Emerging Adults Thinking About Their Future: Development of the Portuguese Version of the Hopes and Fears Questionnaire

Abstract

Nowadays, emerging adults live in a context of macroeconomic uncertainty. As the major processes of one’s identity exploration currently occur in emerging adulthood, understanding how these individuals foresee their future is of special interest. The purpose of this study was 2-fold: (i) to investigate future orientation (FO) in a sample of Portuguese emerging adults and (ii) to validate the Portuguese version of the Hopes and Fears Questionnaire. Data from 332 individuals were analyzed. Results demonstrated that participants’ future hopes and fears were mainly pertaining to education, work/career, and family/marriage. Participants also reported concerns related to their financial resources. Thus, the results showed that participants’ FO reflected major tasks associated with their development stage, as well as contextual factors, such as macroeconomic trends. This study contributed to the knowledge of emerging adulthood in Portugal, simultaneously providing a useful and reliable measure to evaluate emerging adults’ FO in that country.

Cross‐Cultural Validity of Bowen Theory in Southern European Countries

“…Moreover, in the current Portuguese context, young individuals continue to struggle to find relatively stable and non‐precarious jobs. Recent studies conducted with Portuguese emerging adults (Fonseca, Crespo, & Relvas, ; Fonseca et al., ) reveal that participants presented work/career‐related fears, described concerns related to achieving financial sustainability, and reported higher levels of financial worries.…”

Future Hopes and Fears of Portuguese Emerging Adults in Macroeconomic Hard Times: The Role of Economic Strain and Family Functioning

“…The influence of macro-level contextual features in young people's future orientation is well-documented in the literature (e.g., Fonseca et al, 2018;Nurmi, 1991). However, as far as we are aware, no empirical studies have examined the links between emerging adults' perceptions of their financial situations during macroeconomic hard times and the content of their future hopes and fears.…”

“…Family functioning, understood as a set of processes by which a family meets basic needs, makes decisions, establish rules, and defines goals (Lanigan, 2009), was selected for this study because it constitutes a whole-level family variable, describing overall family relationships, dynamics, and the quality of family life. We address the future hopes and fears across six life domains found salient in the future orientation of Portuguese emerging adults (Fonseca et al, 2018): education, work/career, family/marriage, property, autonomy and stability, and financial resources. Fonseca et al (2018) also demonstrated that sex, age, and occupational status played a role in the salience of specific life domains, while additional research (Massey et al, 2008) stressed the influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) in the content of future thinking, suggesting, for instance, that adolescents of low SES reported fewer educational aspirations and emphasized materialistic goals in greater extent.…”

“…among the most salient domains in the future thinking of adolescents (e.g., Massey, Gebhardt, & Garnefski, 2008) and emerging adults (e.g., Fonseca et al, 2018), underscoring that young people tend to follow a cultural prototype of anticipated lifespan development (Nurmi, 1991).…”

“…Other studies (Kolesovs, 2013;Lindfors, Solantaus, & Rimpelä, 2012) reported variations in young people's future goals and fears across time and/or sociohistorical periods. Recent research (Fonseca et al, 2018;Ranta, Dietrich, & Salmela-Aro, 2014) has stressed the prominence of financial issues in emerging adults' future thinking, which might reflect unfavorable macroeconomic trends.…”