Generations and collective memories: part 2.

GENERATION and Collective Memories: Part 2

Reasons for Mentioning Events/Changes

Although our search for connections between cohorts and remembered events has been generally successful, even where such differences are sharpest there are always a fair number of people outside the modal cohorts who nevertheless mention an event or change as especially important to them. For example, although more than 40 percent of those now in their 50s and 60s (and then in their teens and 20s) cite World War II as especially important, the same war is also mentioned by approximately 20 percent of those who were not even born when the war ended in 1945. Or is it the same war that they mention? The fact that these two different age groups cite the same event, even use the same words, does not mean that they think about World War II in the same way, or indeed that they "perceive" it in the same way. It is this issue of possible generational differences in conception and perception that we now turn to. The same issue presents itself even more forcefully for events such as space exploration that do not show a generational effect in number of mentions. Immediately after our sample of Americans named one or preferably two events or changes as important, we asked them to explain the reasons for each of their choices:

What was it about [mentioned event/change] that makes

it seem especially important to you? We expected to find generational differences in the reasons given, and from these to infer differences in the events themselves as subjectively known. For earlier events, older people can base their choice on direct experience, not necessarily of some core event or change itself -- even soldiers were not necessarily in the thick of battle in World War II -- but of living through the "real time" of its happening. They can have what are correctly termed autobiographical memories. Younger people, on the other hand, must base their knowledge of earlier events on what they have heard or read, which may have the advantage of greater perspective but is less likely to be personal or concrete. When we turn to recent events, however, these should be seen by younger people directly and with a fresh eye, whereas older Americans will bring to the same events the world of their youth, with a tendency either to assimilate or to contrast the recent events with personal experience from their earlier years. This was the guiding hypothesis that we explored, though as it turns out the evidence leads toward more varied formulations.

Problems in Reasons Analysis

The analysis of reasons is more difficult than the analysis of events themselves because we start from the number of people who gave each major event, not the number of people who gave any event. Even with a frequently chosen event like World War II, the base is only 364 cases, and with most other events it is much smaller. Our discussion of reasons will therefore concentrate on the four events with at least 100 mentions -- World War II, Vietnam, Space Exploration, and the Kennedy Assassination.(1)