Adult Research Studies: Reports & Books

Reports

Generation X: America's Neglected 'Middle Child'
Pew Research
Generation X has a gripe with pulse takers, zeitgeist keepers and population counters. We keep squeezing them out of the frame. This overlooked generation currently ranges in age from 34 to 49, which may be one reason they’re so often missing from stories about demographic, social and political change. But there are other explanations that have nothing to do with their stage of the life cycle.

Generation X Research - The Longitudinal Study of American Youth
​University of Michigan
The research reports from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth highlight the experiences, challenges, attitudes, behaviors, and dreams of the group of Americans known as Generation X. It is drawn from the responses of approximately 4,000 members of this generation, surveyed each year from 1987 through 2010. Generation X refers to American adults now 30 to 50 years of age, born between 1961 and 1981 

Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality
Pew Research
On aspects of everyday life ranging from mental acuity to physical dexterity to sexual activity to financial security, a 2009 Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey on aging finds a sizable gap between the expectations that young and middle-aged adults have about old age and the actual experiences reported by older Americans themselves.

The Met Life Studies on Baby Boomers

The MetLife Study of Gen X: The MTV Generation Moves into Mid-Life
This study marks a first broad examination of Generation X, describing their their current work, finances, housing, family life and their views about their health, aging and generational identity.

Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality
Pew Research
On aspects of everyday life ranging from mental acuity to physical dexterity to sexual activity to financial security, a 2009 Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey on aging finds a sizable gap between the expectations that young and middle-aged adults have about old age and the actual experiences reported by older Americans themselves.

New Realities of an Older America
Adele Hayutin, Miranda Dietz, & Lillian Mitchell
The number of Americans age 65 and over will double over the next 30 years to 80 million and their share of the population will increase from 13% today to 20% in 2030. Population is a major force with economic, political, and social implications for our entire society - young and old. This report highlights five important changes shaping the new demography: population aging, increased racial and ethnic diversity, changes in living arrangements, evolving heath care needs, and challenges to financial well-being. 

Nones on the Rise: One in Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation
Pew Research 
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling. In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults.

The Roots of Midlife Crisis 
Jonathan Rauch
What the growing body of research reveals about the biology of human happiness - and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age. ​

The Sandwich Generation - Rising Financial Burdens for Middle-Aged Americans
Pew Research
With an aging population and a generation of young adults struggling to achieve financial independence, the burdens and responsibilities of middle-aged Americans are increasing. Nearly half (47%) of adults in their 40s and 50s have a parent age 65 or older and are either raising a young child or financially supporting a grown child (age 18 or older). And about one-in-seven middle-aged adults (15%) is providing financial support to both an aging parent and a child.

A Survey of Research on the 
Baby Boom Generation
Compiled by John Roberto

The Transformation of Generation X: Shifts in Religious and Political Self-Identification
Barry A. Kosmin and Juhem Navarro-Rivera
Generation X is the current parenting generation and according to many social commentators they should have become more religious as they began to marry, have children and settle down in their communities. Religiously and politically, Generation X came to resemble the younger Millennial generation more than their own parents in the Boomer and earlier generations. These inter-generational and intra-generational trends have implications for the future since much of Generation X is raising its own children in less religious home environments than they experienced themselves when they were growing up.

Why Everything You Think About Aging May Be Wrong
Anne Tergesen

Everyone knows that as we age, our minds and bodies decline—and life inevitably becomes less satisfying and enjoyable. Everyone knows that cognitive decline is inevitable. Everyone knows that as we get older, we become less productive at work. Everyone, it seems, is wrong.

Books

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Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious
Linda A. Mercadante (Oxford, 2014)

The last twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in "nones": people who do not claim any religious affiliation. These "nones" now outnumber even the largest Protestant denominations in America. They are not to be confused with secularists, however, for many of them identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR). The response to this dramatic change in American religion has been amazingly mixed. While social scientists have been busy counting and categorizing them, the public has swung between derision and adulation. Some complain "nones" are simply shallow dilettantes, narcissistically concerned with their own inner world. Others hail them as spiritual giants, and ground-breaking pioneers. Rarely, however, have these "nones" been asked to explain their own views, beliefs, and experiences. In Belief without Borders, theologian and one-time SBNR Linda Mercadante finally gives these individuals a chance to speak for themselves. This volume is the result of extensive observation and nearly 100 in-depth interviews with SBNRs across the United States. Mercadante presents SBNRs' stories, shows how they analyze their spiritual journeys, and explains why they reject the claims of organized religion. Surprisingly, however, Mercadante finds these SBNRs within as well as outside the church. She reveals the unexpected, emerging latent theology within this group, including the interviewees' creative concepts of divine transcendence, life after death, human nature, and community. The conclusions she draws are startling: despite the fact that SBNRs routinely discount the creeds and doctrines of organized religion, many have devised a structured set of beliefs, often purposefully in opposition to doctrines associated with Christianity.
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Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation
Richard Flory and Donald E. Miller (Rutgers University Press, 2008)

Sociologists Richard Flory and Donald E. Miller argue that we are on the verge of another potential revolution in how Christians worship and associate with one another. Just as the formative experiences of Baby Boomers were colored by such things as the war in Vietnam, the 1960s, and a dramatic increase in their opportunities for individual expression, so Post-Boomers have grown up in less structured households with working (often divorced) parents. These childhood experiences leave them craving authentic spiritual experience, rather than entertainment, and also cause them to question institutions. Flory and Miller develop a typology that captures four current approaches to the Christian faith and argue that this generation represents a new religious orientation of “expressive communalism,” in which they seek spiritual experience and fulfillment in community and through various expressive forms of spirituality.
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Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life
Nancy Tatom Ammerman (Oxford, 2014)

In this book, ordinary Americans tell the stories of their everyday lives - from dinner table to office to shopping mall to doctor’s office. They talk about the ordinary routines and the things that matter most to them, including the times and places and events they consider spiritual. Often they name that spiritual reality “God,” but it is also experienced in the more impersonal forces of nature and individual life meaning. Ammerman explores their stories to describe the common threads in those descriptions of spirituality and the significant way they are shaped by religious traditions, by organized religious communities, and by people’s conversations with the others they encounter as fellow members of a spiritual "tribe.” The voices in this book come from all the corners of the Christian and Jewish traditions. Some are devout; most are typically modest in their religious participation; many come from the growing population of people who are unaffiliated, and a few are truly secular. If religion has not entirely disappeared from the modern world, where do these people find modern religion and how is it sustained?