Brett S. Sharp, Ph.D.

Book Review

by

Brett S. Sharp

Generations and Politics:  A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents, by M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi.  Princeton, New Jersey:  Princeton University Press, 1981.  427 pp.

"It Was a Very Good Year."  Frank Sinatra took that song to the top of the pop charts in 1965.  Ironically that same year, events began to foreshadow the turbulent times just ahead.  The civil rights movement was building to a climax with severe race riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Ku Klux Klan shootings in Selma, Alabama, and the assassination of Black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, in New York.  Meanwhile, college students began demonstrating in Washington D.C. against the bombing of North Vietnam.  America was standing on the brink of one of the most turbulent periods of social upheaval in its history.

Blissfully unaware of the historic role their own generation would play in the national drama about to unfold, the high school seniors of 1965 prepared for their impending graduation.  With this group of young people and their parents, M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi began their seminal study on the political socialization of pre-adults.  This research culminated in their highly revered book, The Political Character of Adolescence:  The Influence of Families and Schools.  Their book challenged the prevailing understanding of the degree of influence parents and schools have in the political development of adolescents.  Jennings and Niemi found that parents and teachers were strongly involved in political socialization relative to other factors, but were not the dominant socialization agents as previously widely believed.  Their research revealed that numerous other factors which occur as an individual learns and gains experience tend to dilute whatever effects parents and schools may have in early political development.

The authors, however, remained unsatisfied with the potential of their own research.  They took a second look at the 1965 data that they had collected.  Through an extensive follow-up study of their original respondents eight years later combined with a new survey of the high school seniors of 1973, Jennings and Niemi have produced a comprehensive longitudinal examination of the development of the political attitudes of Americans.  Generations and Politics:  A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents by Jennings and Niemi represents one of the most important large-scale studies of public opinion.

The purpose of this sequel is to examine more fully the persistence and change of political attitudes of two American generations across time.  Jennings and Niemi focus their attention on several political domains including involvement in politics, interest in public affairs, trust in political institutions, knowledge of current events, and belief in personal influence on political processes.  Nonpolitical characteristics presumed to be related to these political domains are considered as well as religious belief and behavior, personal trust, opinion strength, and self-confidence.

The original data was collected from a national sample of high school seniors and their parents in 1965.  New data was collected from an impressive follow-up of over three fourths of their original respondents.  An additional national sample of 1973 high school seniors was conducted for control purposes.  The multiple data points provide a unique and valuable perspective for clarifying the impacts of maturation and history on a wide range of political attitudes and behaviors.  The authors are able to analyze the sociopolitical dynamics of individuals, children and parents taken together as pairs, high school seniors from 1965 and 1973, and all within a significant historical backdrop.

Following the work of David O. Sears, the authors make use of four major theoretical models in order to make sense of the massive volume of collected data.  The first of these models is the lifelong persistence model which represents the notion that early socialization is so powerful that it will endure a lifetime.  The second is the lifelong openness model which posits that individuals can and do change either rationally or capriciously with little regard to previous learning.  The third is the life-cycle model which assumes that although persistence is most likely, individuals are very vulnerable to change during particular life stages.  The fourth is somewhat related and is known as the generational model.  It describes individuals as basically products of their time resulting from powerful socialization factors occurring during the formative and impressionable years.

In addition to these theoretical frameworks, several hybrid models are also discussed.  Both individual and aggregate levels of the data are analyzed in separate sections.  Since the topics are addressed in this manner, the reader may notice a small amount of repetition.

The authors should be credited with the faithful attention paid to alternative interpretations of their findings.  The reader is usually given enough information from which to draw independent conclusions.  However, the reader would have been better served in evaluating the intensity of the statistical results and the authors' conclusions if levels of significance were provided.  Readers may also find the lack of a bibliography disappointing.

Excellent documentation of the survey samples is provided in the appendix.  Comparisons are made between the first and second wave samples of the original respondents in order to investigate possible respondent bias caused by attrition.  The authors found no meaningful differences in regard to major variables.  Full descriptions of those items making up the measuring instruments are also provided as well as methods used for coding their respective responses.  Differences between the first and second wave items purporting to measure the same domains are fully discussed.  Often the modifications are merely changes of terminology designed to reflect contemporary usage of particular works.  For example, the term Negroes as used in 1965 was subsequently changed to blacks for the 1973 sample.  Each of the items show remarkable care taken in their construction.

