Changed days: Does generational analysis need a rethink?

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The avocado-toast guzzling lazy millennial has been usurped by the workshy Gen Z-er who never wants to come into the office, if clickbait headlines are to be believed. Cultural discourse continues to feed off stereotypes and apparent differences between the generations – even if those variations are marginal, or don’t actually exist at all.

In May 2023, American thinktank Pew Research Center announced it would conduct generational analysis only when it has historical data that allows for comparison of generations at similar stages of life. Even then, it would attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons.

Pew had been in the process of rethinking how it approached its analysis of the new adult generation – Gen Z – when a groundswell of criticism over generational research, mainly from academics, started to gain steam.

“People had started to look to us for very specific definitions of generations, such as where does millennial end and Gen Z begin, and so on, and that’s not really where we wanted to be,” says Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew.

“At the same time, academic critics were making a lot of valid points – that a lot of people doing marketing research, or even people who just aren’t doing careful statistical analysis, will take age differences and slap a generation on, just because it makes for a more interesting story.”
Parker has been at Pew for a while, and says when it first began conducting research on millennials, it wasn’t as ‘gimmicky’ or as much of a marketing tool. “But in the 15 years or so since then, it’s become so clichéd and there are a lot of stereotypes,” she says. “We didn’t want to be perpetuating that.”

Parker believes the crux of the problem is that you don’t know if what you’re seeing are generational differences or lifestyle ones. “Young people are different from older people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unique to their generation,” she explains. “It is only possible to know if generational differences are meaningful if you can compare with previous generations at the same age.”

One critic, sociologist Philip Cohen, wrote an open letter to Pew – signed by demographers and social scientists – calling on it to stop using generational labels. Addressing the issue in a 2021 column for The Washington Post, he said such labels had “no basis” in social reality.

Parker says Pew brought in a series of speakers over the course of a year, including critics and proponents of generational research, to “get a grip on the issue”, before changing its direction.

One of the challenges Pew has faced, along with others in the polling industry, is that, over time, the organisation has shifted from telephone to online surveys, meaning earlier data is not necessarily comparable with surveys conducted today.

“We were hoping we could go back to our surveys in the late-80s and see how Gen X-ers felt when they were young, and compare with other generations at a similar age,” says Parker. “But we realised we couldn’t do that.”

Are generational labels still relevant? Parker thinks they can be, but with the big caveat that you must be able to control for age and life-cycle. Again, this requires robust historical data. However, Parker adds: “I’m pretty persuaded by the fact there’s so much diversity within generations – sometimes an older Gen X-er might have more in common with a young boomer than they do with the youngest Gen X-er. It can be useful in some contexts, but you really have to treat it with care and come at it with some sort of theoretical underpinning.”

Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, and author of ‘Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are?’, thinks generational markers are still relevant, notwithstanding the issues raised about how they are used. But he says most generational analysis is not useful, and can be harmful.

“I am a big believer in understanding things generationally being a really vital tool in understanding where we’ve come from, where we are now, and the future,” he says. “If we can think of things generationally, it gives a really good understanding of history and the future, and about why we’ve seen the changes we’ve seen, and what we might see next.

“But that’s not where we’ve ended up with most generational analysis, which is useless or misleading, or dangerous, or just a waste of time – because it’s not true generational analysis; it’s just applying these labels to cross-section snapshots that don’t tell you very much.

“Worse than that, particularly in the marketing and employee research space, there is a vast amount of very spurious research under these very catchy labels. The labels have taken hold and they are a headline writer’s dream. It’s very useful shorthand, but very misleading, mostly.”

However, Duffy comes to a slightly different conclusion to those in the open letter. “We should defend the space, rather than abandon it to the bad analysis,” he says, “and only use it if shedding light on genuine changes, not as snappy labels.”

Does age matter?

Part of the problem is the way in which age groups have been conflated with generations. It’s one of the main causes of generational myths and stereotypes, with repeated examples of a characteristic being assigned to a whole generation when it is just people behaving in the way young people behave, and they will change as they age, as others have before them.

The mixing up of age and cohort also plays into a “deep human prejudice”, adds Duffy – of always thinking badly of the youngest generation.
“Go back to Socrates and his long diatribes on young people,” he says. “You look back and you always see people thinking young people are the worst, but that is what older people always think, because we were socialised at a time with different norms.

“One of the great joys of looking at this over time is that it’s essential for society that you do have this generation of young people without all the baggage – or else we’d never change as a society. One of the big determinants of how societies change over time is having big changes between younger people and older people in repeated generations.”

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) tends to use more arbitrary age groups in its research, such as people born in any given decade, or within any five-year period.

Curtis Jessop, director of attitudinal surveys at NatCen, says the advantage of this is the groups tend to be narrower and a bit more precise. “[People are] more likely to have a more similar set of experiences, at least temporally,” he says. That’s useful for unpicking long-term trends. “When you do age-cohort analysis, it’s a way of looking at a particular age group over time; how they have developed or how they compare with another age group when they were the same age.”

