I thought that the time frame of the study was particularly interesting. The participants of the Terman study grew up during many difficult periods, including world wars and the Great Depression. Nevertheless, most of them seem to have progressed through their lives despite the hardships of their generation. The first thought that I had when I read about this was that they must have grown a level of resiliency from these events. They must have had to change their thoughts and behaviors in order to adapt to the troubling environments they were in. No generation has been through so many troubling times in the United States than the generation that was being tested by Dr. Terman.
With that all being said, I think that conscientiousness was one of the traits that many of the children needed to adopt in order to survive. For example, in order to survive through the Great Depression, the children needed to be careful with how they spent money. The children who grew to have conscientiousness seemed to have realized that they needed to think about the future. Perhaps some of the children naturally had conscientiousness and were able to thrive through hard work while growing up. However, I like to believe that many of them had to learn to have conscientiousness because it was a trait that they realized would help them be able to handle the difficult times. The combination of their environment and their response to it seems to have shaped many of the children to have conscientiousness.
I remember I was in elementary school when the housing market fell. I remember how it was a very difficult financial time. Now, many years later, I think my generation is still impacted by this event. When looking at the numbers of millennials buying homes, it is a dramatic drop from what it used to be. I think that living through the housing market crash influenced many of us to have more conscientiousness about our purchases, especially homes. We are more careful with money when buying a home because we remember what happened to us while we were growing up.