GENERATIONAL EFFECTS--PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE

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The main goals of this research are to understand the influence on individuals of the larger local, national, and world history that they have lived through; to show how that history affects both collective memories of the past and present attitudes and actions; and to replicate findings on these issues over time and across societies in order both to establish important generalizations and to discover the limits of these generalizations and the modifications required in them by the particularities of historical experience. The research is being done within a life course perspective that tests the importance of adolescence and early adulthood as a critical period for the shaping of memories, attitudes, and actions throughout later development. The research design calls primarily for open-ended questioning within rigorous sample interview surveys of three types: a lengthy face-to-face survey of a sample representative of the Metropolitan Detroit area, which will allow intensive exploration of the connection of memories of the past to present attitudes and actions, as well as a concern for the impact of history at the local level; a shorter and more focused national telephone survey of a cross-section of the American public, in order to generalize past (1985) results on the importance of the intersection of personal and national history during adolescence and early adulthood, and to repeat selected questions from the previous face-to-face interview; and a series of basic replications in a number of other countries (including Lithuania, the Russian Republic, Japan, and Nicaragua), which differ greatly in history and culture from the United States.