New research from the University of Zurich challenges the assumption that crises define adolescence. Tracking over 1,400 participants across nearly a decade, the study found that education, friendships and personal milestones — not hardship — top the list of formative experiences.
A sweeping long-term study has turned a familiar narrative on its head: for most young people, it’s the good stuff — not the hard stuff — that shapes who they become. Researchers at the University of Zurich tracked more than 1,400 participants from age 15 through age 24, and found that roughly 83% of the life events young people described as personally meaningful were positive in nature.
Published June 22 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the study analyzed open-ended written responses from 1,442 participants surveyed at ages 15, 17, 20 and 24. Unlike most research on life events, which tends to zero in on stressful or traumatic experiences, this project let participants speak freely about what felt significant to them — and their answers skewed decidedly upbeat.
School, Friends and New Beginnings Top the List
Education and vocational training dominated responses, accounting for nearly half of all events mentioned. Friendships and romantic relationships came in second at around 12%, followed by personal growth and mental well-being at roughly 8%, and travel or time spent abroad at about 7%. First jobs, moving out of a family home, and new relationships rounded out the picture of a generation marking its progress through achievement and connection rather than adversity.
First author David Bürgin, a clinical developmental psychologist in the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich, noted that the findings challenge assumptions that have long shaped how society thinks about young people’s inner lives.
“Our results show that youth is not primarily composed of crises. Many young people primarily mention positive developmental steps such as education, relationships and personal achievements,” Bürgin said in a news release.
Study co-lead Lilly Shanahan, an associate professor of clinical developmental psychology in the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich, drew a direct line between the findings and how support systems for young people should be designed.
“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,” Shanahan said in the news release.
Mental Health Still Shapes the Story
The picture wasn’t uniformly rosy. Participants who reported more significant symptoms of anxiety or depression were far more likely to cite conflict, loss, personal failure and strained relationships as their key life events. They also mentioned travel, academic accomplishments and sports activities less frequently than their peers — suggesting that psychological well-being shapes not just how young people feel, but what they remember as meaningful.
This finding reinforces the importance of early mental health support. For students dealing with anxiety or depression, the gap between their experience and that of their peers may be wider than surface-level comparisons suggest — not just in how hard life feels, but in what milestones feel accessible at all.
Priorities Shift as Young People Grow
The longitudinal design of the study — spanning nearly a decade — allowed researchers to chart how priorities evolved over time. In mid-adolescence, school, friendships and leisure activities dominated participants’ sense of what mattered. By early adulthood, work, housing, romantic partnerships, and in some cases parenthood had moved to the foreground. Sports and going out faded in prominence as participants aged, replaced by the steadier rhythms of adult independence.
Researchers also noted differences across gender, socioeconomic background and migration experience. Even so, the most frequently cited themes were broadly consistent across social groups, pointing to a shared developmental arc that transcends individual circumstances.
Why It Matters for Students
For college students navigating one of the most transition-heavy phases of life, these findings offer something more than academic interest. They suggest that the milestones that feel meaningful — finishing a degree, forming close friendships, traveling somewhere new, landing a first job — are not trivial compared to harder experiences. They are, for most young people, the actual substance of growing up.
The research also has implications for how universities and campus support services frame their work. If positive experiences and self-efficacy matter as much as resilience training, institutions might invest more deliberately in creating opportunities for students to build relationships, explore independence, and accumulate small wins — not just in developing infrastructure for crisis response.
AI-Assisted Analysis at Scale
One methodological highlight of the study was its use of automated natural language processing to sift through thousands of free-form written responses. Co-first author Christina Haag, now based at the University of Cambridge, described the approach as a way to preserve participants’ authentic voices while still extracting large-scale patterns.
“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. This allows their perspectives remain visible in their own words,” Haag said.
The researchers say this method could open new doors for longitudinal research, making it possible to quantitatively analyze qualitative data without flattening the nuance of personal accounts.
Source: University of Zurich