BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  41. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends archives, controlling for education, income, urbanism, age, marital and parental status, job status, sex, race, and region. The same pattern appears in both archives. Rolf Meyersohn, “Television and the Rest of Leisure,” Public Opinion Quarterly 32 (spring 1968): 102–112.

  42. Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior; John P. Robinson, “Television and Leisure Time: A New Scenario,” Journal of Communication 31 (winter 1981): 120–130; Comstock, Evolution of American Television; Bower, Changing Television Audience; Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life; Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life; Brehm and Rahn, “Individual-Level Evidence,” 1015, and Brehm and Rahn, personal communication; Schramm, Lyle, and Parker, Television in the Lives of our Children; Comstock and Paik, Television and the American Child; Mutz, Roberts, and van Vuuren, “Reconsidering the Displacement Hypothesis.” Author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style surveys from 1993 to 1998; 39 percent of respondents who watched TV during two time slots or fewer a day “generally” or “definitely” agreed that “I am a homebody,” as compared with 50 percent of those who watched during six or more time slots. See also my “Tuning In, Tuning Out.”

  43. Increased cocooning during the 1970s is confirmed by DDB Needham Life Style surveys of 1975–76. Activities that respondents reported doing more often were staying home, spending time with family and friends, dining with the family, and watching TV—in short, relaxing at home alone or with family and friends. Activities said to be declining were entertaining at home, going out to dinner, and going to the movies—in short, going out or formally entertaining.

  44. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends surveys in 1974, 1975, 1977, and 1979. Controlling for sex, age, education, and city size, as well as parental, marital and work status, respondents who said they were watching more television than in the past were 25–35 percent less likely to participate in community activities than were those who said they were watching less than in the past. See also Campbell, Yonish, and Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited.”

  45. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life. These authors review research on the psychological effects of television viewing. See also Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985).

  46. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life, 164–165.

  47. Michael Argyle, Social Psychology of Everyday Life, 110; Bowden and Offer, “Household Appliances,” 735–736.

  48. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life, 138–139.

  49. Bowden and Offer, “Household Appliances,” 739–741.

  50. Data in this and the following paragraph from author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style archive. Three closely correlated agree-disagree items were combined into a factor score of malaise: 1) “I get more headaches than most people,” 2) “I have trouble getting to sleep,” and 3) “I frequently get indigestion.” Each symptom is independently correlated with dependence on TV, but insomnia is the least closely linked, so the basic correlation is not a function of insomniacs who watch late-night TV for distraction. “High” in figure 68 refers to the top third of the population in frequency of headaches, indigestion, and insomnia. I cannot exclude the possibility that heavy doses of TV ads for headache, indigestion, and insomnia remedies increase hypochondria.

  51. Bowden and Offer, 737–738; Robinson, “TV and Leisure,” 129; F. Thomas Juster, “Preferences for Work and Leisure,” in Time, Goods, and Well-Being, F. Thomas Juster and Frank P. Stafford, eds. (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1985), 333–351; Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 242–250. In the DDB Needham Life Style data, reliance on TV for entertainment is a powerful predictor of unhappiness (as measured in chapter 20), roughly equivalent to financial worries and being single (typically found to be the strongest predictor of unhappiness).

  52. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 149.

  53. Sources for this paragraph and the next: Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 318; Roderick P. Hart, Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Allan McBride, “Television, Individualism, and Social Capital,” PS: Political Science & Politics 31 (September 1998): 542–552; Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age (New York: Penguin, 1995).

  54. A controversial line of research under the rubric of the “mean world effect” argues that heavy TV watching is associated with symptoms of misanthropy, such as overestimating crime rates. See George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, “The ‘Mainstreaming’ of America: Violence Profile No. 11,” Journal of Communication 30 (summer 1980): 10–29; Anthony N. Dobb and Glenn F. Macdonald, “Television Viewing and Fear of Victimization: Is the Relationship Causal?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 170–179; Paul M. Hirsch, “The ‘Scary World’ of the Nonviewer and Other Anomalies: A Re-analysis of Gerbner et al.’s Findings on Cultivation Analysis, Part I,” Communication Research 7 (October 1980): 403–456; Michael Hughes, “The Fruits of Cultivation Analysis: A Re-examination of the Effects of Television Watching on Fear of Victimization, Alienation, and the Approval of Violence,” Public Opinion Quarterly 44 (1980): 287–303; Comstock, The Evolution of American Television, 265–269; L. J. Shrum, Robert S. Wyer Jr., and Thomas C. O’Guinn, “The Effects of Television Consumption on Social Perceptions: The Use of Priming Procedures to Investigate Psychological Processes,” Journal of Consumer Research 24 (March 1998): 447–458. Brehm and Rahn, “Individual-Level Evidence,” Dhavan V. Shah, “Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use: An Individual-Level Assessment of Social Capital,” Political Psychology 19 (September 1998): 469–496, and my own analysis of the DDB Needham data suggest that the link between distrust and TV viewing is probably spurious.

