Kinship emotions and parenthood as motivators of concern for the distant future: a qualitative study

This study investigated concern people have for the future and the influence of parental status on how people think about the future. Qualitative interviews were used to further explore the findings of a previous quantitative survey study. The previous study asked participants to report how far into the future they felt personally invested, but it did not directly assess what specific considerations about the future led them to respond as they did. The survey study was administered to a sample of 240 participants. This study recruited 17 new participants. The original future thinking survey was administered first. The participants were then engaged in a structured interview designed to assess two separate aspects of their survey responses: the participants' understanding and interpretation of the survey questions and the reasoning behind their answers. Interview questions were structured so responses from different participants can be pooled together to identify common themes and reasons for survey answers. A central hypothesis of this study is that parenthood status would focus the interviewees' responses around their children. Themes that emerged were divided into concern for humans and concern for non-humans. All 10 of the parents interviewed mentioned their children or grandchildren during the interviews, and four of the seven non-parent participants mentioned nieces or nephews.