Back to basics: Is there a significant generational dimension and where does it ‘cut’?

Despite an apparent consistency across the academic and practitioner literatures, there are concerns over the validity of evidence on which the concept of generations is based. Existing studies are problematic because of their cross sectional research design and there is insufficient justification for the use of existing generational categories as they originate from the practitioner literatures based on anecdotal evidence.This chapter sets out the first stages of a research project that begins the process of addressing these weaknesses in existing research by using historical datasets (repeated cross-sections and panel surveys) to distinguish between age differences, cohort (generational) effects and period effects. The question is, if generational differences exist, what are the generations