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Life’s Turning Points and Generational Consciousness

Finnish generations
 

Changes of the Finnish society during 20th century has often been analysed with the help the concept of generation. The typology developed  by J.P. Roos (1987) based on Finnish autobiographies  is in general use in Finland. There are four generations: (1) those born in 1900–25: the Generation of war and depression, (2) those born in 1925–39: the Generation of reconstruction, (3) those born in 1940–50: the Generation of the transformation, and (4) those born during the 50s: the Suburban generation. The typology was based on a collection of autobiographies with the emphasis of such ‘variables’ as social and economic security, work, education and human relations. In what follows, I shall discuss a three generation scheme where the first two generations are condensed into one and the third extended to the 60's. In the literature, the middle generation often has another name, that of the Baby boomers. This name will also be used here (for important theoretical discussions of the generations, see Attias-Donfut, 1988, Eyerman-Turner,.1998, Kohli-Szydlik, 1999)
The life course and turning points 

In very schematic terms the life course in modern societies has had a linear and rigid nature (Kohli, 1998  Featherstone, 1994): various age grades were highly standardised and universalised, so that the life course was constructed as a universal and institutionalized trajectory from childhood through youth towards the middle-age of adulthood ending in retirement. The late modern condition is said to transform many aspects of those old conventions: late modernity entails (or is said to entail) a reversal, a great diversity in the cultural content of life phases and a blurring of age grades, individuality instead of standardisation, variation and flexibility in the trajectories of life (e.g. Giddens, 1991)  . 
This would mean also that the traditional turning points in the life course would diminish in importance and their order would vary enormously. There would also be repetition (second chances!).  In this short paper, I will ask the following simple questions: what kind of turning points do different generations mention, when do these occur and are there significant differences between generations.
Data 
The quantitative survey data discussed in this paper comes from a mail questionnaire (The Finnish Life Course) carried out by Statistics Finland in 1998. The questionnaire covers general background information plus following themes : (1) education, (2) work and income, (3) the family in childhood and parents, (4) present family and household, (5) orientations in work and retirement, (6) health and life satisfaction, (7) generational consciousness, (8) partner- and human relations, (9) way of life and life orientations and (10) turning points in life. 
The total sample was 4435, with 2628  (= N) responses. The response rate was thus 59 which is acceptable. Women responded more actively than men. The age distribution was unskewed. People born between 1936 and 1970 formed the population (N) for the survey. A partition into three age groups formed the basis for data collection; the baby boomers (people born between 1945–50) were disproportionately represented in the sample. However, the results can be generalized on the whole population using weights calculated by Statistics Finland (causing the N’s in the tables vary). The questionnaire contained several open questions, one of which (on turning points) is discussed in this paper.

The concept of turning points 
What do we best remember of our lives? One answer is the turning points in life, the  fateful moments which imply a change in our life course. Only the first one, birth (especially the moment when we start breathing), nobody can remember (except, it is claimed, after a long analysis, but this probably just a proof that psychoanalysis is humbug) but most of us will have heard quite detailed stories about it. The rest is mostly known to us: entering school, illnesses, accidents,  marriage(s), divorce(s), (parents’ and own), graduation, changes of employment, of homes, of places of living, children’s birthdates and later events. Some of us remember better the bad moments whereas some remember mostly the good ones (this is essentially what makes bitter and positive personalities).
Of course, many such events do not necessarily constitute turning points properly speaking, i.e. events when our life takes another course. In a person’s life story (i.e. life as told), turning points are typically very much present. They form the anchors or organizing events around which the life story is structured. They are the events that are mentioned in the
story, that form the starting points of new chapters etc. If a child’s birth does not constitute
a turning point, it is simply not mentioned. Of course there is also the possibility that a
turning point is not consciously seen as such. At least when it takes place. But if it really is
a turning point, its impact will certainly be noticed. In fact, in many cases we will later
search for the precise moment when an important change was introduced in our lives.
When did I fall in love? When did the relationship turn sour? When did I first notice
that something was taking place in our relationship to work?  When did I notice that a
certain career was the right one? Or the wrong one? All these questions will usually be
answered in at least a temporarily satisfactory manner, even though it is not always certain
that the timing is right.
In a life story, then, the turning points are embedded in the story and can be read out of it. Hidden turning points are an interesting question which I will ignore here as they are not relevant to the discussion in this paper, which is based on data about turning points understood as such.
Note that turning points are a different thing from ‘turning periods’. The clearest example is the difference between getting sacked and being afterwards unemployed during a longer period.. Getting  married and having either a happy or an unhappy marriage is another. In the latter case, the nature of the turning point depends a lot of the nature of the marriage. But in most cases the actual marriage is seen as a positive turning point regardless of the consequence.
Another possible alternative for ‘turning point’ is simply ‘important life event’. Turning points may require more uncertain interpretation whereas a life event is more easily
recognizable and less prone for misinterpretation. But on the other hand, a turning point is
more demanding and homogeneous: not everything that is classified as an important life
event means that it will turn the course of our lives. But a turning point is always also an
important life event.
In Inglehart and Baker (2000), Finland belongs clearly to the group of countries with high self-expression and secular-rational values. Also, Finland has changed very little from 1981 to 1996. That is, Finns are in general very highly modernized, more so than such countries as Germany or Switzerland.. But from our perspective, the most important thing is that Finns live in a largely unchanging value environment, where important turning points do not come from dramatic outside events or threats to life and neither do they believe in transcendental, mystic events. In the former socialist countries, the changes in the surrounding society have forced people to emphasize survival-values, which also implies that these changes would be mentioned as negative turning points in life.
 

