Showing posts with label Pew Research Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pew Research Center. Show all posts
May 14, 2010
Voices of Humans Fading from Cellphones
Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls - NYTimes.com
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By JENNA WORTHAM
Liza Colburn uses her cellphone constantly.
She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.
“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.
For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.
For example, although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.
This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.
Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.
The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.
“Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. “But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.”
Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.
But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen.
Still, even the telephone design industry has taken note. Ross Rubin, a telecommunications analyst with the NPD Group, said cellphones outfitted with numerical keyboards — easiest for quickly dialing a phone number — were no longer in vogue. Touch screens, or quick messaging devices with full “qwerty” keyboards, on the other hand, are. On the newest phones, users must press several buttons or swipe through several screens to get to the application that allows them to make calls.
“Handset design has become far less cheek-friendly,” Mr. Rubin said. Mr. Hesse of Sprint said he expected that within the next couple of years, cellphone users would be charged by the data they used, not by their voice minutes, a prediction echoed by other industry executives.
When people do talk on their phones, their conversations are shorter; the average length of a local call was 1.81 minutes in 2009, compared with 2.27 minutes in 2008, according to CTIA. For some, the unused voice minutes mount up.
“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”
Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”
Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.
“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”
Nicole Wahl, a 35-year-old communications manager at the University of Toronto, estimates she talks on her phone only about 10 minutes a month.
“The only reason I ever call someone anymore is if I don’t have their Twitter handle or e-mail address,” Ms. Wahl said. “Like my hairdresser to see if she has a last-minute appointment or my parents to say I’m dropping by.”
American teenagers have been ahead of the curve for a while, turning their cellphones into texting machines; more than half of them send about 1,500 text messages each month, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates.
“We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,” she said.
Mrs. Colburn said texting had also become a much easier way to stay in touch with her daughter and receive quick updates about after-school plans.
“The other night she texted me from upstairs to ask a vocabulary question,” she said with a laugh. “But I drew the line there. I went upstairs to answer it.”
May 2, 2010
How Does Technology Affect Kids’ Friendships? - NYTimes.com
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Andy Wilson, 11, left, and his brother Evan, 14, go on Facebook in their treehouse in Atlanta.
By HILARY STOUT
“HEY, you’re a dork,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
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Apr 19, 2010
Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor: Overview - Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
Overview
By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.
Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation’s problems – including more government control over the economy – than there was when Barack Obama first took office.
The Tea Party movement, which has a small but fervent anti-government constituency, could be a wild card in this election. On one hand, its sympathizers are highly energized and inclined to vote Republican this fall. On the other, many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the Tea Party represents their point of view better than does the GOP.
These are the principal findings from a series of surveys that provide a detailed picture of the public’s opinions about government. The main survey, conducted March 11-21 among 2,505 adults, was informed by surveys in 1997 and 1998 that explored many of the same questions and issues. While a majority also distrusted the federal government in those surveys, criticism of government had declined from earlier in the decade. And the public’s desire for government services and activism was holding steady.
This is not the case today. Just 22% say they can trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time, among the lowest measures in half a century. About the same percentage (19%) says they are “basically content” with the federal government, which is largely unchanged from 2006 and 2007, but lower than a decade ago.
Opinions about elected officials are particularly poor. In a follow-up survey in early April, just 25% expressed a favorable opinion of Congress, which was virtually unchanged from March (26%), prior to passage of the health care reform bill. This is the lowest favorable rating for Congress in a quarter century of Pew Research Center surveys. Over the last year, favorable opinions of Congress have declined by half – from 50% to 25%.
Federal agencies and institutions also are viewed much more positively than is Congress. Nonetheless, favorable ratings have fallen significantly since 1997-1998 for seven of 13 federal agencies included in the survey. The declines have been particularly large for the Department of Education, the FDA, the Social Security Administration, as well as the EPA, NASA and the CDC. In terms of job performance, majorities give positive ratings to just six of 15 agencies or institutions tested, including the military (80% good/excellent) and the Postal Service (70%).
As was the case in the 1997 study of attitudes about government, more people say the bigger problem with government is that it runs its programs inefficiently (50%) than that it has the wrong priorities (38%). But the percentage saying government has the wrong priorities has increased sharply since 1997 – from 29% to 38%.
Perhaps related to this trend, the survey also finds a rise in the percentage saying the federal government has a negative effect on their day-to-day lives. In October 1997, 50% said the federal government had a positive effect on their daily lives, compared with 31% who said its impact was negative. Currently, 38% see the federal government’s personal impact as positive while slightly more (43%) see it as negative.
