Ich besuchte dieses Wochenende meine Freundin, die ich bereits seit der ersten Klasse Gymnasium kenne. Ihre Kids sind bereits fast erwachsen und doch fühle ich mich in ihrer Gegenwart wie die erwachsene Version der Teenager, die wir einst waren. Ihre Kids verkleideten sich für diverse Halloweenparties und ich erinnerte mich. Erinnerte mich an die vielen Fasching und anderen Parties, die wir gemeinsam verbracht hatten und obwohl mir verwehrt wurde, mich ebenfalls als bloody bitch zu kostümieren, was mir übrigens weniger ausmachte, als ich es vorgab, denn der Zeitaufwand für das Kostümieren und erst des wieder Deskostümierens erzeugten keinerlei Wellen der Freude in mir, dennoch fing ich auf der Heimfahrt an über alte Freundschaften nachzudenken. Die Tage vor diesem Wochenende war ich mit zwei Freundinnen auf Kaffee & Aperol - als es noch erlaubt war - und eine weitere langjährige Freundschaft wohnt direkt neben mir und so geht es weiter ... was für ein gesegnetes Leben ich führen darf. Ich krieche bei meiner Freundin in der Früh von der Wohnzimmercouch und stapfe ungeschminkt und mit schlafverzerrter Stimme und Gefühlen barfuß in die Küche, trinke meinen ersten Kaffee, der bis zum Mittagessen dauern soll, weil es so viel zu reden und zu schweigen gibt, weil wir uns nix erzählen müssen, was und wie wir denken sondern mit den Worten, die aus uns heraus kommen wieder Ordnung und Luft in unserem Gehirn schaffen.
Ist es nicht so, dass - wenn wir jemanden kennenlernen - wir überlegen was, wann und in welcher Dosis wir von uns erzählen. Wie wir reagieren, wenn politische, gesellschaftskritische oder kulturelle Meinungen geäußert werden. Lacht man über humorfreie Witze, darf man während dem Essen die Beine unter seinen Po schieben oder Küchenrolle anstatt Servietten verwenden, darf man sagen, dass der Film, der für einen ausgesucht wurde, grottenschlecht und sensationell langatmig ist? Wer kennt diese Fragen nicht? Umgekehrt, wer kennt das Gefühl, wenn man all das nicht bedenkt, wenn man einfach pur und ungefiltert ist? Es gehört wohl beides ins Leben - das Neue, das Alte und ich bin überaus glücklich, das fühlen zu dürfen und einfach zu sagen - Pony, ich lieb Dich, aber der Film war unübertroffen mies. Und an all meine Freundinnen und Freunde, die dies hier lesen - nehmt diese Worte als kleine Liebeserklärung, denn vielleicht sage ich es Euch nicht oft genug: Ihr seid scheen, taff, mutig und so ziemlich das Beste, was einem passieren kann!
The Decline in Adult Activities Among U.S. Adolescents, 1976–2016
Hey, friends! Sorry to miss last week—I was so overwhelmed with work, and I decided to put that first. In the future, I’ll try to give you all a warning in advance if I’m going to disappear again!
Before I get into today’s study, I believe in declaring biases—I identify as a part of the asexual community, and I’ve done a significant amount of work within my college for asexual and other LGBTQ+ people. This means that today’s study, which is predicated on evolutionary theory assuming that human behavior is aimed at reproduction, naturally set me off. I’m going to do my best to be unbiased while describing the results, and I’ll give cleaner reasons for why I disagree with this sort of theory at the end of the report, but please do think about my arguments with my biases in mind. With that in mind, on to the research!
TL;DR Version: [i]
· The authors wished to test the hypothesis that instability in youth influences a person’s desire to begin engaging in reproductive activities, or “adult” activities (drinking alcohol, having sex, dating, driving, working for pay, and going out without parents) sooner.
· They found that over time, adolescents have been engaging in significantly fewer adult behaviors.
· They also found a significant correlation between instability during youth and earlier adult behaviors.
Media Analysis:
I don’t have too much to say here, because most of the articles are more political than based off the study. The results they’re interested in—the decrease in “adult behaviors” – is fairly straightforward. I’m not interested in getting into debates over whether it’s good that teens are having less sex or if it’s bad that they’re working less—I’ll leave that interpretation up to all of you.
