Studies Prove Past Is Prologue
Research always begins for me with the revelations that come out of real-life stories. In 1989, I started collecting life histories of women and men who were living through stages beyond where “Passages” left off. These pacesetters are the primary subjects of my research. They tend to be achievers and risk-takers - the natural scouts of any society who are first to spot possibilities in what used to be a terra incognita.
Some of these pacesetters are celebrities, but my interviews with people like Lauren Hutton and Gloria Steinem, Frank Gifford and Hugh Downs were not glitzy; they were sober self-examinations.
Most people I interviewed were not famous. To break out of the bicoastal corridor of high-powered personalities in New York and Los Angeles, I made research trips to the Far West, the Midwest and the South. From a depressed area in Freehold, N.J., to a men’s health spa high in Seattle’s hills, to a down-and-dirty discussion with divorced women over 45 in Chicago, I got an earful of the new possibilities and pitfalls being encountered to wayfarers into Second Adulthood. I kept chugging on: Dallas, San Antonio, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Detroit, and back to Baltimore and Boston, down to Louisville and Atlanta, and on to Orlando and Tampa.
I conducted close to 500 personal interviews with men and women from age 20 to 70. They ranged from working-class Americans to those of the educated middle class who have the luxury of choice.
I had assumed that after sharing their very personal and sometimes painful stories, most people would wish to be anonymous. But after they read their vignettes, the majority of people elected to be identified by name.
The bedrock of my data comes from several years’ work with the U.S. Census Bureau. The bureau’s data are the broadest cache of sociological comparisons we have in this country. Once each decade the Census Bureau gives us a snapshot of everyone at the same moment in history.
Evelyn Mann, the retired New York City chief demographer, helped me create my own tape file, a pseudo-longitudinal data set that would span 50 years, from 1940 to 1990, and would allow us to trace through what happened to a particular age-sex group over its lifetime.
Five different generations now occupy contemporary adulthood, spanning birth dates from 1914 to 1980. The playing field is quite different for each generation when its young members start the journey into adulthood. The point where you and your friends came in on your culture’s history has influenced your choices and attitudes. That distinctive generational coloration affects each stage of life and the passages between them.
To represent each of the five generations, I have selected five birth years that make a “cohort group,” a sociological term that refers to people who will always share a common location in history. Not only were members of any cohort born within the same few years, but they have experienced defining events when they were the same age.
Drawing on the PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample) file - the unique database created from Census Bureau data spanning 50 years - we were able to compare and contrast what is happening at any age to a particular cohort group over its lifetime, with regard to educational and occupational achievement, labor force status, income level, marriage, child-bearing and divorce patterns.
The five generations I refer to - and you’ll read more about them in future columns - are: the World War II Generation, born 1914-1929; the Silent Generation, born 1930-1945; the Vietnam Generation, born 1946-1955; the Me Generation, born 1956-1965; and the Endangered Generation, born 1966-1980.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate