Social responsibility at midlife

The purpose of this study was to describe how people understand social responsibility in various domains of their lives and to investigate the relationship of social responsibility to people's central life goals and their sense of meaning in their lives.

Semi-structured interviews with a representative group of 94 middle-aged American women and men were conducted in 1996. Participants were drawn from areas within a fifty-mile radius of five cities chosen to cover major geographic regions of the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco. The participants were drawn from a larger, nationally representative sample of American adults, the 1995 National Survey of Midlife Development (MIDUS) conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development.

In two- and three-hour interviews, participants were asked to talk about their life histories and what they do for their families, friends, and communities; about their paid work and volunteer work; their political engagement; and their financial contributions to charities and directly to other people. The interviews were taped and transcribed. In addition, structured summaries of the interviews were constructed by trained coders.

The Murray Center holds 94 transcribed interviews, summaries of 90 intervies, and computer files of data coded from the interviews and MIDUS survey responses for the 94 participants.