the number of pages read, when the goal is understanding, Liberman and Dar, 2009). According to Josephs et al. (1994), this ‘quantity principle’ is adopted because people favor information that is computationally simple (e.g., Hunt and Agnoli, 1991), available (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973), representative (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973), and attracts attention (Taylor and Fiske, 1978). Therefore, we predict that people will be more likely to monitor their goal progress if they feel able to assess it in quantifiable terms.

How people relate to their goals may also influence whether and how they monitor their goal progress. One important variable in this regard might be levels of self-efficacy, which reflect a person’s belief in their ability to achieve a goal (Bandura, 1977). For example, Bouffard-Bouchard et al. (1991) found that students with high levels of self-efficacy spent more time monitoring how long they spent working on a problem-solving task than those with low self-efficacy. This led us to predict that levels of self-efficacy would be positively associated with the frequency with which people monitor their goal progress.

A person’s motivation for achieving a goal or performing goal-related activities may also influence the reference value that they use and the extent of progress monitoring. Liberman and Dar (2009) propose that people may monitor their progress toward goals that have a prevention focus (i.e., goals that are motivated by security, responsibility, and/or the avoidance of losses; Higgins, 1997, 1998) more frequently, because such goals tend to require more immediate action than goals with a promotion focus (i.e., goals that are motivated by gains, Higgins, 1997, 1998; Freitas et al., 2002; Pennington and Roese, 2003). For example, Freitas et al. (2002, Experiment 2) found that people elected to start working on an application for a fellowship sooner if their attention was drawn to avoiding rejection (a prevention focus) rather than to being accepted (a promotion focus). However, Liberman and Dar (2009) also note that prevention-focused goals tend not to have an end state, because they are often concerned with avoiding a particular outcome, which may make it harder to assess progress. Thus, we also investigated whether people are more or less likely to monitor their progress toward goals with a stronger prevention focus.

Liberman and Dar (2009) also suggest that it may be more difficult for people to monitor their progress toward goals that are based on intrinsic motivation (i.e., those that fulfill needs related to competence, relatedness to others, and autonomy; Ryan and Deci, 2000) because activities that are intrinsically motivated are performed for their inherent satisfaction, rather than to attain some separable consequence. For example, a person may have the goal to spend time with friends simply because they enjoy socializing. In this case, there is no concrete outcome that the person is trying to achieve (other than perhaps some sort of feeling state), and thus it may be difficult to monitor the outcome of that goal. Therefore, we hypothesize that people will consider goals that are based on intrinsic motivation to be more difficult to monitor and, as a consequence, they may monitor their progress toward such goals less frequently.

Lastly, we examined whether the amount of time that people had spent pursuing their goal influenced whether they evaluated their goal progress with respect to a target or to a past state. This is because the findings of Bonezzi et al. (2011) suggest that, to the extent that the duration of goal pursuit is typically associated with being closer to achieving a goal, people who have worked on their goal for longer are likely to evaluate their progress with respect to a target end-state, while people who have just started striving for a goal are likely to evaluate their progress with respect to the past (or starting) state.

The Present Research

Although progress monitoring is a central component of frameworks for understanding self-regulation, relatively little research has investigated the frequency with which people monitor their progress on their personal goals and how they assess their progress. Thus, we conducted three studies to investigate these questions. Study 1 interviewed participants and asked them how they assess their progress on their personal goals. This open-ended, exploratory method allowed us to understand how participants interpreted the constructs that we were interested in and helped to identify factors that might influence progress monitoring that, as yet, remain untested in the existing literature. In Study 2, participants completed questionnaires that measured how they assessed their progress toward one of their personal goals. Participants then evaluated their goal on the focal dimensions derived from Study 1 and rated the perceived instrumentality of their behavior. Study 2 also extended Study 1 to examine whether the domain of goal striving (e.g., health or work) influenced how participants monitored their progress. Finally, Study 3 provided a conceptual replication of Study 2 using multi-item measures.

Study 1

Method

Participants

Participants were recruited via an email sent to a list of staff and postgraduate volunteers at a large university in northern England. Forty people (M_age = 32.30 years, SD = 8.74, 28 females) responded and were paid £10 for their participation. Ethical approval for all studies presented in this paper was obtained from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Psychology Ethics Committee.

Procedure

Participants gave informed consent to take part in a semi-structured interview where they described up to five goals that they were currently working on. A series of open-ended and Likert-style questions was used to assess each of the variables pertaining to our hypotheses. The interviews ranged from 19 to 90 min, and were recorded and then transcribed. The first author and a second coder who was blind to the hypotheses coded participants’ responses to the open-ended questions. Inter-rater reliability was good (free-marginal kappa = 0.81 or higher) and disagreements were jointly resolved through discussion.

Measures

Nature of elicited goals

Participants were asked how long they had worked on each nominated goal for (in weeks), and why they were pursuing the goal. Responses to the latter question were used to identify whether the goal was: (a) prevention focused, and (b) based on intrinsic motivation. Prevention focused goals were coded as those based on security, responsibility, and/or the avoidance of negative outcomes (e.g., giving up smoking because it is unhealthy and expensive). Goals were coded as being intrinsically motivated if the person enjoyed performing the activity, and/or because it fulfilled their need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Nature of progress monitoring

Participants were then asked questions about how they monitored their progress toward the target goal. First, they were asked “Do you have an idea of whether you are making progress toward this goal?” Those answering in the affirmative (all but one case) were then asked “How do you know that you are/are not making progress toward this goal?” Based on each participants’ responses to this question and how they described their goal, we coded whether they represented their progress in quantifiable terms (coded 1; e.g., in terms of weight lost, money saved, hours of time spent performing an activity or behavior) or not (coded 0; e.g., in terms of resolving psychological issues).