Rising criticism about government’s personal impact is not limited to the federal government. Just 42% say their state government has a positive effect on their daily lives, down from 62% in October 1997. There is a similar pattern in opinions about the impact of local government – 51% now see the impact of their local government as positive, down from 64% in 1997.
And despite the frustration most Americans feel with government, a majority of the public (56%) says that if they had a child just getting out of school they would like to see him or her pursue a career in government; and 70% say the government is a good place to work, unchanged from October 1997.
However, along with the frustrated majority, which has remained fairly steady over the years, the survey also identifies a small but growing segment of the public that holds intense anti-government views. The proportion saying that they are angry with the federal government has doubled since 2000 and matches the high reached in October 2006 (20%).
For example, 43% of Republicans say the federal government presents a major threat to their personal freedom, as do 50% of independents who lean Republican and fully 57% of those who agree with the Tea Party movement. That compares with just 18% of Democrats, 21% of independents who lean Democratic and just 9% of those who disagree with the Tea Party movement.
The Perfect Storm
The recent downward trend in trust in government began in the fall of 2008, when public satisfaction plunged amid the financial crisis. In early October 2008, 11% said they were satisfied with the way things were going in this country – the lowest measure in more than two decades of Pew Research Center polling. That same month, a CBS/New York Times survey found just 17% saying they could trust the government in Washington to do what is right, which matched an all-time low seen previously only in the summer of 1994.
A second element is presidential politics. Trust in government is typically higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among members of the “out” party. However, Republicans’ views of government change more dramatically, depending on which party holds power, than do Democrats’. Republicans are more trusting of government when the GOP holds power than Democrats are when the Democrats are in charge.
This pattern is particularly evident in the Obama era. The president’s policies – especially the year-long effort to overhaul the health care system – have served as a lightning rod for Republicans. Currently, just 13% of Republicans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right, nearly equaling a low point reached in June 1994 during the Clinton administration (11%).
A third factor is that a particular subgroup of independents, who are financially pressed, chronically distrustful of government and who typically lean to the Republican Party, appears to be especially angry today. Pew political typology surveys in the past have labeled these individuals as “disaffecteds.” This group may explain, in part, why at least as many Republican-leaning independents (37%) as conservative Republicans (32%) say they are angry with the government. And identical percentages of Republican-leaning independents and conservative Republicans (53% each) say they agree with the Tea Party movement.
For the most part, the public sees the members of Congress themselves, rather than a broken political system, as the problem with the institution. A majority says (52%) that the political system can work fine, it’s the members of Congress that are the problem; 38% say that most members of Congress have good intentions, but the political system is broken.
When asked about a series of criticisms of elected officials in Washington – that they care only about their careers, are influenced by special interests, are unwilling to compromise, and are profligate and out-of-touch – large majorities (no fewer than 76%) agree with each of the statements. And while 56% say they would like their child to pursue a career in government, far fewer (36%) say the same about their child making a career in politics.
It’s Not Just Government
Notably, those who say they are frustrated or angry with the federal government are highly critical of a number of other institutions as well. For example, fewer than one-in-five of those who say they are frustrated (18%) or angry (16%) with the federal government say that banks and other financial institutions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.
Familiar Complaints, Growing Concerns
As in the past, poor performance is the most persistent criticism of the federal government. Fully 74% think that the federal government does only a fair or poor job of running its programs, which is on par with opinions in the late 1990s.
But another strain of criticism is that the federal government’s priorities are misguided and that government policies do too little for average Americans. More than six-in-ten (62%) say it is a major problem that government policies unfairly benefit some groups while nearly as many (56%) say that government does not do enough to help average Americans.
Since 1997, there has been a substantial increase in the percentage saying that middle-class people get less attention from the federal government than they should; 66% say that currently, up from 54% thirteen years ago. In contrast with many opinions about government, this view is shared by comparable percentages of Republicans (68%), Democrats (67%) and independents (65%). Conversely, about half of Republicans (52%), Democrats (52%) and independents (47%) say that Wall Street gets more attention than it should from the federal government.
The public is now evenly divided over whether federal government programs should be maintained to deal with important problems (50%) or cut back greatly to reduce the power of government (47%). In 1997, a clear majority (57%) said government programs should be maintained. Greater support for cutting back government programs is seen among Republicans (up 14 points) and independents (eight points); by contrast, just 27% of Democrats say programs should be greatly cut back, unchanged from 1997.
