Positive life events shape youth development more than previously thought

A recent study provides evidence that when young people are asked to describe the most important events in their lives, they predominantly focus on positive, everyday milestones rather than major stressors. The research, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggests that supporting these positive experiences may play a significant role in promoting youth mental health. The project was a collaboration between the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development and the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute at the University of Zurich.

Mental health research focusing on youth has traditionally relied on rigid checklists to track life events. These standard questionnaires typically ask participants to indicate whether they have experienced specific, predefined situations. The questions often center on negative or highly stressful occurrences, such as physical trauma or the loss of a family member.

Because experts design these surveys ahead of time, they rarely capture the spontaneous, lived experiences of young people in their own words. Adolescence and young adulthood are periods defined by significant psychological and emotional development. During these years, individuals navigate major life transitions, such as completing their education, entering the workforce, and moving away from their parents. Identifying which specific experiences young people view as the most meaningful during this time helps experts design better support systems.

Reading and categorizing thousands of written responses requires an immense amount of time and resources. Advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing provide new ways to solve this problem. Natural language processing is a type of computer technology that can analyze and extract themes from massive amounts of text data. The current research represents one of the first large-scale, long-term studies in the world to use these tools to analyze open-ended responses from young people.

Christina Haag, a first author of the study who is now at the University of Cambridge, noted the utility of this technological approach. “Our analyses show how freely formulated responses from large longitudinal studies can be processed in such a way that they provide a structured picture of young people’s experiences,” Haag says. “This allows their perspectives to remain visible in their own words.”

To gather these perspectives, the authors analyzed data from the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood. This project is a large community study tracking a diverse group of individuals in Zurich, Switzerland. The study included 1,442 participants who provided open-ended text responses at various points in time. The participants were surveyed when they were 15, 17, 20, and 24 years old.

At each assessment, participants answered a single, open-ended question about their lives. They were prompted to think back over the past few years and write down the single most important event they had experienced. Over the course of the study, this produced a total of 5,670 unique text descriptions. The researchers also gathered demographic information, including sex, socioeconomic status, and whether the participants had a family background of migration.

To measure mental health, the scientists assessed participants for internalizing symptoms. Internalizing symptoms refer to feelings and behaviors that are directed inward, such as symptoms of anxiety and depression. Participants completed an eight-item questionnaire at each time point to report how often they felt unhappy, fearful, or worried over the past month.

To analyze the vast amount of text data, the scientists used a Python programming tool called BERTopic. This software uses natural language processing to group similar text responses into distinct topics. After the computer model generated initial groupings, the researchers manually reviewed and refined the categories to ensure the content grouped correctly. They also trained a separate computer model to evaluate the emotional tone of each text segment to determine if the event was positive, negative, or neutral.

The authors found that 83.1% of the reported events were categorized as emotionally positive. Most of the events were ordinary, commonly occurring experiences rather than rare or extreme situations. The analysis identified 12 distinct topics that the researchers grouped into five broader categories. Education and career development made up 51.1% of the responses, while social relationships accounted for 19.6%.

Leisure activities and successes made up 12.4% of the responses, mental health and well-being accounted for 11.2%, and other life transitions made up 5.7%. The four specific topics mentioned most frequently were related to school and education, romantic relationships and friendships, mental health changes, and travel or vacations.

David Bürgin, a clinical developmental psychologist at the University of Zurich and first author of the study, highlighted the significance of these findings. “Our results show that youth is not primarily composed of crises,” Bürgin says. “Many young people primarily mention positive developmental steps such as education, relationships and personal achievements.”

This emphasis on positive milestones has practical applications for mental health professionals. Lilly Shanahan, a study co-leader at the University of Zurich, adds: “Support services should therefore not only focus on how to cope with stress. Stable relationships, positive experiences and opportunities to experience self-efficacy are just as important.” Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their own ability to succeed or accomplish goals.

These event topics shifted in noticeable ways as the participants grew older. Mentions of school and friendships were paramount in middle adolescence, but topics related to work, housing, and having children continued to rise steadily into young adulthood. In contrast, reports of sports and going out decreased as the participants aged. These shifts map closely onto expected developmental milestones as teenagers transition into independent adults.

Sociodemographic factors showed some small associations with the types of events reported. For example, women were more likely to report events related to travel, family, loss, and marriage compared to men. Men had higher odds of mentioning sports and vehicles. Participants with a higher socioeconomic status reported more travel events and fewer events related to work, family, or vehicles.

Despite these minor demographic differences, the three most common topics were reported equally across all groups. Education, friendships, and mental health themes did not vary based on sex, income, or migration background. This suggests that the core milestones of young adulthood are widely shared experiences.

The researchers also observed a link between mental health symptoms and the types of events participants recalled. Higher levels of anxiety and depression were associated with an increased likelihood of reporting negative events, stressful life events, conflicts, loss, and personal failures. At the same time, participants with higher internalizing symptoms were less likely to report positive experiences, such as achievements in school, work, or sports. This pattern provides evidence that mood may influence how individuals remember and appraise their past experiences.

There are several limitations to consider when interpreting these findings. First, the researchers do not fully understand the cognitive processes that prompt a person to select one specific event over another. A participant’s mood at the exact time of the survey might heavily influence which memory comes to mind. Additionally, because participants were only asked to name a single event, they may have left out other meaningful experiences.

The study is also limited by its specific geographic and historical context. The data were collected between 2013 and 2022 in an urban area of Switzerland. Some of the reported events were tied to specific moments in time, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or a particular pop music concert. These highly specific occurrences do not necessarily generalize to populations in other areas or time periods.

Another limitation involves participant dropout over the nine-year tracking period. Attrition at later stages of the study was slightly higher among men, youth from lower-income families, and participants with a migration background. This selective dropout may affect how well the findings represent the broader population, as research samples tend to become less diverse over time.

Future research could build on this study by asking participants to list multiple events and rank them by importance. Scientists might also benefit from asking individuals to rate the emotional impact of their own memories, rather than relying on a computer model to assess the tone. Integrating standard checklists with open-text questions could offer a more comprehensive view of youth development. Continuing to use text analysis tools could help professionals identify ways to foster beneficial experiences that improve well-being among adolescents and young adults.

The study, “Personally meaningful life events from adolescence to young adulthood: a longitudinal natural language processing analysis,” was authored by David Bürgin, Christina Haag, Lynn Alison Büeler, Laura Bechtiger, Clarissa Janousch, Elena Feldmann, Denis Ribeaud, Manuel Eisner, Viktor von Wyl, and Lilly Shanahan.