A Pause for Cause

Hi everyone!

As noted on my website (reginaldbibby.com), I have been taking a slight break and rethinking blogging.

Beginning in January, I will return - offering very short "takes" on any number of topics - and inviting dialogue with readers.

Until then, still enjoying the breather. I don't know about you, but life has never been more full, even though it also has never been much more enjoyable.

Very best to you! Perhaps will "see" you in 2010.

-Reg

Why the Shock - and Anger - Over Some Good News About Teens?

My new teen book, The Emerging Millennials, won’t be out for about two-to-three more weeks. But already, media attention – notably that of Maclean’s (April 13th cover story) and the National Post (April 7th) – indicating that the overall findings about teenagers are positive is being met with predictable anger by some people. That’s not surprising. What’s surprising is that anyone should be surprised – as this short excerpt from the book explains.

Are We Making Progress?

In Canada, we continue to make young people a very high priority. Precisely because we want “our kids” and “our grandkids” to turn out well, we direct significant resources toward their well-being. Part of the Boomer legacy has been the creation of government departments that have specialized in enhancing the well-being of youth. Along with multi-faceted school programs, such government initiatives address a wide range of themes, including education, employment, drug abuse, personal development, recreation, family life, and personal counselling.
Further, the explosion of information has been accompanied by the emergence of a seemingly endless number of information industries, many of which specialize in youth. Government departments and schools routinely draw on people who provide expertise in any number of areas, as illustrated by the roster of a major teachers’ convention, or a one-day training event for people involved with youth.
Consequently, it’s ironic that we continue to engage in considerable hand-wringing about young people today. Like so many adults before us, we frequently repeat the old adage about teenagers facing more challenges than ever before. In addition, we express concern that they are not going to turn out as well as the emerging generations that preceded them.
Why do we continue to say such strange things? If we are investing those millions – no, billions – of dollars in young people and providing them with the unprecedented body of resources that we have at this point in history, why on earth would we expect that they should turn out worse than previous generations of teenagers?
Such morbid negativism amounts to a damning indictment of the collective resources being directed at youth, including the hundreds of thousands of women and men employed in the youth sector who are giving their lives to elevating life for young people.
For example, I’ve sometimes been appalled at the negative reaction of people involved in the drug field when I bring some good news about drug use being down – or the wincing of teachers when I suggest students are feeling more positive about school than they did in the past. I am treated like the bearer of bad news. Heavens, if people have been doing their jobs well, those are precisely the findings we would expect to uncover.

The more appropriate response? Give some credit, and take some credit!

Source: Reginald W. Bibby. The Emerging Millennials: How Canada’s Newest Generation is Responding to Change and Choice. Lethbridge: Project Canada Books, 2009:67-68. Available in bookstores and via www.projectcanadabooks.com.

Boomer Barbie Turns 50…A Memo to Women Turning 50 in 2009

I get some requests from the media from time to time that at first sound strange – like when Misty Harris, the Consumer and Social Trends National Reporter for Canwest News Service, contacted me last week and reminded me (!) that even Barbie (yes, as in Barbie Doll) is not exempt from aging. The iconic, best-selling, much-embraced and much-maligned doll is turning 50 this year.

Misty asked me if I could dig into my Boomer material and provide her with ““a small picture of what Barbie’s life would look like in real life if she were a flesh and blood woman turning 50 in Canada.” It was an interesting exercise, primarily because it resulted in a profile not only of Barbie, but also of a large number of Canadian women who are turning 50 in 2009.

Well, since Canada Barbie was born in 1959, she found herself near the end of the Baby Boomer cohort (1946-65).

As such, by the time she reached her famous teen years in the early 1970s, she – like her American counterpart – was enjoying the music of the likes of Bread, Neil Diamond, Rod Stewart, and Simon and Garfunkel.

