The great generational divide

What’s the matter with kids today?

The most dramatic cultural difference between the young and old found in the study concerned TV programming. The young are far less worried about content issues regarding sex and violence.

Depends on what side of the conservative/liberal line you’re standing. Hint: Youth are far more conservative than their elders on many issues

By Susan Williams

The next time you’re tempted to say something like, “Geez, what is this younger generation coming to?” check things out with Edward “Ted” Carmines, Rudy Professor and Warner O. Chapman Professor of political science at IU Bloomington. You might still mu tter a wondering phrase, but it won’t be for the reason you originally assumed.

Carmines, along with political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, released a report Sept. 24 from a research project funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust and conducted by the Survey Research Center at Berkeley. The findings? That youths are more conservative than their elders on several controversial issues, notably those involving religion and abortion, cornerstones of today’s conservative cultural agenda.

For example:

• On the topic of school prayer, the survey showed that 59 percent of adults ages 27-59 want public schools to allow prayer at official school activities, such as commencements. Among teenagers, 69 percent support school prayer.

• In considering federal aid to faith-based charities, 40 percent of adults ages 27-59 support such funding. But support reaches 59 percent among the college aged and 67 percent among younger teens.

• And on religious conservatives, young Americans show somewhat more warmth than older adults. Individuals ranked their feelings for religious conservative groups on a scale from zero for “cold” to 50-100 for varying degrees of “warmth.” Although no age g roup showed much warmth to Christian fundamentalists, 33 percent of youths ages 15-26 gave them a rating over 50; 26 percent of Americans over age 26 gave a similar score.

• In looking at abortion, government restrictions are supported by 34 percent of adults over 26, while about 44 percent of youths ages 15-22 support such restrictions.

“A widespread presumption has been that younger adults and teenagers have more liberal attitudes on cultural issues,” said Carmines, regarding the findings. “While this is true on some cultural issues, just the opposite is the case for other cultural issu es.”

Carmines said that areas in which some traditional political differences between younger and older Americans continue to prevail, however.

“Youth want the federal government to do more to protect women and racial minorities from job discrimination,” he said. “They also consider job discrimination against gays and lesbians to be a serious problem, and they want more federal assistance to assi st the poor and protect the environment.”

But, perhaps the most dramatic of traditional differences between the young and old concern sex and violence on television, according to Carmines.

“Among Americans ages 27 to 59, 67 percent think that ‘the amount of sexual content on television’ is a serious problem, while just 47 percent of teens and college aged agree,” he said. “And while an overwhelming majority of adults ages 27 to 59—74 percen t—thinks that TV violence is a serious problem, the majority of teens and young adults—55 percent—disagree.”

Finally, there were areas in which older and younger respondents were in full agreement. According to Carmines, there were no substantial differences on a number of political issues, including military defense, gun control, tax policy, criminal punishment and government support for health care.

“This survey was jointly conceived and planned during the year (2000-2001) I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University,” said Carmines. “We had been looking for an opportunity to do a compre hensive national survey focusing on citizens’ political concerns and how those concerns are linked to different kinds of political participation. We were especially interested in whether adults and youth had similar or very different political views and p riorities.”

While the survey—based upon telephone interviews with a standard academic survey research sample of about 1,250 people—didn’t fully explore more objective reasons for the beliefs held, Carmines ventured a guess.

“One possibility for the greater conservatism found among younger respondents on some cultural issues is that messages criticizing abortion and supporting prayer and government aid to religious charities may have been more prominent in the media during th e period when the youngest generation was developing political views,” he said. “But this is only one possible explanation, and more research needs to be done to explore the various dimensions of the generation gap.”

Whether members of the younger set maintain their current positions as they age is another major question to be answered.

“We hope to do a follow-up study to assess this possibility,” Carmines said. “More generally, we intend to develop a continuing version of the survey that would provide current information about the political agendas and civic engagement of both youth and adults.”