American college students' understandings of the good life: a grounded theory

'What is the good life?' Few empirical studies explore how American college students answer this important question. In this grounded theory study, we analysed the responses of 276 American college students in two phases. In the first phase, we examined responses from 109 students at 10 different universities. In the second phase, we added interviews with an additional 167 students at one of the universities. Based on our coding, we found students' visions of the good life were comprised of 24 unique ingredients; the most common being having a stable or passion-inspired career, being married, having children, continuing advanced learning, and being financially stable. We also discovered that eight distinct clusters of ingredients accounted for three-fourths of student responses. The clusters included American dreamers, happy strivers, comfort, and stability seekers, ECL (enjoy work, have comfort, limited family) students, family cultivators, singular career strivers, moral strivers, and God-followers. Plain Language Summary'What is the good life?' For thousands of years, authors have told us what the good life should be. Yet, if educators and other practitioners, such as student life personnel and youth workers, are going to help persuade students to develop a particular vision of the good life, respectable pedagogy requires that we first understand what students think the good life is.Unfortunately, few studies explore how American college students answer this important question. In this study, we analysed the responses of 276 American college students in two phases. In the first phase, we examined responses from 109 students at 10 different universities. In the second phase, we added interviews with an additional 167 students at one of the universities.Based on our analysis, we found students' visions of the good life were comprised of 24 unique good life 'ingredients'. An ingredient is simply one particular element of the good life that students mentioned. The most common ingredients were having a stable or passion-inspired career, being married, having children, continuing advanced learning, and being financially stable.We also discovered that eight distinct clusters of ingredients accounted for three-fourths of student responses. We named these clusters: American dreamers, happy strivers, comfort, and stability seekers, ECL (enjoy work, have comfort, limited family) students, family cultivators, singular career strivers, moral strivers, and God-followers.