The majority of the book is packed with very interesting and often surprising table, figure, and narrative interpretations of the authors' findings.  Any social scientist will enjoy browsing through the pages of Generations and Politics if only for the fascinating glimpses of the political scence during such a spectaculr period.  The results however, offer only the most indirect insights into the overall scheme of the development of political attitudes and behaviors.  The diverse and heterogeneous subjects covered also make it a bit tedious to read from cover to cover.  Despite this lack of an overriding thematic coherence, the research does provide a means to test theoretical models in the light of the results obtained.

Perhaps a closer look at some of the conclusions reached by the authors would be beneficial.  If there is a common thread running through the book it is the surprising and intriguing variability in political outlook and behavior that occurs at the individual level.  Previous research into the area has assumed that political attitudes tend to crystallize in the early adult period with only minor changes occurring in later life stages.  This research suggests that the potential for change remains throughout life.  Even more surprising is that this variability is not reflected at the aggregate level.  One example is the examination of the so-called generation gap (the reality of which is confirmed by the research but at a level much less than the popularly exaggerated description).  The results revealed that taken as pairs, the young adults and their parents declined in their level of agreement over the eight year period while the aggregate analysis revealed that the two groups were actually converging in political outlook by 1973.

Many of the authors' other findings were equally surprising and interesting.  The young adults became more secular during the eight years of the study while their parents continued to be more religious during the same time period (p. 182).  Education has very little influence on political attitudes since many of the characteristics often attributed to college education wee already established eight years earlier when the respondents were in high school (p. 267).  Those students that ultimately participated in the protest activities of the late sixties and early seventies were already significantly different than their non-protesting cohorts before high school graduation (p. 339).  The eventual protestors emerged from high school in 1965 with a more positive opinion of government than their non-protesting cohorts and thus later became more severely disillusioned (p. 352).  The protestors of the late sixties represented more of a true generational unit than did Vietnam veterans (p. 377).  Despite the commonly held view that college students largely escaped military service during the time of the Vietnam War, about one half of the males attending college actually wound up in active service (p. 378).  The "political consequences of having served during the Vietnam War were nonexistent to negligible" (p. 378).  African Americans continued to be more disadvantaged than whites in terms of psychological involvement and political resources (pp. 310-313).  In matters relating to political involvement, political participation, and educational level the younger generation exhibited less racial differences than the elder generation (p. 330).  "On average, young adult women continued to differ from young men in ways consistent with traditional stereotypes" (p. 303).  The gender role of motherhood has the most politically detrimental effect on young females among the variables analyzed (p. 300).  Many of these individual findings probably deserve to have books exclusively devoted to their further exploration.

One of the major problems of many of the conclusions listed above and others contained within the book is the limits of generalizability allowed by the sample.  Not included were those younger generational cohorts that dropped out of school prior to their senior year as well as members of the elder generation that were not parents of high school seniors.

The strengths of this book tend also to be its weaknesses.  The comprehensive overview that Generations and Politics is able to offer comes at the expense of more in-depth analyses.  Although the authors are able to authoritatively discuss a myriad of subtopics, their work fails to identify an overall unifying theoretical framework.  In fact, the authors find support for several of the models considered.  The cursory examination of many of the subjects are appropriately treated with simple bivariate correlation analyses and yet, the availability of such an enormous and diverse set of data begs for more focused statistical rigor.

Along these same lines, the unique historical period covered provides an excellent benchmark in which to evaluation particular propositions, especially those that go against patterns normally expected in light of the extreme historical events.  But this atypical period in American history also frustrates the ability to validly generalize to other times.  This is of course a difficulty for all efforts to study mass behavior.  As a result, Jennings and Niemi must struggle to determine the historical, generational, or life-cycle effects contributing to their findings.

The success of Generations and Politics has been its understated ability to credibly refute many of the theories of political socialization often taken for granted by other scholars.  The authors' strategy "to cover a very wide range of political characteristics" does not lead to definitive conclusions but does provide an excellent overview to the subject of political development.  Jennings and Niemi have constructed a major starting point for continuing analysis in the area.  This book will hopefully serve as an inspiration and foundation for further research.

Copyright © 2001 by Brett S. Sharp

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