generation
generationA generation is a form of age-group consisting of those members of a society who were born at approximately the same time. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in generational analyses which examine the contribution of emerging age-groups to social change. Karl Mannheim, in his essay on The Problem of Generations (1952), describes how people located in the same generation may see the world in very different ways from their counterparts in earlier generations. Thus the unique experiences common to each generation group allows for social change. In a more recent work, Children of the Great Depression (1974), Glenn H. Elder shows how the generation brought up in a time of great frugality had a very different view of the world from those raised in a time of economic prosperity. Generation is also used to refer to the period that elapses between one generation and the next. Studies of differences...
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