For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.
This morning NPR aired a segment on media stories about the “boomerang generation,” college-educated children who return to live with their parents after graduation. A widely-repeated figure is that currently 85% of recent college grads are moving back in with their parents, taken as a sign of the ongoing, and potentially long-term, consequences of the economic crisis.
Except for the part where it’s not true.
You may have heard this figure. CNN Money seems to be the first to cite it, in 2010; Time and the New York Post, among others, repeated the number:
It continued to spread, most recently ending up in a political ad from American Crossroads that attacks President Obama.
But PolitiFact recently looked into the claim and declared it false. It supposedly came from a survey conducted by a marketing and research firm from Philadelphia. Yet as they dug further into the story, PolitiFact found many things that might make you suspicious. For instance, some people listed as employees claimed never to have worked for them, while others seem to be fictional, their photos taken from stock photo archives. One employee they did find turned out to be the company president’s dad. When they found the president, David Morrison, he said the survey was conducted “many years ago” but refused to release any information about the methodology, saying he had a non-disclosure agreement with the (unnamed) client.
But as the story of this shocking trend was reproduced, it appears reporters did not try to access the original survey to fact-check it, or surely they would have discovered at least some of these discrepancies, or the lack of any available data to back up the claim.
In contrast to the 85% figure, a Pew Center report (based on a sample of 2,048) found that for young adults aged 18-34, 39% were either currently living with their parents or had temporarily moved in with them at some point because of the economic downturn:
And importantly, of those currently living with their parents, the vast majority of 18-24 year-olds said the economy wasn’t the reason they were doing so. The study found no significant differences by education for those under 30 (42% of graduates were living at home, compared to 49% of those who never attended college), but for those 30-34, only 10% of college graduates were living at home (compared to 22% of non-college graduates).
But once the more shocking 85% figure had been cited by a mainstream news source, it was quickly reproduced in many other outlets with little fact-checking. As PolitiFact sums up,
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.…once a claim enters the mainstream media, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. “The dynamic of trust is built with each link,” Wemple said. “It barely occurs to anybody that all those links may be built on a straw foundation.”
Comments 20
Tusconian — May 15, 2012
People want to believe "disturbing" things about "that generation" "that" one being the one that includes teens and young adults). This doesn't strike me as any different than my mom not letting me buy rubber bracelets at 14 "because that means you are signaling to people you are going to do sex acts" and my grandmother insisting that every college party was called "beer bashing" (wut) and involved people intentionally drinking so much they died, because these were things they saw on the news. Then following it up with "when I was your age, we didn't...." The story now for me (a recent college grad) is that "YOUR generation all sits around doing nothing and complaining about jobs you didn't apply to until you're 35. In MY DAY we moved out the day we turned 18, got a job, and got married, wharrrgleblargggle." It doesn't matter that I know few college grads who lived with their parents for more than a few months, and our parents, if anything, are encouraging it. It doesn't matter that I'm living in my own home and so are most of the people I know. And it CERTAINLY doesn't matter WHY those college grads are living with their parents temporarily. No one speculates about cultural factors (a friend of mine from Italy thought it was strange I was staying out on my own at 21). No one considers that jobs are harder to find and homes/apartments are generally too expensive for someone who can't find a job. No one considers that if it's temporary, that usually means "this is where I am staying while I look for a job/my own home so I will not be homeless for an undefined amount of time." People just jump to bad statistics and loaded phrasing to covertly say "omg this generation sucks at being adults! Clutch your pearls and start in on stories about the good ol days!"
DIGFOTO — May 15, 2012
Sadly, I'm not surprised that media outlets would toss around bad data for this long. What I find more disconcerting is the implied assumption that all "young people" who live at home are lazy, dependent, immature grafters or gamers living in their parents' basement. In fact, it's only really in North American and Western Europe that unmarried 22-year-olds are expected to get their own place right away. In many countries in Southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it's considered normal for young adults to live at home until they get married... and in many developing nations high unemployment, housing scarcity, and/or cultural mores make it uncommon/impractical for young unmarried people to live alone or with roommates.
Yrro Simyarin — May 15, 2012
http://xkcd.com/978/
It's even more amazing how many things enter into "common knowledge" through this route.
Ann — May 15, 2012
Who would admit they were doing it for economic reasons? It's still too many.
Gina — May 15, 2012
Great example!! On both the topic of media awareness and this kind of Millennial story reporting, I have to suggest Jessica Mae Stover's work, particularly the amazing Millennial Proposal http://www.amazon.com/A-MILLENNIAL-PROPOSAL-ebook/dp/B007T4PZG4 and everything to do with Artemis Eternal.
Why things that are untrue get repeated | Joshua Curtis Kidd — May 15, 2012
[...] second article is by Gwen Sharp on Sociological Images and looks at the myth that 85% of recent college grads are moving back in with their parents. In her article, Sharp traces the myth back to its source, in this case CNNMoney, and notes that [...]
Demetrea Farris — May 16, 2012
As of 2000, the number of young adults living at home was about 26% so it may well be at about 39% today, 12 years later. As someone who has been studying this phenomenon since 2007, the figure of 85% is just outrageous. What's really interesting about the Pew report is that my individual research findings (both qualitative and quantitative) do show that the number one reason adult children move back home IS actually because of economics; other non-academic studies have shown this as well, even before our serious economic downturn. College loan debt, high costs of housing, low entries for entry level jobs- these are the main reasons adults move back home. Despite the fact that the Pew's respondents report that they didn't move home for economic reasons, as Sociologists we need to make sure to "read between the lines" of what our respondents are telling us, and what the reality is of the situation in which they are living. What we need to focus on (and I do) are the situations not where adult children move back home to care for aging parents, but for the sole benefit of themselves- which is exactly the situation for these boomerangers.
jeffdowd — May 17, 2012
Thanks for the useful corrective. I will use this in my stats class. But, I must take issue with the notion that the majority currently living with their parents isn't about the economy. I believe the study is accurate and that young people did say that and probably genuinely believe it as well.
But, I suspect it is not as true as they would like it to be. It is likely that many young people falsely believe that if they wanted to they could "make it on their own" but to save some money they are choosing to stay at home. Americans like to believe that everything that happens to them is their choice. They also likely view having to stay at home as a sign of personal failure. I think the study may be measuring these two tendencies rather than any objective economic reality.
Lacy Chenault — December 30, 2012
In America there is so much pressure to leave the home when you're 18, or else you're a failure. I know this is not so in other countries. I know a few hard working respectable Cambodian men who still live with their parents (and siblings) I think it's sad it's a shameful thing here in America..
Obama — April 25, 2020
It continued to spread, most recently ending up in a political ad from American Crossroads that attacks President Obama >> shell shockers.
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