  55. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys. Thanks to Rusty Silverstein, Dan Devroye, David Campbell, and Steve Yonish for help with this research. Credit for inspiring this line of work belongs to Shah, “Civic Engagement.”

  56. Figure 69 is drawn from Campbell, Yonish, and Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited.”

  57. J. Philipe Rushton, “Television and Prosocial Behavior,” in Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, eds. David Pearl, Lorraine Bouthilet, and Joyce Lazar (Rockville, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1982), 248–258, and Susan Hearold, “A Synthesis of 1,043 Effects of Television on Social Behavior,” in Public Communication and Behavior, vol. 1, ed. George Comstock (New York: Academic Press, 1986), 65–133.

  58. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  59. Nielsen Media Research, 1998 Report on Television (New York: 1998), 19, 23.

  60. Rahn and Transue, “Social Trust and Value Change”; George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, “Growing Up with Television: The Cultivation Perspective,” in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillman (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 17–41, quotation at 31; Alexander W. Astin, What Matters in College (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), 310.

  61. Robert E. Lane, “The Road Not Taken: Friendship, Consumerism, and Happiness,” Critical Review 8 (fall 1994): 521–554; Nicholas Zill and John Robinson, “The Generation X Difference,” American Demographics 17 (April 1995): 24–31.

  62. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 214–215.

  CHAPTE
R 14: FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

  1. Among DDB Needham Life Style respondents who denied that TV was their primary entertainment, lived in towns under 50,000, had a household income in the top third nationally, and were married with only the husband working full-time, club meetings annually fell from sixteen in the 1970s to nine in the 1990s. Among Roper respondents who watched less than one hour of television a day, lived in towns under 250,000, had an above-average income, and were either wives not employed full-time or married males, those who took part in none of the twelve forms of civic participation rose from 11 percent in the 1970s to 32 percent in the 1980s and to 55 percent in the 1990s. Frank Bryan found that in a sample of about seventy-five Vermont towns with an average population of about 1,000, town meeting attendance fell from about 27 percent of registered voters in 1970–73 to about 15 percent in 1998. Frank M. Bryan, personal communication and Real Democracy (unpublished ms., 1999), as cited in Joseph F. Zimmerman, The New England Town Meeting: Democracy in Action (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), 93–97.

  2. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style, Roper Social and Political Trends, General Social Survey, and National Election Studies archives, using standard demographic controls.

  3. Both life cycle and generational effects may be at work simultaneously. For technical treatments of this methodological issue, see note 7, chapter 2.

  4. Author’s analysis of GSS, Roper, and DDB Needham Life Style survey archives; Babchuk and Booth, “Voluntary Association Membership”; and S. Cutler, “Age Differences in Voluntary Association Membership,” Social Forces 55 (1976): 43–58.

  5. Wendy Rahn deserves credit for emphasizing the generational basis of declines in social capital.

  6. To maximize reliability, table 3 aggregates several years of surveys at each end of the two-decade period. Except for union membership and church attendance, for which abundant confirmation is available in other surveys, every entry in table 3 is based on 5,000–7,500 interviews, so even small absolute differences are highly reliable.

  7. In the Americans’ Use of Time archive, too, the declines in activity in both religious and secular organizations are almost entirely intergenerational.

  8. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain: The Evolution of Electoral Choice (London: Macmillan, 1974).

  9. Figure 71 draws on interviews over a quarter-century span (roughly 1970–75 to roughly 1995–2000) to estimate the civic engagement by year of birth. To control for life cycle effects early and late in life, figure 71 excludes respondents under twenty-five and over eighty. Too few respondents born in the late nineteenth century appear in these surveys to reliably discern differences among successive birth cohorts. However, those scant data (not broken out in figure 71) suggest that the turn of the last century might have been an era of rising civic engagement. Similarly, too few respondents born after 1970 have yet appeared in national surveys to be confident about their generational profile, although slender results suggest that the forty-year generational plunge in civic engagement might be bottoming out. Section II showed that declines in the civic engagement are substantial, even without controls for education, but to clarify generational differences, figure 71 holds constant the educational composition of the various birth cohorts. To offset the relatively small year-by-year samples and to control for educational differences, figure 71 charts five-year moving averages for respondents with less than high school, high school, and more than high school education. Figure 71 abstracts from life cycle and period effects, but the analyses that underlie this figure have explored other possible interpretations, and I do not believe that the generational interpretation is seriously misleading in any material respect. The operational measures are Vote: National Election Studies (1952–96) presidential year voting; newspaper: General Social Survey (1972–98) read newspaper every day; social trust: GSS (1972–98) agree “most people can be trusted”; community project: DDB (1975–98) worked on at least one community project in previous year; group membership: GSS (1974–94) member of at least one group; interest in politics: DDB (1975–98) agree “I am interested in politics”; church: GSS (1972–98) attend church at least “nearly every week”; club: DDB (1975–98) attended nine or more club meetings in previous year.

