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Does Aging Make Us Grittier? Disentangling the Age and Generation Effect on Passion and Perseverance
Volume 20, Issue 3 (2022): Special Issue: Data Science Meets Social Sciences, pp. 401–411
Shane Sanders   Nuwan Indika Millagaha Gedara   Bhavneet Walia     All authors (5)

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https://doi.org/10.6339/22-JDS1041
Pub. online: 14 April 2022      Type: Data Science In Action      Open accessOpen Access

Received
17 December 2021
Accepted
6 March 2022
Published
14 April 2022

Abstract

Defined as perseverance and passion for long term goals, grit represents an important psychological skill toward goal-attainment in academic and less-stylized settings. An outstanding issue of primary importance is whether age affects grit, ceteris paribus. The 12-item Grit-O Scale and the 8-item Grit-S Scale—from which grit scores are calculated—have not existed for a long period of time. Therefore, Duckworth (2016, p. 37) states in her book, Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance, that “we need a different kind of study” to distinguish between rival explanations that either generational cohort or age are more important in explaining variation in grit across individuals. Despite this clear data constraint, we obtain a glimpse into the future in the present study by using a within and between generational cohort age difference-in-difference approach. By specifying generation as a categorical variable and age-in-generation as a count variable in the same regression specifications, we are able to account for the effects of variation in age and generation simultaneously, while avoiding problems of multicollinearity that would hinder post-regression statistical inference. We conclude robust, significant evidence that the negative-parabolic shape of the grit-age profile is driven by generational variation and not by age variation. Our findings suggest that, absent a grit-mindset intervention, individual-level grit may be persistent over time.

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 Supplementary Material
For reproducibility, all data formatting and analysis scripts have been uploaded as Supplementary Materials and linked with the abstract of the article.

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2022 The Author(s). Published by the School of Statistics and the Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China.
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Keywords
achievement aging difference-in-difference grit personality

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