A Closer Look at Life Goals across Adulthood: Applying A Developmental Perspective to Content, Dynamics, and Outcomes of Goal Importance and Goal Attainability

Abstract

It is well established that goals energize and direct behaviour across the lifespan. To better understand how goals are embedded in people's lives across adulthood, the present research examined life goals' content (health, personal growth, prosocial engagement, social relations, status, work), dynamics (interplay between goal importance and goal attainability), and outcomes (subjective well‐being) from a developmental perspective. We argue that people rate those goals as important and attainable that enable them to master developmental tasks, that they adapt their goals to personal capacities, and that goals predict subjective well‐being after 2 and 4 years. The sample included 973 individuals (18–92 years old, M = 43.00 years) of whom 637 participated 2 years later and 573 participated 4 years later. Goal importance and well‐being were assessed at all occasions and goal attainability at the first two occasions. Results indicated that age was negatively associated with importance and attainability of personal‐growth, status, and work goals but positively associated with importance and attainability of prosocial‐engagement goals. The association between goal importance and attainability was largely bidirectional over time; and goal attainability, rather than goal importance, was positively linked to later well‐being. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of adult lifespan development. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology

Does Age Matter for Personality Psychology?

“…Younger, middle‐aged, and older adults differed in how important and how attainable they perceived distinct domains of life goals (e.g. work, health, and social relationships), yet goal importance and especially goal attainability predicted later general and domain‐specific satisfaction rather similarly for adults of different age (Bühler et al, ). When differentiating social goals into approach and avoidance goals in very close, close, and peripheral social relationships, a more distinct pattern of associations with daily well‐being and satisfaction arose (Nikitin & Freund, ): Age‐related differences in social goals became most apparent in peripheral relationships compared to close relationships.…”

Stability and change in major life goals during the transition to parenthood

“…Past research indicated that the rank-order stability of major life goals is moderate with average testretest correlations of $ r ¼ .45 -.60 across periods of two to six years, with slightly lower stability estimates for younger (Hill et al, 2016;Lu¨dtke et al, 2009;Roberts et al, 2004) compared to older samples (Bleidorn et al, 2010;Bu¨hler et al, 2019). More recent studies showed that life goals are also considerably rank-order stable over periods as long as 20 years (Atherton et al, 2020).…”

The actor, agent, and author across the life span: interrelations between personality traits, life goals, and life narratives in an age-heterogeneous sample

“…It is thought that as a result of these adaptive processes (e.g. Freund & Baltes, 2000), life goals relate to age in accordance with changing age-graded expectations and developmental tasks (Elder, 1995; Erikson, 1968; Havighurst, 1972): In terms of communal and agentic life goals as assessed in this study, one would expect age to be positively linked to communal goals of family and social relationships, positively linked to communal goals of generativity and community, and negatively linked to agentic goals (Bühler et al., 2019; Hutteman, Hennecke, Orth, Reitz, & Specht, 2014; Nurmi, 1992). As for life narratives, the narratives of middle-aged and older adults, compared with their younger counterparts, tend to show more complexity, coherence, warmth, and emphasis on positive events (Baddeley & Singer, 2007; McAdams, 2015b).…”