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Midlife Themes of Invisible Citizens

An Exploration into How Ordinary People Make Sense of Their Lives

Department of Education, Southeast Texas State University, San Marcos, TX 78666.

This article reports on a two-part interview study of 23 men and women aged 35 to 45 who held low-profile jobs such as prison inmates and guards, hospital cooks, laundry workers, custodians, resort maids, gardeners, bartenders, and bellmen. A research approach incorporating interview, life study, and oral history methods, mixed open-ended questions with formal inventories such as the Rokeach Value Survey and the KilpatrickCantril self-anchoring scale.

Four common themes emerged from the group. All were hopeful about their futures and most felt that their present lives were better than their past. A majority saw their lives as being strongly influenced by some painful and traumatic life event such as a divorce, death of a loved one, accident, drug addiction, or view of war. The women tended to select relational events when asked for their most significant life events, whereas the men chose public or personal events. All saw themselves as being responsible for their lives. The greatest contributions were the life stories themselves, reminding one of the need to see individuals in the rich context of their separate lives in order to appreciate the logic of their life themes.

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 2, 45-63 (1985)
DOI: 10.1177/0022167885252006


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