Practice question · Multiple choice
Sociologists distinguish between a demographic cohort and a sociological generation. What makes this distinction vital when analysing social change?
Hints
- Does sharing a birth decade automatically guarantee a shared social consciousness?
- What role did Mannheim assign to historical catalysts compared to biological birth years?
Show the answer
C. A generation requires shared historical events to activate its cohort identity
Why
Following Mannheim, mere co-presence in birth years does not forge collective consciousness; historical disruption must crystallise a cohort into an active generation. Ryder showed demographic replacement supplies the raw material, but history supplies the catalyst.
Practise Family, Generations and the Life Course
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Family, Generations and the Life Course
- Survey data show that people born after 1990 report lower rates of home ownership than people born in the…
- Which changes belong to the second demographic transition as Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa described it?
- Complete the account of the three effects that any study of change over time must separate.
- Arrange the steps of the classic post-war standardised transition to adulthood, in the order it was expected…
- Estimate the mean age at which young people leave the parental home in Spain, on recent Eurostat figures.
- In which year did Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa name the second demographic transition?
- Sort each finding by whether it supports the individualisation thesis or complicates it.
- Cherlin describes the de-institutionalisation of marriage, and in the same period marriage acquired new…