Influenced by the freedom movements that moved like a tidal wave through her entire cohort, Barbie had the freedom to live out life in ways that were virtually unknown to her mother and grandmother. She threw aside many of their constraints and inhibitions in being able to speak out and express what she thought about life, experiment as she saw fit with pot and sex, go to university, pursue the career she wanted, and – in the face of a variety of options - marry and have children. That latter decision resulted in her engaging in a tough juggling act in the course of trying for the twin wins of happiness and fulfilment in the twin settings of the office and home. She also was determined to find time to look after herself – time to stay fit, time to relax, and, of course, time to stay beautiful. After all, beautiful is what most people had grown accustomed to expecting of her.

In many ways, Canada Barbie wanted it all. And she had it all.

Now, at 50, life is quite different. Not everything has turned out as planned. The beauty thing has become increasingly difficult to sustain. All the effort, all the working out, and all the dieting haven’t been able to neutralize the harsh reality that 50 isn’t 15 – or 25 – or 35. Like most of her friends, she gave up smoking a few years back, but still likes a drink now and then.

It would have been great if both her marriage and her career had succeeded. Her career, she discovered, was at times seemingly hurt by her good looks. She often wasn’t taken seriously or taken too seriously – not only by men but also by women. She felt she gradually got beyond that. But the time and energy she found herself giving her career made things tough on the home front. Her first marriage added one more case to the Boomer file marked “the generation with the highest divorce rate in Canadian history.” She has remarried, is pretty happy, and intends to stay with her second partner for the rest of her life. Then again, who knows?

The biggest problem she has faced is the sheer lack of time – although money also has sometimes been more than a shade elusive. It hasn’t been easy to give her career all that it needs, while being able to be the kind of wife that her husbands have expected, not to mention the kind of mother that her daughter and son have seemed to want and need. On balance she thinks she has done a pretty good job of combining both roles. When we asked her kids, they were not so convinced. When we asked her husbands, one was anything but convinced. Canada Barbie finds it all a bit demoralizing.

From time to time, she has reflected with her grandmother and mother about what they wanted out of life and how things turned out. What’s surprising and intriguing to her is that they are more inclined than she is to say that they feel pretty fulfilled with life as a whole. They tend to be more positive than she is when they reflect on their marriages, the enjoyment they get from their kids, how far they went in school, and even their financial situations. Go figure.

“But hey,” Canada Barbie reminds herself, “I’m still only 50. There’s still time to turn a few things around. My ‘doll days’ may be behind me. But I still have some good years to find better balance in my life. By the time I hit 70. I’m going to have the last laugh!”

The Rise and Fall of Survey Research in Schools

Some people think that survey research is a breeze. All a person has to do is draw up a questionnaire, pop it in the mail, reach into one’s mailbox, and analyze the darn thing. Anyone can do it.

It’s not at all like painstaking historical research that requires one to spend countless hours pouring over documents. It’s also far less demanding than qualitative research, where a select number of people are interviewed face-to-face, and pages and pages of transcriptions are examined. Years ago, a professor of mine summed up common sentiment then that remains widespread today: “Maybe you could get at the question by doing a quick and dirty survey.”

Wow! I’ve got breaking news for such people. Survey research has become incredibly difficult to carry out. It takes a tremendous amount of time and money, energy, and patience.

Anyone who has perused my blog over the past while has noted that I have been pretty much invisible since arriving back in Canada from Japan at the beginning of March. My family and friends, colleagues and contacts, have also been aware of my relative scarcity, physically and mentally. I further am keeping a close eye on my research budget, am tired, and struggling to suppress my impatience.

The reason is pretty simple. I’ve been almost totally preoccupied with the carrying out of my latest national youth survey - Project Teen Canada 2008. As you may be aware, this if the fourth national youth survey in the Project Teen Canada series; earlier surveys were completed in 1984, 1992, and 2000. We have pursued the participation of one class in approximately 150 high school and CEGEP-level classes across the country.

