A quick glance at the raw numbers suggest that that really wasn't much more of a gap between 35-50s and 18-24s then than there is today. *shrug* Not really interested in analyzing the raw data, but maybe you feel like running SASS?
Out of curiosity, though, Carrol why does it matter if there is or isn't a generation gap - then or now? I mean politically - is there a reason?
One explanation I learned of years ago was age segregation in society. More and more, we segregated children from their grandparents and great-grandparents through the privatizaton of the heteronormative family, the rise of lifestyle enclaves, etc.
Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu:
Put it this way then. The opinions of those who see a generation gap on the 60s are of no interest to anyone who knows something about the '60s. So I stopped reading with your first sentence. Carrol
-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of SA
On 11/12/2011 7:12 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> THERE WAS NO GENERATION GAP.
Yes there was.
I posted this before:
> [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]
>
> ----
>
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