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21. Roper Reports 97–5 (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1997), 186–191, based on surveys in 1976, 1986, 1990, 1995, and 1997. Confirming this trend, Sandra Hofferth and Jack Sandberg, “Changes in American Children’s Time, 1981–1997,” PSC Research Report No. 98-431 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Population Studies Center, 1998), report that the time that children spend on weekday family meals declined 20 percent between 1981 and 1997, while family conversational time was cut in half.
22. Author’s analysis from Roper Social and Political Trends surveys (augmented by data from Roper Reports 1995–3 (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1995), General Social Surveys, and DDB Needham Life Style surveys, using annualization formula in appendix I and linear regression to estimate slope.
Survey
Question Wording
Time Span
Singles Trend
Married Trend
Roper
Went out to bar, night club or disco in previous week?
1982–1995
–39%
–60%
GSS
How often do you go to a bar or tavern?
1974–1998
–31%
–41%
DDB
How many times last year did you go to a bar or tavern?
1988–1999
–21%
–13%
23. Data in figure 20 from Jack Richman, ed., “1998 National Retail Census,” in Report to Retailers (New York: Audits & Surveys Worldwide, 1998). Until 1998 “coffee bars and shops” were not broken out by Audits & Surveys as a separate category within “other.” I am grateful to Audits & Surveys for these data.
24. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life, rev. ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1996), 132–136.
25. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989).
26. See Oswald Jacoby and Albert H. Morehead, The Fireside Book of Cards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 17, on 1940 survey. Until the 1950s every pack of playing cards sold in America was subject to a special tax. We have updated data in Jesse Frederick Steiner, Americans at Play: Recent Trends in Recreation and Leisure Time Activities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 138, with later Treasury reports.
27. For evidence on generalizations in this paragraph, see David Scott, “Narrative Analysis of a Declining Social World: The Case of Contract Bridge,” Play and Culture 4 (February 1991): 11–23, at 11; Babchuk and Booth, “Voluntary Association Membership,” 34; Bonnie H. Erickson and T. A. Nosanchuk, “How an Apolitical Association Politicizes,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 27 (May 1990): 206–219; and David Scott and Geoffrey C. Godbey, “An Analysis of Adult Play Groups: Social Versus Serious Participation in Contract Bridge,” Leisure Sciences 14 (January/March 1992): 47–67.
28. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style data. Mediamark Research annual surveys show a comparable drop of roughly 40 percent in the frequency of playing cards between the early 1980s and the late 1990s.
29. This calculation assumes, following the DDB Needham Life Style survey data, 8.4 games per adult per year (declining at the rate of .4 games per year), 192 million adults, 3.5 adults per game.
30. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style data. Between 1981 and 1998 card playing dropped by 36 percent among people sixty and over, but by 48 percent among people under sixty. In the mid-1970s younger people played cards more often than their elders, but by the 1990s this pattern had been reversed. Age data supplied by the American Contract Bridge League, Memphis, Tennessee.
31. Children’s board games are rapidly being replaced by play-alone computer games, fueling (according to Adam Pertman, “Board Games? No Dice,” Boston Globe, December 16, 1998) “a fundamental societal shift away from an emphasis on community-based values and behavior.”
32. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys, 1977–96.
33. Author’s analysis of GSS surveys, using the annualization algorithm given in appendix I.
34. The University of Michigan-NIMH study cited in endnote 23 of chapter 3 found that the percentage of American adults who “got together” with friends and relatives at least once a week fell from 65 percent in 1957 to 58 percent in 1976, a statistically significant decline. The fraction of Detroit-area residents who “got together” with their neighbors at least once a week fell from 44 percent in 1955 to 32 percent in 1959 and to 24 percent in 1971. Author’s analysis of data from the University of Michigan-NIMH study and from Detroit Area Study, made available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
35. Author’s analysis of National Election Study of 1996.
36. See Barrett A. Lee, R. S. Oropesa, Barbara J. Metch, and Avery M. Guest, “Testing the Decline-of-Community Thesis: Neighborhood Organizations in Seattle, 1929 and 1979,” American Journal of Sociology 89 (1984):1161–1188, quotation at 1165; Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850–1920 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). See also Robert A. Rosen-bloom, “The Neighborhood Movement: Where Has It Come From? Where Is It Going?” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 10 (April/June 1981): 4–26; Matthew A. Crenson, Neighborhood Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); John R. Logan and Gordana Rabrenovic, “Neighborhood Associations: Their Issues, Their Allies, and Their Opponents,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 26 (1990): 68–94; and Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994). Robert C. Ellickson, “New Institutions for Old Neighborhoods,” Duke Law Journal 48 (1998): 75–110, esp. 81, presents evidence that homeowners associations (“residential community associations”) have recently proliferated, in large part as a marketing device for new suburban developments.
37. Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 Cities, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1999): 21. Another 61 percent of the respondents said they and their neighbors had agreed to watch out for one another’s safety, illustrating the enduring importance of “natural” social capital, but unfortunately the study provides no evidence on its changing importance over time.
