Personality and motivation of participants in the senior university courses

The population of the Czech republic is getting older. That applies to other European states, including the most advanced ones. In response to that, universities through out the Czech republic have began offering third age university for senior citizens. For my thesis, I decided to conduct studies on this group of inviduals. This group of seniors that have decided to enroll back in school are eager to learn something new, here at the University. In this thesis I am studying personality characteristics of third age university students. From this research, I have managed to create a general profile of the aforementioned student. Another task was to find out what was the motivation and the reason for them to attend the university. The motivation is in many respects similar to the studies already carried out on this topic, but due to the method I chose for my research, I was able to get further under the surface. The research was done using semi-structured interviews that were on average 1 hour long. Key words: old adult, university of the third age, old adult motivation, qualitative research, profile of student U3