Seeking Young People's Stories About the Great Recession

Barbara Ray and colleagues are seeking young people's stories about transitioning to adulthood during the Great Recession of the past couple of years, for a book/documentary project. This project, studying whom the authors refer to as "Generation R," can be accessed by clicking here.

My Psychology Today Blog Column

Starting today, I will be a regular blogger for Psychology Today, writing a column entitled "On the Campus: Emerging Adulthood and Adolescent Life." My first column addresses the question of whether college attendance increases students' drinking compared to if they never set foot on a university campus. I'll still post here, on the Emerging Adulthood blog, pertaining to matters outside of college and academia. But for issues in higher education, I invite you to visit my writings for Psychology Today.

Young Voters in 2010 Midterm Elections

After the 2008 U.S. presidential election, I wrote about the role of young voters in Barack Obama's win and cited expert opinion at the time on whether the present cohort of young voters would continue to turn out in future elections and whether they would remain as heavily inclined toward the Democratic party as they were in '08.

Leading into this upcoming November's midterm elections for the U.S. House and Senate, state governorships, and other offices, Republicans have been projected to make major gains. It's not so much that Democrat-leaning voters are being won over to Republican ideas; rather, polling seems to suggest an "enthusiasm gap" that may propel a greater share of GOP-leaning citizens into the voting booth than of Democratic supporters. However, the Democrats may be catching up in motivation, to some degree.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier today, with the headline "Battle for Congress tightens between parties," suggests that certain segments of the traditional Democratic coalition are started to get more excited about voting -- but young adults are not among them.

The NBC/WSJ pollsters attribute the tightening to increased enthusiasm for the upcoming midterms by African Americans (who saw a six-point gain in high interest) and Hispanics (who saw an 11-point gain).

But young voters, who helped fuel Obama’s presidential victory in 2008, are now sitting on the sidelines. Just 35 percent of those ages 18-34 are enthusiastic about the election in November, versus 65 percent of seniors who say that.

In an apparent attempt to reinvigorate the youth vote, Obama spoke today at a large rally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and apparently will appear on other campuses in the coming weeks (see here and here).

Texas Tech Grad Explores EA in Australia

Today in my Development in Young Adulthood course at Texas Tech University, we had a guest speaker from Australia via Skype. The speaker, Amanda, completed her undergraduate degree at Texas Tech in 2005 and had been in one of my classes back then. Just a few months ago, she fulfilled a long-term dream by moving to Australia. I thought -- and Amanda agreed -- that her desire to explore the world before settling down exemplified emerging adulthood, so she was a fitting guest to have in class. (She had to be available at 3:00 a.m. her time to fit my class time, for which I and the students are very appreciative.)

Amanda is blogging about her journey, which some readers may find of interest. She mentioned during her appearance in my class that as she approached the end of high school, she probably would have been the front-runner to be voted by the senior class as most likely to marry early and start a family. However, during college, a desire to explore that had been with her since childhood came to the fore and she decided traveling the world was for her in the immediate future. Hence, at that point she entered the realm of emerging adulthood.

I was pleased at the number of students in my class who asked questions and at the variety of questions. The students asked about everything from how it is arriving to a new culture, to work opportunities, to what the dating scene in Melbourne is like! One topic we pursued in some depth is concept of a hostel, a form of lodging for young travelers (and others) that some students in the class may not have been very familiar with.

Amanda's timeframe for the next two years or so is to travel to additional countries throughout the world and then work her way back to the U.S. At that point, she thinks, she will be ready to settle down and start a family. About half of her college friends, she estimates, married and started families early, whereas the other half, like her, are taking more time to move into these roles.

EA and Youth Aimlessness and Indecisiveness in Classic Literature

I was quoted in this Toronto Star article about emerging adulthood that came out over the weekend. In addition to providing a basic introduction to EA for readers, the article probed how the theme of aimlessness and indecisiveness during the transition to adulthood has been a mainstay of classic literature, introduced long before social scientists wrote of EA and related concepts. I virtually never read fiction. However, one genre of literature has long fascinated me, the Beat Generation (or Beatniks). Thus, I was able to comment for the reporter on seeming parallels between EA and Beatnik authors. I would recommend Steven Watson's book, The Birth of the Beat Generation, as an historical account.

Major NY Times Piece on EA

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine includes a huge article pertaining to emerging adulthood entitled, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" For those who've already read extensively about young-adult development, the article probably won't offer much that is new, except perhaps for the details of Jeff Arnett's personal life growing up through the emerging-adulthood years. If you're new to the area of emerging adulthood, however, the article should provide a good introduction.

The article spends a good bit of time evaluating whether emerging adulthood qualifies as an official developmental stage of the lifespan. Like Arnett, I'm not so concerned about this. As a leading scholar said at a conference I attended in recent years, regardless of whether emerging adulthood is a stage, it does successfully describe what a large number of young people are going through.

Numerous areas are covered in the piece, from brain development, to public policies to aid young people toward full-fledged adulthood, to a profile of a unique (and expensive) mental-health treatment facility for young adults having difficulties, to a topic my students and I are starting to conduct research on, "helicopter parents."

My fellow transition-to-adulthood blogger Barbara Ray offers a provocative review of the article here. Ray critiques Arnett's conceptualization of emerging adulthood as being too focused on individuals' psychological "interior," too preoccupied with "how young adults perceive themselves as agents (or in this case as nonagents), and how they psychologically grapple with their identity and who they are/want to be," and concerned little, if at all, with social structural factors (e.g., the job market) that can greatly affect the life opportunities of young people.

The technical term for the studying the actor's subjective experience is phenomenology. It is the approach that I (along with Arnett and my Texas Tech colleague Malinda Colwell) used in designing the Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA), a questionnaire to gauge how closely an individual's experiences match with the central themes of emerging adulthood. In creating a phenomenological measure, it was never my intent (and presumably not of my co-authors) to discourage or exclude structural factors from inquiry into young-adult development. We have compared college-attending youth and age-matched non-attenders on our questionnaire, for example, in an attempt to take into account more macro-level aspects of society (as it turned out, the two exhibited largely similar profiles on the IDEA).

Northwestern J-School Covers Emerging Adulthood

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, as part of a national network known as News 21, has put together an online series that "examines the issues confronting the generation of young adults as they confront their futures in a diverse America. Issues include identity, lifestyle, career, community, social responsibility, dating/marriage and others." As seen in the following screen capture, the series appears to focus on approximately 20 metropolitan areas, about which the reader can obtain various demographic statistics. Shown below the map are some of the stories the school's writers have put together.

These stories range from the semi-humorous ("30 [Things to Do] Before 30") to more serious topics such as interfaith marriage. The project's focus on urban America (and on Chicago, in particular, given Northwestern's location) obviously doesn't represent the full diversity of the transition to adulthood. However, the variety of topics and of media (e.g., print, video) should appeal to readers interested in emerging adulthood.