38. See James R. Gillham and George A. Barnett, “Decaying Interest in Burglary Prevention, Residence on a Block with an Active Block Club, and Communication Linkage: A Routine Activities Approach,” Journal of Crime & Justice 17 (1994): 23–48 and the extensive literature cited there, especially at 24.
39. Author’s analysis of Americans’ Use of Time data. For further details, see appendix I. Our analysis here is limited to “primary” activities, excluding, for example, conversation while primarily engaged in child care or work. Because of an inconsistency in the coding of phone conversations in 1965, the figure for informal conversations in that year is imprecise. The participation rate for all informal socializing for 1965 almost certainly lies between 58 and 68 percent, and the mean time per day almost certainly lies between seventy-eight and eighty-nine minutes. The dotted lines in figure 24 reflect the midpoint of these bands of uncertainty. If “informal conversation” is excluded from the analysis to avoid this uncertainty, the 30-year decline in time spent “visiting with friends” remains highly significant. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 170 and 176, confirm a substantial decline in informal socializing between 1965 and 1985. In the DDB Needham Life Style archive the fraction of Americans, both married and single, who report that they “spend a lot of time visiting friends” has slipped by about 10 percent over the past decade or two.
40. Time Lines: How Americans Spent Their Time During the 90s (Rosemont, Ill.: NPD Group, July 1999). Every year between 1992 and 1999 the NPD Group asked three thousand adults to record their activities every thirty minutes during a twenty-four-hour peri
od. My analysis weights men and women equally and weekday and weekend reports appropriately to produce a “synthetic week.” I am grateful to Harry Balzer and his colleagues at NPD for sharing their results with me; they are not responsible for my interpretations.
41. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style, General Social Survey, Americans’ Use of Time, and Roper Social and Political Trends data archives.
42. On single-person households, see endnote 20 above. According to the General Social Survey, the fraction of all adults who are married with children under 19 fell from 32 percent in 1975 to 24 percent in 1998.
43. Author’s calculations from surveys of sports participation conducted on behalf of the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA; 1986–97), the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA; 1987–97), and the DDB Needham Life Style surveys (1985–98), as well as a report on the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) of the National Center for Health Statistics (1985–95) as reported in John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, “Has Fitness Peaked?” American Demographics, September 1993, 36–42, updated by author’s analysis of 1995 NHIS data from the NCHS. The NSGA results are based on persons aged seven and over who engaged in a given sport at least twice in the previous year. The SGMA results are based on persons aged six and over who engaged in the sport at least once in the previous year. The Life Style results are based on adults who engaged in the sport at least once in the previous year. The NHIS results are based on adults who had participated in the sport in the previous two weeks. Each of these four archives is based on surveys with tens of thousands of Americans, and each posed somewhat different questions to somewhat different populations. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, both levels and trends are consistent across the four series. (Thus this evidence is more credible than the evidence from the General Social Survey, based in some cases on only a few hundred interviews a year.) Among the dozens of different sports measured in these four archives, the only significant discrepancies involve hiking (up in the NSGA studies, down in the SGMA and Life Style studies) and bicycling (down in the NSGA, SGMA, and Life Style surveys, but up in the NHIS). The NSGA data are sometimes reported (as in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, for example) without adjusting for overall population growth. This practice gives a misleading impression of buoyancy in American athletic habits.
44. The NSGA surveys report a decline of 32 percent between 1986 and 1997; the SGMA surveys a decline of 36 percent between 1987 and 1997; the Life Style surveys a decline of 34 percent between 1983 and 1996; the NHIS a decline of roughly 25 percent between 1985 and 1995. All four concur that in the late 1990s no more than ten million American adults played softball at least four times a year. By contrast, the Amateur Softball Association, as recorded in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, claimed an unvarying figure of exactly forty-one million players every year over the last decade or two. I found no other source consistent with that figure; it may represent administrative lethargy rather than actual surveys.
45. According to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, exercise at home declined from an annual national average of eighteen times per year in 1984 to thirteen times per year in 1998. By contrast, the NSGA, SGMA, and NHIS data, based on as little as a single episode per year, suggest growth in home exercise over those years. This evidence suggests that many newly purchased treadmills and other exercise equipment may sit unused in America’s basements after a single, hopeful tryout. In any event, exercise on a home treadmill is hardly an occasion for building social capital.
46. According to the NSGA surveys, the proportion of all Americans aged seven and over who played soccer at least twice a year grew from 4 percent in 1986 to 6 percent in 1997, and the comparable figures for basketball were 10 percent and 13 percent. Meanwhile, over the same period the proportion who played baseball fell from 7 percent to 6 percent, football (touch plus tackle) from roughly 9 percent to roughly 8 percent, softball from 10 percent to 7 percent, and volleyball from 11 percent to 7 percent. In short, the gain of 5 percentage points for soccer and basketball must be offset against the aggregate loss of 9 points for the other four sports. According to the SGMA surveys, participation in the “big six” team sports (as proportion of population aged six and over) declined from about 72 percent in 1987 to 62 percent in 1997. In short, both archives agree that participation in team sports declined by roughly 10–15 percent over the most recent decade. Aggregate participation in thirty-six different sports activities (weighted by frequency of participation) measured by the NSGA in 1987 and 1997—from treadmills to trap shooting and from power-boating to power walking—fell by about 5 percent. The equivalent figure for forty-nine different sports measured by the SGMA is a decline of 4 percent.