The Regulation Paradox
Along these lines, the public opposes government exerting more control over the economy than it has in recent years. Just 40% say this is a good idea, while 51% say it is not. Last March, the balance of opinion was just the opposite. By 54% to 37%, more people said it was a good idea for the government to exert greater control over the economy.
While the public is wary of too much government involvement with the economy, it suspends that concern when it comes to stricter regulation of major financial companies. A clear majority (61%) says it is a good idea for the government to more strictly regulate the way major financial companies do business, which is virtually unchanged from last April (60%).
Government Distrust and Midterm Politics
Hostility toward government seems likely to be a significant election issue and an important element in both midterm voting intentions and turnout. While there was widespread distrust of the federal government in the late 1990s, just 37% went so far as to say that the federal government needed “very major reform.” Today, that figure stands at 53%; increasing numbers of Republicans, independents and Democrats say that government needs very major reform. Still, far more Republicans (65%) and independents (54%) than Democrats (41%) express this view.
Consistent with this pattern of partisanship, anti-government sentiment appears to be a more significant driver of possible turnout among Republicans and independents than among Democrats. Among Republican voters who are highly dissatisfied with government, 83% say they are absolutely certain to vote in the midterm elections; that compares with 67% of Republicans who express low levels of frustration with government. By contrast, there is no difference in intention to vote among Democrats who are highly frustrated with government (63%) and those who are less frustrated (64%).
1 See “Deconstructing Distrust,” March 10, 1998.
About the Surveys
This extensive study of public attitudes toward the federal government serves as an update and expansion of the Pew Research Center’s 1998 Deconstructing Distrust report (http://people-press.org/report/95/how-americans-view-government). Results are based on interviews from four telephone surveys conducted on landline and cell phones of nationwide samples of adults living in the continental United States.
The main survey was conducted March 11-21, 2010 with a sample of 2,505 adults. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. For the total sample of 2,505 interviews, the margin of sampling error that would be expected at the 95% confidence interval is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The margin of error for subgroups is larger.
Three other surveys of approximately 1,000 adults each were conducted March 18-21, April 1-5 and April 8-11. Interviews were conducted in English. The margin of sampling error for these surveys is plus or minus 4 percentage points.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uGUVoq6B0nMitE3P6rlIl9bOR4GAOoXc6Ey3U7eXgZ82S6GivfXDO_RCrt2Up8QLPQ8CDqSgilNbWIM4s48oxY0U7dUoZAH7klMxaieVPtK867zEp_Eqrc_kDXZz9hNrK8a8sVVcugwXGWFQdwZqky=s0-d)
Apr 2, 2010
Hispanics new to U.S. more likely to participate in census - washingtonpost.com
By Carol Morello
Friday, April 2, 2010; A16
Recent Hispanic immigrants are more likely to return their census questionnaires than Hispanics born in the United States, according to a new study that suggests a census campaign targeting Spanish speakers has been wildly successful.
A telephone survey of about 1,000 people conducted in the third week of March by the Pew Hispanic Center also found that foreign-born Hispanics are less skeptical that their census information will remain confidential.
The study was released Thursday, which the government dubbed "Census Day" -- the day by which, officials hoped, people would have filled out their forms and mailed them in. To encourage participation, the White House released a photo of President Obama filling out his questionnaire.
The government will continue to promote the census throughout April, particularly in areas with low response rates. At the end of the month, officials will compile lists of addresses from which surveys have not been received by mail. Census-takers will be dispatched to those addresses to try to get survey questions answered.
Major Hispanic groups have said there is widespread fear among immigrants that data will be shared with immigration authorities. In response, groups have stressed the confidentiality of the census in a campaign called "Ya es hora. ¡Hagase contar!" or "It's time to be counted."
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, declared himself "giddy" about the results.
"It shows the work we have been doing has had an impact," he said of the effort that enlisted newscasters, entertainers and other prominent Latinos to spread the message that Hispanics should send in their forms regardless of their legal status. "It shows that this population understands what we need do as a community to move forward, to be counted and to be heard."
But, ironically, the survey suggests that the message did not get through so readily to U.S.-born Hispanics. While 91 percent of the foreign-born said they had returned their forms or would do so soon, only 78 percent of the U.S.-born said they would participate. Both figures would be an improvement over the last census, when 69 percent of Hispanic households returned their forms.
Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in the United States, as well as the fastest growing. About 35 million were counted in the 2000 Census, and they were estimated to number 47 million by 2008, or 15 percent of the population.
