The Comprehensive Measure of Meaning

Abstract

Psychological researchers have advanced several instruments to measure meaning. Philosophers have debated the objective versus subjective status of meaning in life and on the global versus individual or personal aspects of meaning. In this chapter, the authors make use of an emerging consensus in the psychology literature concerning a tripartite structure of meaning as cognitive coherence, affective significance, and motivational direction. They enrich this understanding with important philosophical distinctions to distinguish subdomains within this tripartite understanding. The authors use relevant philosophical distinctions to classify existing measurement items into a seven-fold structure intended to more comprehensively assess an individual’s sense of meaning. The proposed measure, with three items in each subdomain drawn from previous scales, constitutes what is put forward as the Comprehensive Measure of Meaning to hopefully enrich the empirical research on the assessment of, and on the causes and effects of, having a sense of meaning.