Jessop discusses the example of NatCen’s examination of the liberalisation of attitudes within society. “We see a long-term decline in people who say people who want children ought to get married, and a more liberal attitude to same-sex relationships,” he explains.

“On both, we see attitudes becoming more liberal and we see differences by age, where younger people are more liberal than older people, on average. When it comes to ‘people who want children ought to get married’, within each age group, over time, that has remained relatively stable.
“So, people who are now aged 50 to 54 have similar attitudes to those they had 20 to 30 years ago.”

However, if you examine views on same-sex relationships, there is a generational difference – within each generation, over time, attitudes have become more progressive, according to Jessop, who says: “Now, 50 to 54-year-olds are much more accepting of same-sex relationships than they were 20 to 30 years ago,” he says, adding that when you see some changes over time across all age groups in parallel, at a similar rate, it suggests that it is not because of life-cycle, but because of something happening more broadly in society.

Technological impact

With the rapid proliferation of technology impacting how people are experiencing the world, some have made the argument for introducing smaller generational categories – because something that shaped someone who is 30 now may be very different from what is impacting someone aged 15 now.

Says Parker: “There is a lot of change now occurring demographically and technologically, which makes you wonder, if there are things that shape a generation, whether that can really be sustained over a 15-year period.”

One online trend is that of young people expressing apathy towards work through memes and videos (‘Gen Z does not dream of labor’, by Terry Nuyen for Vox in April 2022 ). Some have intimated that these expressions could indicate a wider generational attitudinal shift, possibly because of precarity in the post-pandemic economy.

However, social media didn’t exist for Gen X-ers when they were the same age as Gen Z-ers today, and this makes it more difficult to understand what type of effect this is.

Online culture also seemingly reinforces generational stereotypes, through memes such as the catchphrase ‘OK boomer’, typically used to dismiss attitudes associated with baby boomers. Has the growth of social media affected how different generations view themselves, or others?
Superficially, perhaps, according to Tom Johnson, managing director at Trajectory. “It feels like generational markers are a big part of the discourse, especially online,” he says. “But our data has shown people generally don’t know what generation they or other people are in. So, for marketing or communications, it’s pretty useless. For younger people, virtually everyone older than them is a boomer. It’s become quite reductive.”

In terms of any significant generational shifts resulting from the pandemic, it will take time to tell, says Duffy. “I think there will be some horrors uncovered over time of the impact on people who were children during that period, particularly those going through transitions such as starting university or high school.”

However, he adds: “Covid is a generation-defining event, but like all of those types of things, they take a while to fully reveal themselves. Their immediate effects are only part of the story.”

Oversimplification

Many of the problems of generational analysis boil down to the same issue: misrepresentation or incorrect reporting of research. Generations are a target for clickbait journalism at a time when many, including politicians, are determined to draw on the so-called ‘culture war’ narrative.

“One of the fake breaks we have among young people and older people that is presented as a generational difference is around the culture war issues of ‘snowflakes’ or ‘social justice warriors’,” says Duffy. “That is just not true in a very particular sense – young people always have different views on emerging social issues compared with older people. And the key thing here is that, today, they’re not proportionally any bigger than they were in the past.”

In the 1980s, for example, boomers were the youngest generation and were half as likely to agree that women should stay at home and men go out to work than their parents.

Today, meanwhile, Gen Z are half as likely to be proud of the British Empire. “There is a constant ratio of the young always being twice as comfortable with whatever is emerging as the old,” says Duffy. “That is a classic age and generation mix-up effect.

“That’s driving a wedge between young and old. Those types of things are really important to get right, and generational labels and these types of analysis are actively working against that sometimes.”

Jessop urges caution against using labels to talk about an entire group of people as if they are the same group of people, irrespective of whether labels such as millennial are involved, or whether you pick an age group. Even using tighter age groups doesn’t solve the problem.

“Even within the context of saying people born within a five-year age band are more likely to have experienced similar things, for example – well that might be true, but even if people have experienced the same event, it doesn’t mean they experienced it in the same way,” Jessop says.

Stakeholders in commercial research and marketing don’t necessarily have access to historical data; they need insights in the here and now.

Sarah Sanderson, managing director of TGI at Kantar Media, notes that, while it can be interesting to look at cohorts over time, it is “not the be all and end all”, and marketers should avoid relying too heavily on one source of data.

“The richness of the insight comes in when you’re looking at how homogeneous or diverse this generation is on different axes – for example, in concerns about the economy – and then overlaying that with people’s circumstances and behaviours,” she says. “It’s a starting point, but there’s so much more we can do.

“For brands to be distinctive, they have to be carving out a position for themselves based on consumer insights that go beyond just appealing to a demographic – chiming with people’s values, priorities and needs.”

The fact remains that research needs to group people somehow.

“There’s a big fallacy at the heart of thinking that, just because people were born at the same time, they have a lot in common,” says Tom Johnson. “But the same is true for any single lens you use to view people – region, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, housing tenure. They’re all limiting.”.

Jessop echoes this point: “It’s absolutely right that we want to dig deeper and understand the nuance and complexity of individuals’ experiences, but – from a quant research perspective at least – we need to draw that line somewhere.”