generation

generation A generation is a form of age-group consisting of those members of a society who were born at approximately the same time. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in generational analyses which examine the contribution of emerging age-groups to social change. Karl Mannheim, in his essay on The Problem of Generations (1952), describes how people located in the same generation may see the world in very different ways from their counterparts in earlier generations. Thus the unique experiences common to each generation group allows for social change. In a more recent work, Children of the Great Depression (1974), Glenn H. Elder shows how the generation brought up in a time of great frugality had a very different view of the world from those raised in a time of economic prosperity. Generation is also used to refer to the period that elapses between one generation and the next. Studies of differences in the socialization of successive generations have disagreed about the extent of continuity or discontinuity of both values and behaviour, although inter-generational conflict is a pervasive theme. Within any one generation, however, there can also be conflicting views of reality, in part due to other social characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, and social class. A further question of interest concerns the persistence of generational identities; for example, what happens to participants of youthful protest movements when they reach middle age? Thus research on life-course and ageing is closely linked to the interest in generations. See also AGE-GRADES; COHORT ANALYSIS.