iGen
iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood is the 2017 book by San Diego State University social psychologist Jean M. Twenge, expanding the argument she had earlier laid out in The Narcissism Epidemic and Generation Me. Drawing primarily on four large, long-running American teen surveys, Monitoring the Future, the American Freshman Survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, and the General Social Survey, Twenge identifies what she sees as a sharp generational break around 2012, the year smartphone ownership crossed fifty percent in the United States. The cohort she names iGen, born between 1995 and 2012, looks, in her data, less likely than millennials to drive, drink, hold a job, date, or have sex in high school, more tolerant on questions of race and sexuality, and significantly more anxious, depressed, and lonely. Twenge writes for general readers.
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What you might want to know about iGen
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
San Diego State psychologist Jean M. Twenge analyzes four large national datasets covering eleven million respondents over decades to argue that the generation born after 1995 is sharply different from millennials.
She is a psychology professor at San Diego State University whose research on generational differences underpins iGen and her later book Generations.
Yes. Some psychologists have pushed back on the strength of the smartphone-mental-health link Twenge draws, while others have built on her work. The debate is ongoing in the field.
iGen was written by Jean M. Twenge, published in 2017 by Atria Books.
iGen is 342 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, iGen takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
iGen is a standalone novel by Jean M. Twenge, not part of a series.
iGen is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