The sharp focus on messages in Spanish may have created the disparity in how recent immigrants and natives regard the census.
Maria Teresa Kumar, executive director of Voto Latino, said that recent immigrants are the main consumers of Spanish-language programs aired on Univision and Telemundo, which introduced a census-taker as a character in its top-rated telenovela. Generations born in the United States tend to prefer English-language media.
"The more acculturated you are, the more you have the same views as the rest of mainstream America, and a lot of folks are distrustful of government," she said.
The Pew survey also suggests that a census boycott called by some Hispanic evangelical ministers to protest the lack of immigration reform has been a failure. Only 16 percent said they had heard calls for a boycott.
"We're not sure why it didn't gain traction," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "We know that when it was announced, there was a very broad effort to counter it."
Carlos Aragon, general manager of Radio Fiesta, which broadcasts in the Washington area, said many Hispanics consider the boycott "ridiculous." He also said he hears myths that the Census Bureau will turn in undocumented immigrants to the authorities.
José Robles, director of Hispanic Ministry in the Phoenix Catholic Diocese, said the concern about information being handed over to authorities is more pronounced among members of the clergy than parishioners. The diocese has heavily promoted the census, but Arizonans are among those who are slower to return forms than the national average.
The states whose response rates are lagging are mostly in the South and Southwest.
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Feb 24, 2010
The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation
Event: Video
Quiz: How Millennial Are You?
Overview
Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials -- the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium -- have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.
They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.
Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.(See chapter 4 in the full report)
They embrace multiple modes of self-expression. Three-quarters have created a profile on a social networking site. One-in-five have posted a video of themselves online. Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). 
Despite struggling (and often failing) to find jobs in the teeth of a recession, about nine-in-ten either say that they currently have enough money or that they will eventually meet their long-term financial goals. But at the moment, fully 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences -- with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years.1 (See chapter 5 in the full report)
Whether as a by-product of protective parents, the age of terrorism or a media culture that focuses on dangers, they cast a wary eye on human nature. Two-thirds say "you can't be too careful" when dealing with people. Yet they are less skeptical than their elders of government. More so than other generations, they believe government should do more to solve problems. (See chapter 8 in the full report).
They are the least overtly religious American generation in modern times. One-in-four are unaffiliated with any religion, far more than the share of older adults when they were ages 18 to 29. Yet not belonging does not necessarily mean not believing. Millennials pray about as often as their elders did in their own youth. (See chapter 9 in the full report)
Millennials are on course to become the most educated generation in American history, a trend driven largely by the demands of a modern knowledge-based economy, but most likely accelerated in recent years by the millions of 20-somethings enrolling in graduate schools, colleges or community colleges in part because they can't find a job. Among 18 to 24 year olds a record share -- 39.6% -- was enrolled in college as of 2008, according to census data. (See chapter 5 in the full report)
They get along well with their parents. Looking back at their teenage years, Millennials report having had fewer spats with mom or dad than older adults say they had with their own parents when they were growing up. And now, hard times have kept a significant share of adult Millennials and their parents under the same roof. About one-in-eight older Millennials (ages 22 and older) say they've "boomeranged" back to a parent's home because of the recession. (See chapters 3 and 5 in the full report)
They respect their elders. A majority say that the older generation is superior to the younger generation when it comes to moral values and work ethic. Also, more than six-in-ten say that families have a responsibility to have an elderly parent come live with them if that parent wants to. By contrast, fewer than four-in-ten adults ages 60 and older agree that this is a family responsibility.
Despite coming of age at a time when the United States has been waging two wars, relatively few Millennials-just 2% of males-are military veterans. At a comparable stage of their life cycle, 6% of Gen Xer men, 13% of Baby Boomer men and 24% of Silent men were veterans. (See chapter 2 in the full report)
But the political enthusiasms of Millennials have since cooled -for Obama and his message of change, for the Democratic Party and, quite possibly, for politics itself. About half of Millennials say the president has failed to change the way Washington works, which had been the central promise of his candidacy. Of those who say this, three-in-ten blame Obama himself, while more than half blame his political opponents and special interests.
