"Next to characteristics like social class, race, and religion, generation is probably the most common explanatory tool used by social scientists to account for differences among people."
It's become second-nature to refer to "our parents' generation" or to different groups of people as "The Baby Boomers" or "Generation Me". Alwin argues that generational shift as an explanation for social change is too easy and too flawed to be viable in social science, claiming instead that while generational shift may explain certain changes in attitude and behavior, a good deal more is explained by historical events and patterns of aging.
Sociologists and demographers define "cohort" as "all people born at the same time", which is popularly interchangeable with the term "generation". Alwin notes that cohort replacement is "a fact of social life" and is inevitable as older cohorts die off (or retire) and younger cohorts fill the positions they left in society, but whether members of cohorts can remain pliable or are permanently influenced by their formative experiences remains in question.
The cohort effect is a marked imprint on members of a cohort who experience a major historical event when they are young (such as the economic beliefs and life style of people who grew up under privation during the Great Depression). Unique events, ideologies, and social movements undoubtedly have left impressions on cohorts: the New Deal, the Civil Rights era and women's rights movement, the Vietnam War, etc.
Alwin cautions that there is also an aging effect that describes how people change as they get older; "The older people get, for example, the more intensely they may hold to their views". Likewise, there are period effects that describe how everyone is affected, regardless of age, by certain historical events.
Interpreting people's responses to a survey question of whether they trust other people, Robert Putnam, who authored Bowling Alone about generational differences, argues that the data clearly support his claim that trust in others varies by generation. Alwin, however, claims that if you examine the responses considering age--those of one generation circa age 25 compared to those of the previous generation circa age 25-- the trends they follow suggest that people become more trusting of others as they get older, an age effect more so than a cohort effect. The data at any moment in time differs between cohorts, but the trends are nearly identical.
In a similar analysis, Alwin notes that responses to a survey question about whether they can trust the government to do what is right vary through time, but this variation is nearly identical for all generations. This implies that generation has nothing to do with trust in government, and since the same variation occurred at the same time, it can't be an age effect. Instead, trust in government is explained by period effects that affect all Americans at the same time.
It is peculiar that there is so much talk about generations in America and so much weight given to explanations of social change as generational succession. Alwin does well in reminding us that certain effects are a part of the human life cycle, and others the product of immediate historical events and social movements, and still others the effect of individual variation. I believe social change over time should not be viewed incrementally (as in generation to generation), but fluidly and with recognition that the aging process tends to work the same way on all Americans. In this sense, the American social character is a much more static construct than a generational character and remains much more apropos to the understanding of Americans in general.
Relevance: 3/5 (neutral)
Salience: 3/5 (neutral)
References:
- Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone. - cited in agreement.
- Norman Ryder - quoted. "The potential for change is concentrated in the cohorts of young adults who are old enough to participate directly in the movements impelled by change, but not old enough to have become committed to an occupation, a residence, a family of procreation or a way of life".
- Erik Erikson - quoted. "No longer is it merely for the old to teach the young the meaning of life . . . it is the young who, by their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented by the old and presented to the young has meaning; and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm those who confirm them and, joining the issues, to renew and to regenerate or to reform and to rebel."
- General Social Survey (GSS) - as evidence.
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