  10. See Zukin, Generation X and the News.

  11. The 1910–40 generation also seems more civic than its elders, at least to judge by the few people born in the late nineteenth century who appeared in these samples.

  12. In an unpublished comment on an earlier version of my argument here.

  13. Miller and Shanks, New American Voter, 57.

  14. Ithiel de Sola Pool, “Public Opinion,” in Handbook of Communication, ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool et al. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), 818–821.

  15. Author’s analysis of the National Election Studies, Roper Social and Political Trends, DDB Needham Life Style, and GSS archives. The gap in presidential turnout between those aged twenty-one to twenty-nine and those aged fifty and over rose from 16 percent in the 1960s and 1970s to 25 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. See also Times Mirror Center, “Age of Indifference,” 25.

  16. Author’s analysis of the Roper Social and Political Trends archive. During these years the fraction of the adult population aged forty-five and older increased slightly from 44 percent to 48 percent.

  17. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Stability and Change in American Politics: The Coming of Age of the Generation of the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Paul C. Light, Baby Boomers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); and Cheryl Russell, The Master Trend.

  18. Light, Baby Boomers, 123–125.

  19. Delli Carpini, Stability and Change, 150.

  20. Russell, The Master Trend; Delli Carpini, Stability and Change; M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); and author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends and DDB Needham Life Style archives.

  21. Delli Carpini, Stability and Change in American Politics, 326.

  22. Light, Baby Boomers, 32, 136, and 49, citing Richard Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

  23. Jennings and Niemi, Generations and Politics, 215–226; Light, Baby Boomers, 28; Daniel Yankelovich, “How Changes in the Economy Are Reshaping American Values,” in Values and Public Policy, Henry J. Aaron, Thomas E. Mann, and Timothy Taylor, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1994), 16–53.

  24. Russell, The Master Trend.

  25. Rahn and Transue, “Social Trust and Value Change.” See also the High School and Beyond surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, in 1974, 1984, and 1994, as well as R. A. Easterlin and E. M. Cummings, “Private Materialism, Personal Self-Fulfillment, Family Life and Public Interest: The Nature, Effects, and Causes of Recent Changes in the Values of American Youth,” Public Opinion Quarterly 55 (winter 1991): 499–533.

  26. Author’s analysis of Monitoring the Future survey archive, provided through the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. The decline is from 14–15 percent in the mid-1970s to 10–11 percent in the mid-1990s. Because these samples are very large, these estimates are highly reliable.

  27. Author’s analysis of the Monitoring the Future archive. “Undecided” responses are excluded from this analysis, although their inclusion would not affect the basic trend.

  28. Bennett and Rademacher, “The ‘Age of Indifference’ Revisited”; Zukin, Generation X and the News; Diana Owen and Molly W. Sonner, “‘Think Globally, Act Locally’: Why Political Science Underestimates the NEXT Generation” (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 1995); Diana Owen, “Mixed Signals: Generation X’s Attitudes toward the Political System,” in Craig and Bennett, After the Boom, 85–106; Times Mirror Center, “The Age of In
difference,” 26–28; and author’s analysis of the Roper Social and Political Trends archive. Since figure 72 holds life cycle constant, the lower participation rates of X’ers cannot be attributed simply to their youth.

  29. Myrna Weissman, Martha Livingston Bruce, Philip J. Leaf, Louise P. Florio, and Charles Holzer III, “Affective Disorders,” in Psychiatric Disorders in America: The Epidemiological Catchment Area Study, Lee N. Robins and Darrel A. Regier, eds. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 53–80, quotation at 80. This source includes an appendix reviewing and dismissing possible methodological flaws in this evidence.

  30. Martin E. P. Seligman, “Boomer Blues,” Psychology Today (October 1988): 50–55, quotation at 50. See also Gerald L. Klerman, “The Current Age of Youthful Melancholia: Evidence for Increase in Depression among Adolescents and Young Adults,” British Journal of Psychiatry 152 (1988): 4–14; Gerald L. Klerman and Myrna Weissman, “Increasing Rates of Depression,” Journal of American Medical Association 261 (1989): 2229–2235; Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Pocket Books, 1990); Cross-National Collaborative Group, “The Changing Rate of Depression: Cross-National Comparisons,” Journal of American Medical Association 268 (December 2, 1992): 3098–3105; Peter M. Lewisohn, Paul Rohde, John R. Seeley, and Scott A. Fischer, “Age-Cohort Changes in the Lifetime Occurrence of Depression and Other Mental Disorders,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102 (1993): 110–120; and Eric Fombonne, “Depressive Disorders: Time Trends and Possible Explanatory Mechanisms,” in Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends and Their Causes, ed. Michael Rutter and David J. Smith, eds. (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1995), 544–615.