Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Living Too Long or Dying Too Soon? Exploring How Long Young Adult University Students in Four Countries Want to Live

  • Published:
Journal of Adult Development Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Young adults in more developed countries can expect to celebrate their 85th, 90th and even their 100th birthdays. Although time horizons have a major influence on behavior and adult development, little is currently known about how young people feel about the prospect of living such long lives. We therefore explored young adults’ preferred life expectancy (how long one wants to live) based on questionnaire data from N = 715 university students in Austria, Norway, Poland and Russia. The countries represented in the sample differ substantially with regard to period life expectancy and the extent to which women outlive men. Overall, participants indicated wanting to live for M = 87.43 years (SD = 14.91), M = 8.12 years longer than they expect to live and M = 13.04 years longer than they think that an average person with the same age and sex will live. There was thus no indication that participants felt that they will live “too long.” There was a 7-year difference between the country subsamples with the highest and lowest PLE, providing first evidence that PLE meaningfully differs across countries. Men wanted to live longer than women in each country subsample. Despite country differences in the extent to which women outlive men, there was no evidence that the magnitude of the gender difference in PLE differed across country subsamples. PLE was also related to young people’s representations of old age and subjective health. Young people who prefer to die relatively young (< 80 years) were much more likely to use tobacco daily and be physically inactive than their peers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

References

Download references

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Professor Jesus Crespo Cuaresma at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Anna Gruzdeva at the Northern (Arctic) Federal University, Arkhangelsk, Russia for their help with data collection.

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (Project Number 262700; Principal Investigator: Vegard Skirbekk).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Catherine E. Bowen.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 30 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bowen, C.E., Christiansen, S.G., Emelyanova, A. et al. Living Too Long or Dying Too Soon? Exploring How Long Young Adult University Students in Four Countries Want to Live. J Adult Dev 27, 157–169 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-019-09335-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-019-09335-y

Keywords

Navigation