Life Transitions
People in the middle of changing.
What is in this dataset?
New job anxiety, relationships ending, personal reinvention — moments where someone holds two contradictory positions at once and means both.
Every turn carries what the speaker intended, what they wanted, the communication act, what they believed at that moment and how the relationship moved — computed before the text was generated, not inferred from it afterwards.
Why does it exist?
Systems trained on clean data treat a contradiction as an error to resolve. People in the middle of a change hold both sides at once, and an assistant that flattens that sounds wrong in exactly the moments that matter.
How was it built?
- Three scenarios: starting a job, a relationship ending, personal reinvention.
- Speakers keep a stable identity while their stated position moves.
- Intent and goal are recorded per turn, so the ambivalence is legible.
What does it prove — and what does it not?
That a coherent identity is not the same as a consistent opinion.
Synthetic material, not testimony. It is a good source of the shape of ambivalent conversation; it is not evidence about how people actually experience these transitions.
What can you use it for?
- Training assistants that must not force a premature resolution.
- Testing whether a model can hold ambiguity across a long conversation.
- Studying the difference between a stable identity and a stable opinion.
Data sources
Synthetic populations are conditioned on published demographic and psychometric distributions. We acknowledge the sources: national age structures from Eurostat (demo_pjan), IBGE (Censo Demográfico 2022), U.S. Census Bureau (Population Estimates Program) and CONAPO (Conciliación Demográfica and Proyecciones); marital status and children from the UN Population Division (World Marriage Data 2019) and the OECD Family Database; country personality norms from Schmitt et al. (2007); and given names from national statistics institutes.
What these are, and what they are not. Synthetic people are derived: we sample from the distributions these institutions publish. A synthetic person is not a record from Eurostat, IBGE, the Census Bureau, CONAPO or any statistics institute, and must not be presented or cited as one. None of these institutions endorses, certifies or is affiliated with StrataSynth.