Narcissism and the Current Youth Generation

Today's New York Times had an interesting article on whether the current generation of young people are more narcissistic than those of previous decades. Two sets of researchers looked into this question and came up with vastly different conclusions. (Thanks to Sylvia Niehuis for sending me the link.)

Young Adults' Views of Love and Relationships

(This posting has been edited, and the link updated, on 7/25/18.)

AOL and pollster John Zogby (best known for his election surveys) teamed up for a national study of 20-69 year-olds' views of love and relationships. A summary of the findings is available.

Of greatest relevance to Emerging Adulthood, of course, are the results for the youngest respondents in the survey. Some age-group differences are discussed in the linked article, but they appear fairly modest in magnitude. For example:

A high percentage (44%) in all generations, including 50% of adults in their 20s – don’t believe that they need to be married to validate the commitment of a long-term relationship.

As I've often expressed in the past, studying the dynamics of young adults' attitudes, decision-making, and relationship establishment in the romantic domain would seem to be a fruitful research area.

National Public Radio Segment on EA

Early this morning, National Public Radio ran a segment on Emerging Adulthood, including quotes from Jeff Arnett. Click here to listen to the piece.

Young Voters' Candidate Preferences as 2008 Campaign Heats Up

One of the topics I like to discuss on this blog is emerging adults' political views and, with the 2008 presidential primary season getting underway soon, a recent poll provides some interesting findings.

According to an article on the "Politico" website, a Harvard Institute of Politics survey of 18-24 year-olds nationally shows a difference in the preferences of Democratic-leaning respondents, based on whether or not they're attending college:

[Barack] Obama leads [Hillary] Clinton 43 percent to 23 percent among current college students — but Clinton leads Obama among youth who never enrolled in college, 38 percent to 31 percent.

The Politico article also notes expert opinion on why these results may have emerged:

John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics, says that the disparity reflects a class divide. Just as Obama does better among students, he does better among young people from wealthier families. Young Democrats from lower-income families are more likely to favor Clinton, according to Della Volpe.

“Clinton is seen as more of a traditional lunch-pail Democrat,” said Della Volpe. “She is concerned with domestic issues.”

Iowa State University sociology professor Bill Woodman, whose students have studied the campaign, is also quoted to the effect that, "supporting Obama has picked up a self-perpetuating cool factor on campus."

The report of the survey directly from the Harvard IOP also discussed the candidate preferences of Republican-leaning 18-24 year-olds, but the college/non-college distinction is not highlighted.

The inclusion of young people not attending college, as well as their college counterparts, is an important element of the IOP survey. Given that social scientists are heavily based at universities, college students are a readily available population to study. The relative exclusion of same-age non-college individuals from research studies has led many scholars to label this group the "Forgotten Half" (click here for an example).

Only by studying both college- and non-college-bound youth can research on Emerging Adulthood reach its full potential.

Special Journal Series on EA Around the World

The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) has established a new journal this year, called Child Development Perspectives. The December issue includes a special series of articles (11 in all), under the rubric "Emerging Adulthood Around the World" (Table of Contents).

Consistent with the theme, several articles report on EA in different regions and countries of the world. There's also a debate between Jeffrey Arnett, who first proposed the specific stage of EA in 2000, and EA critics Leo B. Hendry and Marion Kloep.

From my initial skimming of several of the articles, they appear to provide a lot of interesting material on EA, and where it should go from here.

New Article on Measuring Progression Through EA

The article that I wrote with Jeff Arnett and my Texas Tech faculty colleague Malinda Colwell, introducing our Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA) measure and providing reliability and validity information, has now been published. The article appears in the Summer 2007 issue of the Journal of Youth Development, a relatively new online publication (see links section on the right). We hope EA researchers will find the article and measure to be useful. Practical applications for families and educators are also discussed in the article.

Congressional Group Studies Issues Affecting Young Adults

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has created a "30 Something Working Group" within her party's caucus. Although the participating House members are older than what would generally be considered the Emerging Adulthood range, the working group appears to be focusing its agenda toward young adults pretty broadly (also, one must be at least 25 years old to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, so individuals in the traditional EA range of 18-25 years old would be almost entirely ineligible to run). According to the 30 Something group's mission statement:

These Members are committed to engaging the next generation of Americans further in government and the political process. "30 Something" Members seek to talk and listen to young Americans about the issues they care about and how Congress can better represent their opinions on those issues.

Among the specific issues mentioned on the 30 Somethings' website are college cost reduction and raising the minimum wage, both of which are important to large numbers of young people who are transitioning to adulthood.

I also checked the website of Republican floor leader John Boehner and didn't find any signs of a similar project within the GOP.