The importance of people gaining new, and high-level, qualifications in adulthood has been much emphasised in policy rhetoric. It is widely assumed that adults should engage in learning throughout their working life in order to adapt to changing conditions in the labour market and to ensure that national economies remain competitive in a global…

One key objective of life span research is to examine how individual development is shaped by the historical time people live in. Secular trends favoring later-born cohorts on fluid cognitive abilities have been widely documented, but findings are mixed for well-being. It remains an open question whether secular increases in well-being seen in…

In Western cultures, life narratives are typically expected to recount the narrator's life from birth to the present. Disparate autobiographical memories need to be integrated into a more or less coherent story, which is facilitated by an overarching temporal macrostructure. The temporal macrostructure consists of elaborated beginnings that…

The ability to narrate stories and a synchronic self-concept develop in the pre- and primary school years. Life story theory proposes that both developments extend to an even later developmental stage, that is, to adolescents' acquisition of a coherent life story. Cross-sectional evidence supports the emergence of a life story in adolescence, but…

The author examines whether gains of learning of Asian students are the same or different if they are from (a) East Asia, (b) South and Central Asia, or (c) Southeast Asia at undergraduate and graduate levels. Results indicated that East Asian students' gains of learning in personal development, science and development, general education,…

The purpose of this article is to explore how one group of students reflect upon their transition into the higher education environment. This qualitative research project followed one group of female undergraduate students as they moved through the first year of study. All of the participants were the first in their family to consider further…

The SpringBoard Bursary Foundation (SpringBoard) commissioned the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) to undertake an evaluation of its activities and impacts between 2013 and 2018. This interim and summary report presents the findings of the first year of the evaluation. SpringBoard was established in 2012 to transform the lives of…

The multiple and conflicting identity pressures that young women in western society face have been remarked upon in the literature. Adolescence is a time when identity development activity intensifies, and this process can present young people with challenges. In this paper a social constructionist and interpretive frame is applied to such…

Although social change is diverse and ubiquitous, there is to date little research on the impact of social change on individual development, nor on the variables that may mediate and moderate this impact. This lack is, in part, based on insufficient consideration of psychological theories that may be applied to social change, but particularly on…

Tests a career model of immigrants with the following stages: crystallization, vocational retraining, job entry and trial, establishment, and maintenance. Two samples of immigrants are followed up. The research brought into focus the continuity of the process of career reconstruction after the interruption of vocational activity caused by…

The impact of early life events that take place under specific historical and societal circumstances on adult development have rarely been investigated in old age. We examined whether having started a family in young adulthood was related to the contents of possible selves generated by women aged 85 to 100+ in the Berlin Aging Study (N = 129; M…

Four Australian cohorts (born in 1961, 1965, 1970 and 1975) were studied between 1980-2000. The life transitions study focused on these three traditional markers of adulthood: (1) moving out of the parental home; (2) establishing an intimate relationship; and (3) buying a home. Incidence of these transitions was analyzed in terms of their…