What Young Adults Worry About and What They Hope For
What do young adults worry about — and hope for — when they think about the future? A new study by the Risk and Resilience group of the Jacobs Center, conducted in collaboration with the Digital and Mobile Health Team and co-funded by a UZH Population Research Center seed grant, set out to investigate exactly that.
As part of the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, young adults were invited to write freely about their hopes and worries. Using AI-assisted text analysis, the team identified clear patterns in what mattered most to them.
Their biggest hopes:
- Starting a family
- Meaningful work
- A better, fairer society
Their biggest worries:
- Job security and career prospects
- Climate change, politics, and global uncertainty
- Mental health and achieving personal life goals
To strengthen the well-being of young people, policy efforts must also address financial insecurity and interpersonal stress, for example through affordable housing, secure employment, and fair wages. This is an important foundation for enabling young adults to look to the future with hope.
The study has been published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (open access):Read the full paper