No abstract

Grit, which refers to perseverance and passion to pursue long-term goals, has been highlighted as a predictor of better life outcomes, including subjective well-being. For grit to be useful for well-being research, we need to know more about its properties across cultures and determine whether it has a relationship to well-being outcomes beyond other existing psychological measures. Using survey data from the United States and South Korea (N = 1008), this study examines the measurement of grit across cultures as having two dimensions: perseverance of effort and consistency of interest. It then explores the distinctive utility of grit in explaining an individual’s subjective well-being beyond well-established psychological measures such as conscientiousness and sense of control. The results show that gritty people report better subjective well-being; this positive relationship between grit and subjective well-being is largely driven by the perseverance dimension of grit. This dimension accounts for a unique variance in subjective well-being beyond the sense of control in both country samples and variance beyond conscientiousness in the US sample. By contrast, the consistency dimension of grit adds little to our understanding of subjective well-being in either country. Relying on the global grit score, which aggregates the scores of the two dimensions, may obscure the unique role of the perseverance dimension in understanding subjective well-being.

No abstract

This paper proposes the currently fashionable psychological notion of "grit" as a potentially useful variable in sociological analysis and explores its potential for contributing to addressing sociological concerns. Grit, comprising perseverance and passion toward longterm goals, has received growing attention within academia and from the general public as a strong predictor of achievement. Grit captures an important, noncognitive, underdeveloped aspect of agency not included in life course or stratification studies. Grit can contribute to our understanding about how the subjective beliefs that are typically treated as agency are actually translated into volitional action that constructs one's life course, a crucial potential life course mechanism. This paper suggests incorporating grit into sociological understanding of individual-level aspects of stratification, moving beyond its current conception anchored fully in psychology, to further understand what it is, where it comes from, and why it is sociologically useful.

The literature on group differences and social identities has long assumed that value judgments about groups constitute a basic form of social categorization. However, little research has empirically investigated how values unite or divide social groups. The authors seek to address this gap by developing a novel measure of group values: third-order beliefs about in- and out-group members, building on Schwartz value theory. The authors demonstrate that their new measure is a promising empirical tool for quantifying previously abstract social boundaries. Results from a midwestern sample show an important dichotomy such that in-groups were attributed the more positive and altruistic transcendence and openness values, while out-groups were associated conservation and enhancement, the value domains revolving around a self-focus and social restraint. Furthermore, religious attendance and political ideology also emerged as strong predictors of value boundaries, whereas socioeconomic indicators were less influential. Significance and implications are discussed.