Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Commenting on the plight of young people during the Great Recession, economist Richard Freeman remarked (Estes, 2011), "These people will be scarred, and they will be called the 'lost generation'."These words are quite stark, but they speak to the gravity of the situation at hand, the high stakes involved-not just for young people but for society as a whole.Whether today's youth are indeed scarred and lost (or not) has generated a great deal of social and behavioral research in the last several years.This attention is certainly not surprising.How young people fared during this economic downturn is of great importance to policy and practice; for example, economics research can quantify who has been hardest hit, who is the most vulnerable in the future, who needs the most help, and what the price tag might ultimately be.At the same time, this issue has broad theoretical significance across disciplines.Capturing the interplay of macro-level societal trends and micro-level personal experiences, it embodies the very core of the sociological imagination, life course theory, human ecology, and many other perspectives in sociology, demography, developmental science, and economics (Grusky, Western, & Wimer, 2012).The four articles in this Special Section are part of a new tradition of Great Recession research focused on children, adolescents, and young adults.They grew out of a series of activities and meetings (of which I was a part) funded by the Society for Research in Child Development, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and other organizations across several countries, as part of the growing concern over the very possibility that we might have a lost generation (or lost generations) on our hands.Like so many studies of the effects of social change on the individual life course (Silbereisen, 2005;Elder,
Author: Robert Crosnoe
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: No poverty
Open Access status: bronze
Award: G3711296155
OpenAlex ID: W1965953120