In 1984, things seemed fairly uncomplicated. My colleague, Don Posterski, and I put together the questionnaire. My student assistants and I drew up a sample of about 200 schools across the country and mailed out the survey packets. Few school boards had to be cleared; parental and guardian permissions were not required. Schools participated fairly readily and fairly quickly.

Over the past three decades, the survey research terrain has been changing significantly. I have had to submit some forty school board applications in order just to have the doors opened so that I can proceed to the second step of approaching principals to pursue school participation. The board applications average about 15 pages each. Parental/guardian consent forms are mandatory. Although board permissions are widely demanded, they typically mean only that principals can be approached, with the caveat that their involvement is at their own discretion. As one board spokesperson wrote to me, “Congratulations! Your application has been approved. Of course, participation will be up to the principals involved.” At both the board and individual school levels, a consistent question that understandably is raised is, “How will the survey benefit us?”

We have known remarkable board cooperation. Yet, no one bats a thousand. We can clear a highly structured board committee in a major city, only to find that the door is slammed based on the whims of a single individual who is the keeper of the access keys in another setting - even though we sometimes only want one class in one school in an entire system to participate in the survey.

We also can find it difficult to make contact at the individual school level. Despite my effort to write personal cover letters and convey the importance of the survey by sending materials to principals by courier, more than 50 of our 200 principals and office staff either mislaid or discarded our packets - requiring us to send replacements. These packets are not unobtrusive arrivals. Besides being delivered by courier, they contain 30 to 35 questionnaires, parent/guardian consent letters, instructions, and a pre-paid return envelope. With courier costs, they are worth about $50 each, not including my time.

Because of the delicate nature of pursuing board approvals and approaching school principals, much of the project work cannot be assigned to assistants, students or otherwise. I have given an average of about 12 hours a day to the administrative work since the end of November, with a few days and parts of days off along the way.

In the midst of having to adjust to rising demands and rising expectations, along with the perception on the part of almost everyone that life is extremely busy, we have learned that a key component of securing support and participation at the individual school level is the proverbial personal touch. The principals of schools we have not heard from have been called by Project Teen Canada 2008’s project’s associate director, James Penner. James has been highly effective in persuading principals to participate. He has been assisted in Quebec by bilingual assistants. As a result, we have been able to salvage a solid majority of those schools where questionnaire packets never seem to have been seen.

And guess what? For all the strain and pain, the good news is that we are experiencing comparable success to what we have known in the past. In fact, we are projecting the highest level of participation we have ever known - close to 200 schools and around 4,000 teenagers, 15-to-19. I think the data we will end up having will be pure gold and a treasure for future generations of researchers!

Which all goes to show that the willingness of individual principals to have their schools participate in a nation-wide survey remains high. But the litigiousness of boards, the subjectivity of gate-keeping, the administrative organization of school offices, and the time-pressures of administrators, teachers, and students alike have combined to make participation in Project Teen Canada 2008 more difficult to attain than anything we experienced in the past.

Survey research continues to be one important means of finding out how the world works, including learning what is going on the minds and lives of young people. However, no one should be surprised if large-scale surveys that rely on the indispensable support of Canada’s schools become increasingly rare to the point that they are virtually extinct. I would go so far as to say this may one of the last non-governmental national surveys that is carried out through the nation's schools.

Little wonder that survey researchers are looking fondly at "quick and dirty" on-line alternatives.

Postscript
Please don't confuse my realism with morosity. I still love life and love doing research. But going the school route to locate one's sample is simply becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish on a national scale.

Incidentally, I plan to dedicate my new book, The Emerging Millennials, that makes sense of all this new data I have been collecting, to the thousands of students and administrators - including boards and principals and teachers - who have made the surveys possible.

Whatever Happened to Mosaic Madness?

I have had the privilege of spending the last ten days or so in Japan. I am writing this from Tokyo just before returning to Canada later today.