What are the major turning points like?

In this paper I will discuss turning points from a different perspective. The discussion will be based on an open-ended survey question to the three generations discussed above. The question was formulated as follows: ‘Have there been situations in your life which you have experienced as turning points?’ So the emphasis was on lived experience. It might be of interest to mention that roughly 15-20 % of the respondents had not experienced any turning points, with the exception of young women, who usually had experienced turning points. After this we asked whether these turning points were changes to the better or worse or to both and received a not very astonishing result that most of the people had experienced turning points for both better and for worse. Still, it is fascinating that the youngest generation has had clearly most positive turning points and least negative ones, but even there the mixed turning points dominate. (Table 1)
How should one interpret a result that around 40 % of the youngest generation have
experienced only positive turning points whereas only 3-5 % have had only negative turning points (which are most common for the oldest generation of women, over 10 % who cannot remember any positive turning points at all). It is interesting that the survey makes it possible to lend credence to both the conception that we are prone to forget the negative things in our lives as well as positive. And at least it can be said that a very important and often negative turning point, entering school, is not mentioned at all. Education and gender are very important in how the different types of turning points are organized. Interestingly enough, also marital status has a role. Depending of the education, the lower the education the more often the turning points were negative or interestingly, there were no turning points. And conversely, the higher one’s education, the more does life consist of only positive turning points or of both negative and positive. (Table 2) Marital status is highly relevant. To be unmarried or divorced/widowed gives most negative turning points, and to be unmarried means also that one has more often no turning points at all. While widowers or divorced very seldom report no turning points at all.
But first something about the typical turning points mentioned in the open question. We also asked about the degree of importance so that we have several turning points organized according to their importance. (Typically three positive and two negative turning points were mentioned.) The coding was relatively crude as the answers were not always easy to interpret, when no explanations were given. It is for instance probable that some of the replies giving divorce as a positive turning point were erroneous, even though divorce may definitely be seen as a positive turning point (and nothing prevented people from mentioning it both as negative and positive turning point).  However, most of the turning points were rather uncomplicated, such as getting married (always positive) or falling ill (negative).
The most common positive turning points were the following: falling in love/getting
married, having children, having success in studies or at work. After that came moving but
also divorce was mentioned as a positive turning point by quite a few. (Table 3)
In order of importance marriage, falling in love, etc. comes first, the most often mentioned second turning point was related to children and the most often mentioned third turning point was related to work and studies. Housing comes close to top as third mentioned turning point.
Gender differences are not too unexpected: women mentioned child related turning points almost twice as often than men, men mentioned work or studies more often than women, but the difference is not dramatic. Marriage related turning points were mentioned more often by men. Housing is mentioned as equally important. Generational differences are as such relatively unimportant. (Table 4)
Education is on the other hand clearly related: those with college education saw pair relations clearly less often as positive turning point, and children dramatically less often (24 % vs. 9 %). Work and studies were conversely seen as most important positive turning points (47 % to 16 %). The unimportance of children is quite astonishing, as the number of children or age should not contribute to this. In any case it does not reflect very positively upon the relationship of education and parenting.  
People living in the countryside emphasized  relations between the spouses and children, whereas city people saw work and studies as positive turning points. Housing was also clearly related to the rural-urban division: being more important in the cities.
Negative turning points were quite different from the positive ones. The only turning point which could have both meanings was divorce, which was sometimes mentioned as a
positive turning point but was also the most important negative turning point together with death of relatives, and economic or employment problems (table 3). Interestingly, there is no mention of children as a negative turning point (neither are drug problems or crime mentioned at all).  Economic problems dominated already as second and especially as third most important turning points.
The typical negative turning points were thus connected with divorce, death, illness,
economic problems including problems at work (mainly unemployment).   Crime, drugs or accidents were seldom mentioned. The risks were very classical ones; nothing exceptional, nothing very modern (unless perhaps the dominating position of divorce). The ‘risk society’ is not much of a presence here (but see later an interesting point about social position and risks).
If we look at them by generation we get some obvious results. Illness is more important for the old than for the young, but economic problems are more important for the male baby boomers, followed closely by the suburban generation (both men and women, women being slightly higher). Death of a close person was most important for older women (and for
women in general). (Table 5)
What was perhaps more unexpected is that divorce is the most important negative turning point for young men. Gender differences are here important, whereas education does not make much of a difference. So education does not affect the experience of economic problems as a turning point. Women experience deaths of close persons as much more important than men and men conversely experience economic problems as much more important than women.
Although class  was not significant for the whole population, in the baby boomers’ generation we get quite interesting results. The upper white collar men of the baby boomers have the highest frequency of economic problems as a negative turning point whereas the upper white collar women peak the divorce category. This does not apply to other generations, where the relationship is inverse or does not exist. (Figure 1)
In other words, the higher one’s class position (in the baby boomer generation), the clearer modern risks threaten. This is very interesting. One explanation would be that a higher class position entails more sensitivity to economic risks and more willingness to change. The increased divorce risk for women again tells of more equality between spouses in the upper class.