Full Summary:
Hypothesis: The authors are examining at what age “adult behaviors” (here defined as drinking alcohol, having sex, dating, driving, working for pay, and going out without parents) occur in different generations and through different economic systems. They argued that people who grew up with economic and social instability would likely take a “fast path to adulthood”: having children and engaging in adult behaviors sooner. On the other hand, they argued that people with more stability were more likely to delay gratification, taking a “slow path” to adulthood where they engage in these behaviors later, with more focus on extended education.
Methods: For the purpose of this research, the authors examined three surveys examining children and young adults back as far as 1966. The surveys used were Monitoring the Future (MtF); the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), distributed by the Center for Disease Control; and the American Freshman (AF) survey. All together, these surveys examined over eight million children and young adults.
MtF examines people in 8th, 10th, and 12th grade, as well as young adults. It has data on 12th graders through 1971 and on the other groups through 1991. MtF randomly selects middle and high school populations to sample and asks questions surrounding drug and alcohol use, as well as questions surrounding paid employment, going out with friends, dating behavior, driving, and extracurricular activities. In addition, it records information on race, gender, and parental education level—the authors chose to divide children based on their father’s education level, with children whose father had a high school degree or less defined as low SES [a], and those with fathers possessing a higher degree defined as high SES. The research also breaks students down into urban, suburban, and rural regions.
YRBSS is a government-funded survey, sampling 9th-12th graders every other year to ask questions about risky and sexual behaviors. This research has been ongoing since 1991. For the purposes of the study at hand, the authors exclusively looked at the questions surrounding sexual behavior. This data did not report on SES, exclusively reporting race and gender.
The AF survey reports on incoming college freshman, with data going back since 1996. This survey examines freshman work experience, alcohol use, and extracurricular activities. It exclusively breaks students down by gender.
In addition to these surveys, the authors examined basic cultural information: number of children born per woman, median household income, unemployment rate, life expectancy, teen birth rate, mean age of first birth, college enrollment, prevalence of disease, and crime rates.
Results: As anyone who has read the multitudes of headlines can infer, younger people engaged in fewer “adult activities” than people in past generations. They were significantly less likely to go out, with 12th graders in the 2010s going out less than 8th graders in the 1990s. They were less likely to go on dates or have sex, with 54% of high schoolers having sex in 1991 to only 41% in 2015. In addition, the number of adolescents who drank alcohol declined massively, with a 59% decrease in the number of 8th graders who tried alcohol and a 26% decrease in 12th graders. There was also a substantial decrease in the number of children who had worked for pay, from around 75% in 1976 to around 55% in 2014.
While these declines hit certain groups harder (e.g. sexual activity for black high school students declining from 82% to 49%), it was fairly stable among SES, race, and location. Interestingly, the authors did not find that these decreases coincided with an increase in hours spent studying, and saw only a slight increase in hours of community service among 10th and 12th graders.
Finally, the authors looked at how cultural changes correlated with these decreases. They found that adolescents engaged in fewer adult behaviors when, during their childhood, the average family size was smaller, there was a lower life expectancy, there were more diseases, and the household income was lower. They found this correlation to be higher versus the correlation between these rates when the adolescent was engaging in the behaviors, supporting the authors’ argument that childhood experiences influence a person’s desire to reproduce earlier because of instability and insecurity.
Concerns and Important Issues: Like I stated above, I don’t like this study. The minute you reduce all human behaviors to reproduction, you’re walking a very dangerous line—what about the increase in same-sex sexual relationships? Is a teetotalling asexual who lives in New York City (and therefore has no reason to learn to drive) never an adult? The one thing this study seems to ignore is the growing decrease in emphasis on reproduction, especially among younger people. As women grew more liberated and the focus shifted from a nuclear, heterosexual family to a fulfilling life with or without children, these sort of evolutionary arguments seem to be trying to force old theories into a culture that doesn’t have the same values or pressures.
Indeed, this focus on older values and ideas is made even more obvious when you consider that the authors defined a family’s SES exclusively by the father’s education level. Women are working more and more outside the home, and their education level was presumably listed as well—the authors just chose not to look at it. I’ve worked with data analysis to know it wouldn’t be that hard to combine the two, so refusing to do so was certainly a choice.
