Daily Self-Compassion and Preservice Teachers’ Professional Identity Development: A 14-Day Intensive Longitudinal Study

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Self-compassion has been increasingly conceptualized as a state-like psychological resource that may help individuals relate to difficulty with kindness, common humanity, and balanced awareness. The present 14-day diary study examined daily self-compassion and professional identity among 267 Chinese preservice teachers (3,473 daily observations; 92.9% completion). Multilevel reliability estimates, visual trend diagnostics, within- and between-person associations, model-comparison indices, and DSEM-informed multilevel autoregressive models were used to distinguish stable between-student differences from day-to-day within-student processes. Measurement diagnostics indicated that the six-item raw self-compassion score performed poorly because two items showed anomalous item-total patterns; therefore, a four-item core self-compassion score was used as the primary measure, with six-item raw and recoded versions retained as sensitivity analyses. Preservice teachers who were more self-compassionate on average also reported stronger professional identity on average (r = .414). At the daily level, on days when preservice teachers were more self-compassionate than usual, they also reported stronger professional identity than usual (within-person r = .268). This same-day association remained after controlling for prior-day self-compassion, prior-day professional identity, and day-in-study (beta = .263, p &lt; .001), and model-comparison indices favored the partial contemporaneous specification. In contrast, prior-day self-compassion did not significantly predict next-day professional identity. Findings suggest that self-compassion is meaningfully linked to preservice teachers' professional becoming primarily as a same-day psychological resource rather than as a robust one-day driver of identity change.</p>