When do the turning points happen? 
The most important discovery of this paper is that the timing of turning points is both dependent of the nature of the turning point and generation in a very interesting way.  The
main finding is that the positive turning point is highly dependent on generation, whereas the
negative turning point is not. On the other hand, genders do not show much difference. 
According to this, the most important positive turning points in life take place at around
25-30 years. (Figure 2) The peak is at the year 1970 for the generation of 1945-50. The most important turning point is usually the first in time, but the difference between the first and second is only about three years. In a sense then, the first turning point is causally decisive, the less important positive turning points follow from it. But of course this is a strange result: why should the most important turning point in one’s life be also the first?  What do people understand with ‘turning points’? Perhaps we should only have used the less demanding word ‘life event’?
Incidentally, in my book on Finnish generations (Roos, 1987) it was claimed that the life stories in a sense ‘ended’ when people were between 30 and 40, i.e. after that their lives did not seem to contain much that would have been worth writing about. Here this result is confirmed resoundingly, insofar as positive life events are concerned.
If divided between the most important categories, there is about a ten- year difference
between the peaks of marriage as a turning point and housing as a turning point (the two
extremes: otherwise the order was marriage/relationship, work/study, children).  The third
most important turning point usually takes place at a recent point of time, i.e. in the 90s.
Here there is an interesting generational difference so that for the youngest generation the timing is inverse: the pair relationship as a turning point comes last and even housing is before. (Figure 3) I.e. where the baby boomers fell in love first, then had children and then started careers and finished studies and found a place to live, the young generation wants to have everything more or less simultaneously and even succeeds with it. As to the negative turning points, the situation is completely different. (Figure 4) For all generations, the most important negative turning point takes place in the early 90s and only in the oldest generations does there exist another small peak in the early 60s (at a time which is known in the literature as ‘the great migration’ Finns moved  en masse to towns in the south and to a lesser extent to Sweden). In other words, there is no relationship to age or generation as to the timing of the turning points. For men the turning points have an even higher concentration than for women. 10 % of all negative turning points have taken place in 1991 in the baby boomer generation. This is mainly explained by the role of negative economic turning points, but even other major negative points are concentrated in the near past, although in a less dramatic fashion (divorce, death and illness). (Figure 5) The deep economic depression in the beginning of the 90s has thus had very strong effects, even non-economic ones.
If we accept the hypothesis that the concentration of negative turning points is due to this crisis effect, we are also bound to assume that before the next crisis, the negative turning points will stay fixed. But if the memory of these unpleasant events fades it may also change the timing.
In any case, there is nothing specifically generational here, unless we speculate that different generations have experienced the crisis differently (but negatively). This kind of speculation is only of non-academic interest. The result is however extremely interesting and important for a discussion about generations. It points to an important fact about generational experience: negative experiences do not form generations. The implications of this we will discuss in the final section. Another possible interpretation is that if negative experiences may be generation-generative, this means that there are several age cohorts without any generational experiences.
Subjective generations
Finally, we shall discuss the turning points and subjective generations. In addition to the ‘objective’ generation we also asked people whether they saw themselves as belonging to a generation. Here, the generation of the transformation (baby boomers)  were much more prone to see themselves subjectively as a generation, and precisely as a baby boomer generation (much fewer classified themselves as belonging to the ‘generation of the sixties’). (Table 6)
Therefore, it is much more legitimate to speak about generation in a Mannheimian sense with respect to the generation of the transformation than either the older or the younger ‘generations’. In the above discussion, we have used only ‘objective’ generations, i.e. generations based on common birthdates. But we also asked the respondents about whether they saw themselves as members of a generation. Interestingly 60 % of all respondents and 80 % of the baby boomers answered in the affirmative (so that the youngest age group was least keen on belonging to a generation). As to the actual named generations (suggested in the questionnaire), they partially overlap with the objective generations, but not completely. So the oldest generation called itself most often the ‘post-war generation’ whereas most of the baby boomers were really ‘baby boomers’. The youngest generation was most uncertain: it saw itself as part of the ‘60s generation’ and ‘baby boomers’ (an interesting echo effect which should be studied more), but the most popular name was the ‘welfare generation’. ‘Lucky generation’ was also chosen by some. Other suggested names (‘X-generation’, ‘ecological generation’, etc.) were extremely rare. The most problematic turned out to be the 60's generation which was most popular among the young generation and therefore must mean that they took it as a reference to their birthdate.
If we look specifically at turning points and subjective generations even though the results are quite blurred, some (few) interesting differences emerge. (Table 7) Thus the post-war generation and the baby boomers were almost identical in experiencing least positive turning points whereas the ‘welfare generation’ and those who did not belong to any generation were more positive. The subjective baby boomers emphasized work the least as an important turning point. The ‘welfare generation’ had experienced the economic crisis most negatively. When looking at those born 1945-50 only, the results do not change much.

