Havighurst's Adult Developmental Tasks: a Study of Their Importance Relative To Income, Age and Sex

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Abstract
Robert Havighurst has delineated developmental tasks for various stages of life from infancy through older adulthood. Although Havighurst's study is widely acknowledged by educators as a basis for planned learning experiences, apparently no studies exist which have assessed the saliency of his adulthood tasks for today's men and women. In this study, 540 adults representing three income levels (lower, middle, upper) and three age groups (young, middle-aged, older) were asked to rank, on a five point Likert-type scale, how important each of the adulthood tasks was for them. Means and standard deviations for each task were calculated for each sample subcategory, i.e., for males and females, three income levels, and three age groups. The means were rank ordered and the Kruskal-Wallis "Analysis of Var iance" by Ranks statistical test used. Findings suggest that while the tasks were considered important by most of the subgroups within the sample, women ranked the tasks as signifi cantly more important than did men, and middle income respondents ranked 16 out of 21 tasks higher than did lower or upper income adults. Finally, only older adults found their age-specific tasks to be more important than tasks of other life stages. The relevance of these findings for adult education is discussed.

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