The responsibility to take care of one's own old-age provision rises in many countries due to different developments such as the demographic change and the retraction of the state from the social security systems. This holds especially for today’s young adults who are, however, often unaware of this necessity. This unawareness and possible remedies to overcome it may also depend on how young adults conceive the pension system. In addition, the pension system is a concern of constant social policy reforms, which citizens judge as they vote. Their intuitive conceptions are thus of vital concern for citizenship education. In this paper, we present a study that aims at exploring young adults' intuitive conceptions of the German pension system. To this end, semi-structured interviews with
108 undergraduate students of economic and business education were conducted and assessed by means of content analysis. Preliminary results indicate diverse intuitive conceptions of the German pension system and point towards information needs and further research. The study contributes to the growing but still poorly researched area of research on conceptions and conceptual change in economics (theoretical significance). In addition, it provides indications for learning needs, which are imperative to design respective learning arrangements (practical significance).
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