About the Life Patterns Research Program

The Life Patterns Research Program is an umbrella research program that includes two longitudinal studies of young people’s post school transitions:

• The Life Patterns project follows a cohort of young Australians who left school in 1991
• The Pathways Then and Now project is a new study of a new cohort of young Australians who were in Year 11 in 2005 

Life Patterns

The Youth Research Centre’s Life Patterns Research Program commenced in 1991 with the beginning of the Life Patterns project, a multi-method panel cohort longitudinal study of 2000 students who finished school in that year. The Life Patterns project explored this group of young people’s post-school pathways into adulthood and has documented the group’s lives from their late teens into their thirties (and is continuing).

In general, the participants have told us that the values they’ve inherited from their parents are important. In some ways, their hopes and expectations – with a central place given to financial security and family life – are similar to the previous generation. Yet, and marking a crucial difference with the past, this group has looked to achieve these values by placing an increasing emphasis on the importance of autonomy and flexibility. This emphasis has led us to challenging the assumptions made by many in policy, the media and academia that this group are part of a generation whose transition processes are faulty. We instead propose that a 'new adulthood' has appeared amongst this generation. The Life Patterns project points to this generation finding new ways to both attempt to balance life priorities and to negotiate the many barriers to achieving the ‘traditional markers of adulthood’ that have arisen.   

We are continuing to follow the lives of this cohort of Life Patterns participants in a modified form with the focus on qualitative aspects of the study. This means that the original Life-Patterns study will be extended to cover at least a period of 19 years after the participants left secondary school.

Pathways Then and Now

In 2005, we began a new longitudinal study, of a new generation of students, as a continuation of the Life Patterns Program. This new project, funded by the Australian Research Council, is called Pathways Then and Now: New student transitions to adulthood in a comparative context and is following 3000 young people (in Year 11 in 2005) in Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT and Tasmania as they progress through their studies, jobs and personal lives over the next few years (until 2009). We will compare the experiences of this new group with those of the previous cohort of Life Patterns participants to obtain an insight into the changes that effect young people as they achieve adulthood in today’s society.

This project follows a similar design to the first Life Patterns project: a multi-method approach using annual surveys with a representative sample (3,000 people) and interviews with a sub-sample (50 people). Like its predecessor, the Pathways Then and Now project is built on a robust commitment to participant research. Participants have regular opportunities to provide feedback and to shape the progress of the research. We are grateful to all the participants for their previous and ongoing participation.

A summary report of the 2006 survey, Pathways Through Life, is now available. Full text (PDF)