[From a National Opinion Research Center paper presenting a comprehensive analysis of "generation gap" data from the General Social Survey of 1972, 1985 and 1997.
Copious data are provided throughout the paper. One data point: of the 101 questions analyzed, in 1972 there were 12 showing a profound (+40 points) generation gap between the old and the young (ages 18-24 vs. 65+). In 1985 and 1997, only three questions showed such a large gap....In this excerpt, the author summarizes the data from the 1972 survey]
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http://publicdata.norc.org:41000/gss/DOCUMENTS/REPORTS/Social_Change_Reports/SC43.pdf
The Generation Gap of the 1970s
The generations gap was greater in the 1970s than in succeeding decades and consisted of more large, defining differences. The general pattern was that the young were more liberal than the old on social and political issues.12 However, the difference was not primarily between the enter[ing] cohort of adults (i.e. the "rebellious" youth of the sixties) and all older cohorts, but spread out across all age groups. The differences between adjacent age groups were about of the same magnitude with the largest gap between those 25-34 and those 35-44 (Table 5). The differences were largest on topics related to various "revolutions" and social movements (civil rights and feminism) of the 1960s. These included sex and sexual materials, gender roles, intergroup relations, and, in the miscellaneous category, the legalization of marijuana. It is likely that these represent topics on which there had been large social changes during the 1960s (Brunswick, 1970), but this is not systematically tested here.13 Differences on military-related matters were not a primary contributor to the generation gap in the early 1970s. On defense spending the young were only slightly less pro-military than the old (4.6 percentage points). There was a larger gap on confidence in military leadership (11.0), but this was much smaller than the average gap and only the fifth largest difference in institutional confidence out of 12 institutions. While neither of these measures directly touch the two dominant military issues of the period (the draft and the war in Vietnam), studies on such matters have not uniformly found large generation gaps.14