This paper was also an excellent example of something that tends to get to me a fair bit: misleading figures. As an example, look at this:
On first glance, it looks like there’s been a massive decline in, say, work for pay: almost half the figure! But if you pay attention to scale, it’s actually only a change of 20 percentage points. The authors chose to cut the scale between 95% and 50%, making numbers look much lower and like there was a much larger gap between them. Always check scales-- it’s important.
In the end, the arguments in this paper seem better explained by a changing culture, not by theories assuming all human behavior can be traced back to evolution. Of course, none of this is what the media cared about—they were more interested in the statement that millennials are engaging in fewer adult behaviors.
Jargon Definitions:
a. SES= Socioeconomic status, aka “class”
Reference:
[i] Twenge, J. M. and Park, H. (2017), The Decline in Adult Activities Among U.S. Adolescents, 1976–2016. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12930
Hello everyone, Right now I am feeling frustrated. I set up an ambitious goal of generating 100,000 leads. I have had so far 77 unique visitors on my website. I think it requires me to be more consistent and track my actions in a spreadsheet. I could really do with a mentor over here. In the past
70 milhões de passos me teletransportaram pra esse espaço Brilhando em meu peito a luz do recomeço, ofuscando as manchas dos meus fracassos Eu tive varias opções, vontades Jogar essa porra pro alto, fazer tudo errado Eu fiz minhas escolhas, é verdade Desde então todos meus passos são em direção ao alvo. Finalmente eu entendi o motivo pelo qual nasci, sou uma ponte entre o caos e a paz Embora pra existir, eu tive que insistir e dizer não pro era fácil detmais Vó, prometo que vai fluir, faço isso por ti e meu vô, meus verdadeiros pais Eu sei que sou um martir a esperança viva entre os que me amam e os meus rivais. @projeto4elementos - Sentinela #rare #rap #trap #browlouco #p4e #projeto4elementos #rapnacional #dreads #dreadbr #dreadlock #minasdread #dreadbh #hiphop #style #hair #instagood #instagram #tbt #potography (em Trevo de Sabara) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtJRnm0nlzC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=tdmypclo76nx
After dreaming about it for a while, I’ve finally started a new blog dedicated to explaining psychological studies in the media! I’ll be updating it once weekly, on Saturdays, so there will be many new studies to explore! If you’re interested, it’s @psychologyforeveryone. If you have any questions, please let me know!
This blog exists to explain psychology studies that are currently popular in the media. Often, these studies are over-simplified for publication or even straight-up misconstrued. My goal is to summarize these studies honestly, but in a way that’s generally understandable.
I believe that psychology belongs to everyone: that it’s not just a study for a small elite group, but an understanding of humans and humanity that we all deserve to have as our research becomes more clear. I do not believe that popular media should be responsible for translating research to the general population-- that should be the role of the researcher.
As a disclaimer, I’m still an undergraduate, so I don’t claim to be an expert by any means. However, I do have experience interpreting psychological studies and doing research myself, so I believe that I can accurately understand and explain these studies.
2. How often will this blog be updated?
There will be a new summary up every Saturday, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding.
3. How should I read the summaries?
Summaries will start out with the official title of the study, followed by information about the media reception and any information I consider pertinent to understanding the study.
Next will be the TL;DR summary: this is the lightning summary, where I give bullet points on information I consider important. This will leave out a whole lot, but it’s good if you just want to skim the major points and any glaring critiques to media reception.
Then, there’s the full summary: this will be after the Read More break. While still a summary, this will be my complete description of the study. It will follow a standard psych format-- hypothesis, methods, results. After the study summary, there will be a section, entitled “Concerns and Important Issues,” where I list any concerns, critiques, or critical results that need to be highlighted.
There are two types of tags in my summaries, both important for different reasons.
Numerical tags (i, ii, iii, etc.) are study citations.
Alphabetical tags (a, b, c, etc) are jargon descriptions. If you’re not sure what a word or concept means, you can simply go down to the corresponding letter to get a description!
4. What if I’m still confused?
Let me know! Asks & DMs are open and anonymous is on, if you’re a bit shy (although there are no stupid questions!) I’ll try to explain everything clearly, but I’ve been immersed in psychology for years now-- I’m sure there’s plenty of jargon that I wouldn’t think to define because of that. I will also be writing in a fairly academic tone, since I’ve found that’s the easiest way to make sure things are clear to everyone. However, I completely understand that can be boring and difficult to pick apart, so I’m more than happy to reexplain in a more interesting and fun manner.