To be sure, Millennials remain the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals; they are less supportive than their elders of an assertive national security policy and more supportive of a progressive domestic social agenda. They are still more likely than any other age group to identify as Democrats. Yet by early 2010, their support for Obama and the Democrats had receded, as evidenced both by survey data and by their low level of participation in recent off-year and special elections. (See chapter 8 in the full report)
Our Research Methods
This Pew Research Center report profiles the roughly 50 million Millennials who currently span the ages of 18 to 29. It's likely that when future analysts are in a position to take a fuller measure of this new generation, they will conclude that millions of additional younger teens (and perhaps even pre-teens) should be grouped together with their older brothers and sisters. But for the purposes of this report, unless we indicate otherwise, we focus on Millennials who are at least 18 years old.
We examine their demographics; their political and social values; their lifestyles and life priorities; their digital technology and social media habits; and their economic and educational aspirations. We also compare and contrast Millennials with the nation's three other living generations-Gen Xers (ages 30 to 45), Baby Boomers (ages 46 to 64) and Silents (ages 65 and older). Whenever the trend data permit, we compare the four generations as they all are now-and also as older generations were at the ages that adult Millennials are now.3
Most of the findings in this report are based on a new survey of a national cross-section of 2,020 adults (including an oversample of Millennials), conducted by landline and cellular telephone from Jan. 14 to 27, 2010; this survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.0 percentage points for the full sample and larger percentages for various subgroups (for more details, see page 110 in the full report). The report also draws on more than two decades of Pew Research Center surveys, supplemented by our analysis of Census Bureau data and other relevant studies.
Some Caveats
A few notes of caution are in order. Generational analysis has a long and distinguished place in social science, and we cast our lot with those scholars who believe it is not only possible, but often highly illuminating, to search for the unique and distinctive characteristics of any given age group of Americans. But we also know this is not an exact science.
We acknowledge, for example, that there is an element of false precision in setting hard chronological boundaries between the generations. Can we say with certainty that a typical 30-year-old adult is a Gen Xer while a typical 29-year-old adult is a Millennial? Of course not.
Nevertheless, we must draw lines in order to carry out the statistical analyses that form the core of our research methodology. And our boundaries-while admittedly too crisp-are not arbitrary. They are based on our own research findings and those of other scholars.
We are mindful that there are as many differences in attitudes, values, behaviors and lifestyles within a generation as there are between generations. But we believe this reality does not diminish the value of generational analysis; it merely adds to its richness and complexity. Throughout this report, we will not only explore how Millennials differ from other generations, we will also look at how they differ among themselves.
The Millennial Identity
Most Millennials (61%) in our January, 2010 survey say their generation has a unique and distinctive identity. That doesn't make them unusual, however. Roughly two-thirds of Silents, nearly six-in-ten Boomers and about half of Xers feel the same way about their generation.
But Millennials have a distinctive reason for feeling distinctive. In response to an open-ended follow-up question, 24% say it's because of their use of technology. Gen Xers also cite technology as their generation's biggest source of distinctiveness, but far fewer-just 12%-say this. Boomers' feelings of distinctiveness coalesce mainly around work ethic, which 17% cite as their most prominent identity badge. For Silents, it's the shared experience of the Depression and World War II, which 14% cite as the biggest reason their generation stands apart. (See chapter 3 in the full report)
Work Ethic, Moral Values, Race Relations
Of the four generations, Millennials are the only one that doesn't cite "work ethic" as one of their principal claims to distinctiveness. A nationwide Pew Research Center survey taken in 2009 may help explain why. This one focused on differences between young and old rather than between specific age groups. Nonetheless, its findings are instructive.
Nearly six-in-ten respondents cited work ethic as one of the big sources of differences between young and old. Asked who has the better work ethic, about three-fourths of respondents said that older people do. By similar margins, survey respondents also found older adults have the upper hand when it comes to moral values and their respect for others.
It might be tempting to dismiss these findings as a typical older adult gripe about "kids today." But when it comes to each of these traits -- work ethic, moral values, respect for others -- young adults agree that older adults have the better of it. In short, Millennials may be a self-confident generation, but they display little appetite for claims of moral superiority.
That 2009 survey also found that the public -- young and old alike -- thinks the younger generation is more racially tolerant than their elders. More than two decades of Pew Research surveys confirm that assessment. In their views about interracial dating, for example, Millennials are the most open to change of any generation, followed closely by Gen Xers, then Boomers, then Silents.
Likewise, Millennials are more receptive to immigrants than are their elders. Nearly six-in-ten (58%) say immigrants strengthen the country, according to a 2009 Pew Research survey; just 43% of adults ages 30 and older agree.
