Posted by Jay Livingston
Last week, The Atlantic posted this article by Jean Twenge, and some of my Facebook friends linked to it with favorable comments.
(Click on the image for a larger view.)
Just from what you can see in this graphic, I was skeptical.
1. Kids and Trouble. When I see titles like this, I immediately think of “Trouble” from “The Music Man” and “Kids” from “Bye-bye Birdie.” (What can I say – I was raised on LPs of Broadway shows.) I’ve mentioned these in posts going back ten years (here) and more recently (here). Apparently, you can get a lot of attention by telling people that the youth of America are going to hell in a handbasket, or in this case, an iHandbasket.
2. Crying wolf. Jean Twenge sounded a similar alarm not all that long ago. Generation Me (2006) and The Narcissism Epidemic (2009). I noted my doubts about the latter here.
3. Question titles. Whenever the title of a book or article is phrased as a question, two things are almost certain:
- The author thinks that the answer to the question is “Yes.”
- The more accurate answer is “No.”*
I’d like to explore the evidence – it seems that the main source of Twenge’s data is Monitoring the Future, a long-standing survey housed at ICPSR – but it’s complicated. The survey gives different forms to different samples of different age groups (8th graders, 10th graders, 12th graders). And in 2012, the survey changed the way it compiled the surveys. Anyone who knows how to work with MTF, please raise your hand.
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*This is a slight variation on Betteridge’s Law
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