47. Data in this paragraph are from the DDB Needham Life Style archive. Swimming among twenty-somethings fell from about twelve times a year in the early 1980s to less than half that in 1998, while swimming among people sixty and over remained constant at about four times a year. Between 1989 and 1998, attendance at health clubs more than doubled among those over sixty (from an average of once a year to more than twice a year), while health club attendance declined among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds from six times a year to five. This same pattern—greater declines in younger age groups—is confirmed in the National Center for Health Statistics surveys in 1985 and 1990; see Robinson and Godbey, “Has Fitness Peaked?,” 38, 42. John P. Robinson, “Where’s the Boom?,” 34–37, summarizes recreational surveys in 1965 and 1982: People forty-five and over in 1982 were more active than people that age in 1965, whereas people under twenty-five in 1982 were less active than people that age in 1965.
48. According to the 1998 State of the Industry Report of the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, “One disturbing trend is the overall decline in physical fitness and sports/fitness-related activity among youngsters in America…. [Between 1986 and 1997] the number of 12–17-year-olds who participated in any sport, fitness or team activity, on a ‘frequent’ basis, increased by only 2.9% to 13 million youth [equivalent to a 4 percent decline on a per capita basis].” See also “Is Working Out Uncool?” American Demographics, March 1996 and America’s Youth in the 1990s, ed. Robert Bezilla (Princeton, N.J.: Gallup International Institute, 1993), 228. On the other hand, Hofferth and Sand-berg, “Changes in American Children’s Time,” report that time spent on sports outside of school by preadolescents aged three to twelve increased from 2 / hours in 1981 to 4 hours in 1997.
49. Youth membership in organized soccer leagues, standardized for numbers of youth aged five to nineteen, more than tripled between 1980 and 1995, according to the Soccer Industry Council. On the other hand, both SGMA and NSGA data suggest that nationwide per capita growth in soccer participation stagnated after 1990, especially among adolescents. See also Youth Indicators 1996: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1996), Indicator 41.
50. An upbeat report by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, Gaining Ground: A Progress Report on Women in Sports, 1998, concedes (p. 3) that “except in the 6–11 age group, there has been little change in the overall percent of females who play sports frequently.” In fact, the report shows that regular sports participation by women aged twenty-five to thirty-five declined from 8.3 percent in 1987 to 5.8 percent in 1997. Ironically, the beneficiaries of Title IX appear less likely to participate in sports as adults than their older sisters.
51. After rapid growth in the early 1980s, membership in health clubs (according to the International Health, Racquet & Sports Club Association) rose from 80 per 1,000 adults in 1987 to 102 per 1,000 adults in 1995. These figures are virtually identical to DDB Needham Life Style figures for people who report nine or more health club visits in the previous year. Based on as little as a single visit, SGMA surveys show a 51 percent growth between 1987 and 1997.
52. Data in this and the previous paragraph are from the DDB Needham Life Style archive. According to th
e 1998 survey, 29 percent of American adults played cards at least nine times in the previous year, compared to 9 percent who visited a health club that often. Even among college-educated twenty-something singles, health club visits edge out card games only four to three. Participation in jogging, health clubs, and exercise classes combined was virtually constant from 1989 to 1999. The growth in exercise walking is entirely concentrated among Americans over fifty. The senior boom in exercise walking appears in all four data sets on sports participation. On obesity, see K. M. Flegal, et al., “Overweight and Obesity in the United States: Prevalence and Trends, 1960–1994,” International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders 22 (January 1998): 39–47, and Ali H. Mokdad, et al., “The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States, 1991–1998,” Journal of the American Medical Association 282 (October 27, 1999): 1519–1522.
53. NSGA data suggest that bowling participation rates grew about 6 percent between 1986 and 1997, compared to a 1 percent increase in SGMA data, a 1 percent decline in NHIS data, and a 6 percent decline in DDB Needham Life Style data. In short, participation in bowling (unlike most sports) has just about kept pace with population growth.
54. Author’s analysis of NSGA, SGMA, and DDB Needham Life Style surveys. Among all physical activities, walking, swimming, working out, and bicycling are more common, and fishing is tied, though falling behind. Basketball and pool are the next most popular sports, but have only about three-quarters as many participants as bowling.
55. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys. According to the 1996 survey, Americans in their twenties bowled 2.4 times per year and went in-line skating 1.7 times per year. On cosmic bowling, see Lisa Chadderdon, “AMF Is on a Roll,” Fast Company, September 1998, 132.