The same pattern holds on a range of attitudes about nontraditional family arrangements, from mothers of young children working outside the home, to adults living together without being married, to more people of different races marrying each other. Millennials are more accepting than older generations of these more modern family arrangements, followed closely by Gen Xers. To be sure, acceptance does not in all cases translate into outright approval. But it does mean Millennials disapprove less. (See chapter 6 in the full report)
A Gentler Generation Gap
A 1969 Gallup survey, taken near the height of the social and political upheavals of that turbulent decade, found that 74% of the public believed there was a "generation gap" in American society. Surprisingly, when that same question was asked in a Pew Research Center survey last year -- in an era marked by hard economic times but little if any overt age-based social tension -- the share of the public saying there was a generation gap had risen slightly to 79%.
There is one generation gap that has widened notably in recent years. It has to do with satisfaction over the state of the nation. In recent decades the young have always tended to be a bit more upbeat than their elders on this key measure, but the gap is wider now than it has been in at least twenty years. Some 41% of Millennials say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, compared with just 26% of those ages 30 and older. Whatever toll a recession, a housing crisis, a financial meltdown and a pair of wars may have taken on the national psyche in the past few years, it appears to have hit the old harder than the young. (See chapter 3 in the full report)
But this speaks to a difference in outlook and attitude; it's not a source of conflict or tension. As they make their way into adulthood, Millennials have already distinguished themselves as a generation that gets along well with others, especially their elders. For a nation whose population is rapidly going gray, that could prove to be a most welcome character trait.
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1. Lisa B. Kahn. “The Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Graduating from College in a Bad Economy,” Yale School of Management, Aug. 13, 2009 (forthcoming in Labour Economics).
2. This Pew Research estimate is drawn from our analysis of government data for women ages 18 to 29 who gave birth in 2006, the most recent year for which such data is available. Martin, Joyce A., Brady E. Hamilton, Paul D. Sutton, Stephanie J. Ventura, Fay Menacker, Sharon Kirmeyer, and TJ Mathews. Births: Final Data for 2006. National Vital Statistics Reports; vol 57 no 7. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics. 2009.
3. We do not have enough respondents ages 83 and older in our 2010 survey to permit an analysis of the Greatest Generation, which is usually defined as encompassing adults born before 1928. Throughout much of this report, we have grouped these older respondents in with the Silent generation. However, Chapter 8 on politics and Chapter 9 on religion each draw on long-term trend data from other sources, permitting us in some instances in those chapters to present findings about the Greatest Generation.
Sep 24, 2009
Survey Shows Pull of the U.S. Is Still Strong Inside Mexico - NYTimes.com
In spite of high unemployment in the United States and strict border enforcement, one-third of Mexicans say they would move to this country if they could, and more than half of those would move even if they did not have legal immigration documents, according to a survey published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.
The United States still exerts a powerful attraction for Mexicans, the survey found, with 57 percent saying that those who leave home to settle here have better lives, while only 14 percent say life is worse in the United States.
Many Mexicans want to migrate here even though they are well informed about the hardships they could face and are expecting conditions at home to improve. Nearly half of those surveyed said they knew someone who had tried to reach the United States but had returned home after being caught by border authorities. Four in 10 said they knew someone who had returned home unable to find a job here.
Although 78 percent of Mexicans said they were not happy with their nation’s direction, 61 percent said they expected the economy to get better in the coming year.
“For many, many people in Mexico, this is still the land of opportunity,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington. The poll in Mexico is part of a series of surveys that Pew conducted this year in 24 nations and the Palestinian territories to examine global attitudes.
Personal connections between the two countries are intense. About 4 in 10 Mexicans reported having relatives or friends in the United States they communicated with regularly.
The survey suggests that recent declines in Mexican migration to the United States may be only temporary. A study in July by the Pew Hispanic Center, part of the Pew organization, found a steep decrease in recent years in the flow of Mexican migrants, especially since 2007. Scholars and immigration officials say intensified border controls have combined with the lack of jobs in the United States to discourage Mexicans from attempting an illegal journey. Currently, about 11.5 million Mexicans live in this country, according to Pew; an estimated 7 million of them are illegal immigrants.
The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews from May 26 to June 2 with 1,000 adults in Mexico, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t4UM5gai0fra-CjusrjVMrFV2KxXHHiY9g2dt7W4LMwH-la3NowXTeu-fT5dSeeUgdTQRUmOT-nRRVhCOGTi8j7VGymeUlFU0CxuzZVVoREdqv4AkJTkyQfw3w9lRLevdoESeNc2Ac8_nkUMnUShwh=s0-d)
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