Consequences for the theory of generations 
One very important conclusion mentioned above which can be drawn immediately from this difference between positive and negative events is that only positive events can  function as a basis for generational experience. A negative effect, such as economic shock or negative social or cultural change can not become a generational experience (because there is no relation to age) whereas a change experienced as positive can become a generational experience. Unfortunately, this result is not conclusive, as no such positive cultural changes were mentioned by our respondents. In fact, generation-related changes were highly individual in nature, much more so than the negative changes. In other words, life’s turning points are not immediately relevant as generational experiences of the Mannheimian type.  
Also, as mentioned above, it is possible that not all age cohorts become generations and that in this sense the negative turning points may also be generational. But considering that these experiences fall on very few points of time and also that the most recent negative point does not seem to have created any generation, this seems to be quite improbable. 
Another conclusion is that it is astonishing how strongly the Mannheimian idea of generations has permeated our thinking, especially as it seems to be impossible to get any kind of direct empirical confirmation for its correctness. In empirical terms, Mannheim assumes that a given experiential position with regard to important historical events and specific age give rise to a generation (see Purhonen, forthcoming; Virtanen, 1999). This one could call an experience-generation. Most of the culturally and socially constructed generations (such as the generation of 60's) are certainly Mannheimian, but the problem is that they are highly specific and tend to ‘produce’ themselves. A discourse about ‘baby boomers’ helps create a common generational experience and so more and more baby boomers will begin ‘sharing’ common experiences.
An argument against the Mannheimian generations is evident from this paper: when asked, people do not spontaneously describe as important experiences  anything that could be even remotely called Mannheimian. On the contrary, the important experiences are highly private and personal events or turning points in one’s life. Another  important point is that  they must be positive to qualify as generational events. So it might be claimed that instead of experience-generations, we actually have event-generations, i.e. generations constituted around similar events at similar points of life.
But of course all this is mere speculation: solid empirical research of the kind only conducted by my friend Martin Kohli in his future books (but see Krauth et al. 2001) will hopefully solve the enigma.

References
Attias-Donfut, Claudine (1988): Sociologie des generations: l’empreinte du temps. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
J. Z. Giele & G. H. Elder Jr. (Eds.) (1998): Methods of life course research: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.
Eyerman, Ron & Turner, Bryan S.(1998): Outline of a theory of generations. European Journal of Social Theory 1, 91-106
Featherstone, Mike (1994): Re-Charting the Life Course. Gerontologia 2, 69-74.
Giddens, Anthony (1991): Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press
Inglehart, Ronald & Baker, Wayne E. (2000) Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values, American Sociological Review 65(1), 19-51.
Kohli, Martin (1998): Lebenslauf. In: Schäfers, B. (Hg.): Grundbegriffe der Soziologie. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 200-203.
Kohli, Martin & Marc Szydlik (1999): Generationenkonzepte und ihre Verbindungen. In: Schwengel, Hermann (Hg.): Grenzenlose Gesellschaft. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, Band II/2,
Krauth, Wolfg-Hagan, Scheikle, Waltraud,  Kohli, Martin (eds) (2001):  Paradigms of Social Change : Modernizaton, Development, Transformation, Evolution. London: Palgrave
Hoikkala, Tommi, Purhonen, Semi and Roos JP (forthcoming): The Baby boomers. Life’s Turning Points and Generational Consciousness. In Turner Bryan S. &  Edmunds June (eds): Narrative, Generational Consciousness and Politics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Purhonen Semi (forthcoming): Sukupolven kolme ulottuvuutta. Sosiologia 38.
Roos J. P. (1987): Suomalainen elämä. Helsinki: SKS.
Virtanen Matti (1999): Sukupolven tasot fraktiot ja elämänkaari Sosiologia 36, 81-94.

Notes