The contours of purpose beyond the self in midlife and later life

Abstract

Purpose has been shown in adolescence and young adulthood to be an important component of positive development; however, little is known about its prevalence and function in later life. Surveys from a large (N = 1,198), nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ages 50-92 were collected to explore the prevalence of purpose in midlife (ages 50-64) through later life (ages 65+), as well as demographic differences and associations with indicators of positive adaptation and development. Results showed 31% of all participants—midlife: 30%, later life: 33%—met our established criteria for purpose. Few demographic differences were found, though the prevalence of purpose was higher among people of color in both midlife and later life. Additionally, those who were purposeful were more likely to be higher on measures of positive adaptation and development across the sample. Suggestions for future research on purpose in later life are presented, and preliminary insights for practitioners in the fields of aging and later adult development are offered.

Keywords:

• Purpose
• meaning
• aging
• positive development in adulthood

Notes

1 Whereas there are challenges to obtaining a truly representative sample of older adults using online surveys and generalizability can be reduced relative to census tract approaches, in general the internet is considered to be a viable delivery system for collecting survey data (Remillard, Mazor, Cutrona, Gurwitz, & Tjia, 2014). The primary alternative, telephone surveys using random digit dialing, has become problematic in recent years due to widespread abandonment of land lines, along with prevalent use of various methods to screen out unwanted calls.

2 Specifically, we asked participants to “indicate the approximate total combined income (i.e., combination of your income and, if applicable, that of your spouse/domestic partner) in the last year you were employed full-time.” This information was treated as a general marker of socioeconomic status rather than an indicator of respondents’ present financial condition.

3 If participants selected “Pursue my spiritual goals” as one of their top three life goals, this goal was treated as beyond-the-self in nature only if the participant also ranked another beyond-the-self life goal in his or her top three and rated it as very important. Pursuit of spiritual goals is not, in itself, clearly either beyond-the-self-oriented or self-oriented. Previous studies have revealed that some people may have beyond-the-self understandings of their religious or spiritual goals while others take a self-oriented approach, such as focusing the goal primarily on a desire to get into heaven/achieve a desirable afterlife (see Moran et al., 2010). Furthermore, in our own mixed methods analyses, we found that those interviewees who were coded as purposeful on the interview and also rated “pursue my spiritual goals” as their highest priority goal on the survey, ranked at least one other purposeful goal in their top 3 and rated it as very important or more. Though this aspect of our survey algorithm for purpose may have led to some purposeful participants being miscategorized as non-purposeful (false negatives), we felt it prudent in this exploratory work to take a conservative approach, protecting strongly against false positives, i.e., non-purposeful participants being miscategorized as purposeful. See Bundick, Remington, Morton, and Colby (2017) for a more detailed rationale.

4 There is much precedent for using abbreviated versions of the IRI (e.g., Padilla-Walker & Nelson, 2015), for practical as well as psychometric reasons such as improved reliability and measurement invariance (see Braun, Rosseel, Kempenaers, Loas, & Linkowski, 2015). The three items that were removed due to awkward and confusing wording included “I am often quite touched by things that I see happen,” “Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems,” and “Other people's misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal.”

5 For the overall sample MANOVA and its accompanying MANCOVA, we also ran a MANCOVA controlling for the demographic variables found to be statistically significant in the preceding set of analyses (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity, and highest level of education); additionally, for the midlife subsample MANOVA and its accompanying MANCOVA, we ran a MANCOVA controlling for race/ethnicity. None of results of any of these MANCOVAs substantively or statistically changed the nature or interpretation of the results, so they are not reported.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.