Summary: A 35-year longitudinal study offers new insight into the life transitions people experience from adolescence into midlife.
Source: University of Alberta
Interest in generational differences has been rising: commentators label the Silent Generation as rigidly conventional, boomers as self-focused, Gen X as disengaged, and millennials as slow to reach adulthood. Yet many of those claims rely on stereotypes rather than long-term evidence. One of the few multi-decade investigations that tracks a single cohort—Generation X—is the University of Alberta’s Edmonton Transitions Study (ETS).
Now 35 years running, the ETS is the longest study of its kind in Canada. It traces major life transitions—finishing high school, pursuing further education, entering the workforce, forming families, buying homes, and career progression—by following a cohort of nearly 1,000 Edmonton graduates first surveyed in 1985.
Over the decades the sample size declined as participants moved or could not be located, settling at about 400 who responded at multiple points. Researchers surveyed the group repeatedly between ages 18 and 25 to map the shift from education into employment, then again at age 32, at 43 (in 2010), and most recently in 2017 when participants reached age 50. Those waves focused on employment, family dynamics and well-being across the life course.
The ETS resembles the long-running British “Up” documentary series, which has followed the same group of people every seven years since 1964 to show how lives and perspectives change over time. Similarly, ETS provides a rare longitudinal perspective that reveals how patterns of stability and change in early adulthood relate to later life outcomes.
The myth of midlife crisis
One of the ETS’s most talked-about findings challenged the common belief in a midlife slump. Public commentary often assumes happiness peaks in youth, dips through middle age, and then rises again. ETS data told a different story: on average, happiness tended to increase from late teens into early adulthood, level off by the early 40s and remain stable into the 50s, rather than falling.
“When we followed them over time, yes, happiness increased up to age 32 and kind of leveled off by 43. But it didn’t go down after that,” said psychologist Nancy Galambos, who co-authored ETS publications with sociologist Harvey Krahn and human ecologist Matthew Johnson.
Galambos noted that economists and commentators had long assumed a midlife dip without longitudinal evidence; many earlier studies used cross-sectional snapshots that compare different people at different ages rather than tracking the same individuals over time. ETS’s repeated measures allow researchers to separate cohort and age effects and to observe how individual trajectories influence life outcomes.
Origins and aims of the study
ETS began as a modest investigation into job prospects for Edmonton high school graduates. Krahn and colleague Graham Lowe designed the first survey in the early 1980s, a period of unusually high youth unemployment. They wanted to understand whether unemployment at a critical early age harmed self-esteem, increased depression, or led to other negative outcomes.
“We thought two years was a long study,” Krahn recalled of the original plan. By following the same group again and again, the research team discovered that many young people simply stayed in school because jobs were scarce, delaying certain life milestones but often improving long-term job prospects.
Depression and self-esteem
In the early 2000s Nancy Galambos joined the research team, bringing expertise in developmental psychology and longitudinal measures of depression and self-esteem. Her work found that depressive symptoms and expressions of anger tended to decline between ages 18 and 25, while self-esteem generally rose.
Parental education mattered: participants whose parents had higher education saw depressive symptoms and anger dissipate more quickly. Ongoing conflict with parents sustained anger, and women reported higher depression at 18 than men, although that gap narrowed by 25. Increases in social support and marriage were linked to better psychological well-being, while prolonged unemployment correlated with higher depression and lower self-esteem.
Values across generations
Krahn led a 2012 ETS analysis comparing work values across generations, finding fewer differences in core beliefs than popular commentary suggests. He acknowledged that distinct events—like the Great Depression or a major war—can shape a generation’s outlook, but for many cohorts differences in core values are modest.
Where differences do appear is in the timing of major life transitions. A 2018 ETS paper, “Quick, Uncertain, and Delayed Adults,” showed that Generation X generally took longer than previous cohorts to secure their first full-time job, to leave home, to complete education, to marry, to buy a home and to have their first child. Much of this delay was explained by spending more time in school: longer education postpones milestones but often yields better early-career opportunities.
Contrary to media stereotypes of “kids living in their parents’ basements,” the ETS suggests those who delay transitions to invest in education often fare better in the long run.
Biggest surprise
One unexpected ETS finding was a decline in concern about several social problems as people’s incomes rose. Comparing responses across 25 years, Krahn and colleagues observed decreasing anxiety about racial discrimination, the treatment of Indigenous people, female job discrimination, unemployment and environmental pollution as respondents aged from 18 to 43.
“There’s a long-standing question in sociology and political science: do people become more conservative as they age, or are differences cohort-based?” Krahn said. The ETS data showed that higher education did not reliably change concern over these issues; instead, rising income predicted reduced concern for social problems.
What’s next
As the ETS marks its 35th year, the project continues to attract interest and collaborators. Margie Lachman, a lifespan development psychologist from Brandeis University who specializes in mid- and later-life research, recently joined the team. The research group plans several new papers and extended analyses of the cohort as participants move into later life phases.
Galambos intends to follow Generation X into retirement to see whether the increases in happiness observed earlier persist into old age. Matthew Johnson is exploring family dynamics and commitment in midlife, including evidence that delaying marriage can lead to greater long-term happiness. He is also investigating how family background—immigration, parental education and parent-child relationships—shapes life trajectories and whether parental influence wanes or endures into midlife.
Krahn, now retired, remains actively involved and enthusiastic about the study’s future. “I will continue with the research as long as I can,” he said, praising the strong team and their analytic work. He also plans further inquiry into widely cited assumptions, such as claims that the average person will hold seven careers in their lifetime—an assertion he expects the data will not fully support.
About this aging research article
Source:
University of Alberta
Media Contacts:
Geoff McMaster – University of Alberta
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