Participants were then asked: “When people think about their goal progress, sometimes they compare their current situation to the past and sometimes they compare it to a target that they want to meet. So when you think about your progress toward [your goal] do you compare your progress to how you used to [perform on that goal/your previous state], and/or how you would like to [perform on that goal/your desired state]?” Responses to this question were coded as those that involve a comparison to the past (e.g., “I compare my current weight with how much I used to weigh”), and/or those that involve a comparison to a target (e.g., “I compare my fitness to what I would like it to be”). Finally, participants rated how difficult they found monitoring their goal progress (on a 5-point scale anchored by 1 = very easy and 5 = very difficult) and, as a measure of self-efficacy, how confident they were that they could achieve the goal (1 = not at all confident to 5 = very confident).

Results

Nature of Elicited Goals

Participants described 137 goals in total. There was considerable variation in how long participants had worked on their goals for (M = 141.80 days, SD = 315.28). Participants reported goals for which progress could be easily quantified (49.6% of goals) and goals for which progress could not be easily quantified (50.4%). About half of the goals were prevention focused, and about a quarter of the goals were based on intrinsic motivation (28.5%). Participants felt moderate levels of self-efficacy (M = 3.59, SD = 1.06). The range of goals that were nominated is presented in the Appendix.

Nature of Progress Monitoring

Participants sometimes compared their goal progress to a past state (63.5% of goals) and sometimes to a desired target (48.9% of goals). Participants considered monitoring goal progress to be moderately difficult (M = 2.42, SD = 1.21).

Factors Associated with the Nature of Progress Monitoring

We next examined which factors were associated with the nature of progress monitoring. Because participants could describe more than one personal goal, the data was structured with goals treated as distinct observations (i.e., ‘nested’) within each participant. Two multilevel logistic regression analyses tested the unique relationships between each predictor (e.g., characteristics of the focal goal) and the outcome variables (e.g., comparisons to the target or past). A multilevel linear regression with participants’ rating of the difficulty of monitoring progress as a continuous outcome variable was also conducted with the same predictors. Table 1 summarizes the findings.

TABLE 1

TABLE 1. Unstandardized relationships (B coefficients, SEs) between predictors (rows) and the nature of progress monitoring (columns) in Study 1.

None of the factors were significantly associated with the likelihood that participants reported assessing their progress with respect to the past (the closest being whether progress was thought of in quantifiable terms, B = 0.74, SE = 0.42, z = 1.77, p = 0.08). Participants were less likely to assess their goals with reference to a target if their goal was related to security and responsibility (B = -0.96, SE = 0.43, z = -2.24, p = 0.03, odds ratio = 0.38) than if it was not. Progress toward goals that were thought of in quantifiable terms were more likely to be compared to a target (B = 0.88, SE = 0.45, z = 1.98, p = 0.05, odds ratio = 2.41) than progress toward goals that were not thought of in quantifiable terms. Participants also reported that it was easier to assess their progress on goals for which progress was quantified [B = -0.49, SE = 0.21, t(128.80) = 7.83, p < 0.01, B = -0.59] and when they felt confident of achieving their goal (i.e., had high self-efficacy) [B = -0.20, SE = 0.10, t(114.44) = -2.47, p = 0.02, B = -0.24].

Discussion

Study 1 used an open-ended, exploratory approach to investigate whether and how people monitor their progress toward goals that they consider to be important. Participants reported evaluating their progress with respect to both the past and desired targets. However, progress on goals that pertained to security, responsibility, and/or the avoidance of negative outcomes (i.e., were prevention focused) was less likely to be compared with a target than if it did not pertain to these factors. This may be because, as Liberman and Dar (2009) point out, goals that are prevention-focused tend not to have a clear end state. Participants who felt capable of achieving their nominated goal (i.e., had high self-efficacy) reported that it was easier to monitor their progress. This suggests that feeling confident about attaining the goal is positively associated with confidence about being able to assess progress toward that goal (and perhaps feeling confident generally). Finally, we found that participants who framed their goal in quantifiable terms were more likely to report finding it easier to monitor their goal progress and were more likely to compare their current state to a target when assessing their progress. This finding is consistent with the quantity principle described by Josephs et al. (1994), which suggests that people are more likely to judge outcomes based on quantifiable information, particularly when it is easier for them to do so.

Study 2

One limitation of the approach used in Study 1 is that it required coders to infer how participants construed their goals and how they monitored their progress based on their open ended responses. Therefore, in Study 2 we asked participants to complete an online survey in which they rated aspects of their goals and how they assessed their progress toward them. In addition to the constructs examined in Study 1, Study 2 also examined whether the focal goal’s domain (i.e., whether the goal related to physical development or health, finance, work or studies, or social relationships) was associated with the nature of progress monitoring. Instead of asking participants to evaluate their goal and aspects of progress monitoring on binary scales, we used Likert-type scales to increase the sensitivity of our measures. For instance, instead of asking participants if they assessed their progress with reference to past and/or target comparison points, they rated the frequency with which they assessed their progress with reference to past and/or target comparison points.