Working and ageing - Cedefop - Europa

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Working and ageing
Guidance and counselling for mature learners
contribution to the lives of others and desire to leave a legacy. […] Virtues,
families, friends, faith, and worthy human causes become more emphasisedʼ
(Abi-Hashem, 2000, p. 342).
This is echoed in earlier work by Gonzales and Zimbardo (1985) where the
future concerns of older research participants included their children,
retirement, legacy, and other long-term factors not common in the thoughts of
college students. They contrast this with the college student sample group
(Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999) where the future factor was less complex and did
not divide into subfactors.
Future time perspective has been identified as playing a part in the way
that people relate to many changes as they age, but only limited attention has
been paid to the part it plays in peopleʼs attitudes to and decisions about work,
learning and employment (Bal et al., 2010). Future time perspective is a
subjective view of time, reflecting highly individualised beliefs about how much
time people have available to them in the future. Lewin (1939) argues that an
individualʼs life-space is constituted of geographical, social and time elements,
asserting that ʻtime perspective is one of the most fundamental facts of
developmentʼ (Lewin, 1939, p. 879). His proposition that ʻtime ahead which
influences present behavior […] is […] to be regarded as a part of the present
life-spaceʼ (p. 879) holds true throughout life, and needs to be addressed in
career support in later years of life as it already is in career education provision
in the early years of schooling.
Between early childhood and adolescence, future time perspective
increases from days or months into years (Lewin, 1939). After the adolescent
period, it is negatively correlated with chronological age: anticipation of future
time available reduces with increasing years, though individual differences in
future time perspective may be considerable.
Cate and John (2007) bring another question to future time perspective:
whether it is the unidimensional bipolar construct assumed in most research
to date. Future time perspective has so far been conceptualised as a single
construct, representing a bipolar continuum from expansive (feeling there is
plenty of time to do what one wants to do) to limited (feeling time is running
out; Fung et al., 2001; Lang and Carstensen, 2002) (Cate and John, 2007).
Cate and John (2007) identify two main aspects of change with maturity,
which occur at different paces: an opportunity dimension which may show
reduction from early adulthood into middle age, but then stabilise; and a
limitation dimension which may only occur from middle age, but will increase
with subsequent years. It could be argued that a perception of reduced
opportunities in earlier adulthood (those aged in their 30s and 40s) may reflect