The trip was at the invitation of the Japanese Association for Canadian Studies. I was invited to give three lectures at three different universities here – Reitaku University and Meiji University in Tokyo, and Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo. The latter is a school with which the University of Lethbridge has had an exchange student partnership since the mid-1980s.

What has made the trip particularly timely and intriguing for me is that my hosts were interested in having me reflect on Mosaic Madness – a book I had written in 1990 at the height of Canada’s obsession with unity and constitutional issues. The book had been translated into Japanese a few years later by Professor Norio Ota of York University who felt its analysis and prognoses were potentially of considerable relevance to Japan. As readers undoubtedly know, Japan has tended to be a highly homogenous country that has not been particularly receptive to immigration. Today with its population shrinking, some observers feel that immigration may be an increasing necessity, raising the question as to how the host population and newcomers can live out life together.

My presentations involved my revisiting the “mosaic madness” of the 1990 period. I was intrigued to realize that much of the madness that characterized Canada then and was anticipated to continue and perhaps become even worse has largely dissipated. In 2008 we find Canada characterized by a remarkable calm. My data and that of others such as Michael Adams document what most of know experientially – that Canada today seems quite sane, complete with highly positive interpersonal life, an extremely positive economic environment, and highly content individuals. In the title of my first presentation, one might well ask, “Whatever Happened to Mosaic Madness?”

I suggested to my audiences here that official multiculturalism largely failed to instill in Canadians the idea that multiculturalism, through promoting interaction and mutual reflections on our diverse cultures, had the potential to produce “a richer life for us all,” as Pierre Trudeau envisioned in unveiling the multicultural policy in 1971. Nonetheless, as I have written in The Boomer Factor, “Immigrant parents and ‘host’ parents may not have spoken to each other and shared cultures to the extent that Trudeau envisioned back in 1971. But the good news is that many of their children talked – in playgrounds, in schools, in the workplace, in print, in social situations, as friends, lovers, and marriage partners. Official multiculturalism may have failed, but unofficial multiculturalism has triumphed [33].

Was the thesis of Mosaic Madness wrong? Did we not have to find a better balance between excessive individualism and excessive relativism? Of course we had to find those kinds of critical balances. But it seems that, despite our official efforts and our consternation, the balances are being found and that “richer life for us all” is increasingly being experienced. Why? Primarily because Canadians – led by children, no less – have discovered one another, and collectively are being enriched by the tapping of their diversity.

Religion in Canada is No Humpty Dumpty

Churches Aren't Tumbling Down

"The chimes of time ring out the news, another year is through." And the year-closing Christmas season would not be complete without the Canadian media's number one perpetrator of the secularization myth, religion writer Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail, offering his annual proclamation of religion's demise. This year, the would-be news flash reads, "Churches come tumbling down" (December 22, 2007).

Funny thing. Valpy never called me. He used to call me routinely. Come to think of it, he hasn't called me much ever since our enjoyable session over coffee at the paper in the fall of 2004, when we energetically and enjoyable debated the direction religion in Canada seemed to be going. Our affable conclusion was that I didn't believe his take on secularization and he didn't believe my data.

These days, as in his current "tumbling down" article, Michael ignores me and draws on others whose views are more akin to his. I'm crushed.

Actually, I'm both envious and a shade frustrated. Michael is able to disseminate his views via the front page of a Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail, while I am left trying to get my side of the story out via this obscure blog. Who said life is fair.

We now have lots of data, as summarized in my book, The Boomer Factor (2006), that make it clear that organized religion in Canada isn't tumbling down. Far from it. Sure, anyone can point to the numerical problems of Mainline Protestantism, as Michael once again does to make his case. The identification and attendance numbers are down for the United Church, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. But by now we know that the reason is tied primarily to demographics, not disenchantment. Those groups used to benefit from immigration and relatively high birth rates; they no longer do.

Conversely, Roman Catholics outside Quebec continue to enjoy a robust immigration pipeline, and their numbers keep going up. In Quebec, most of the province continues to see itself as Catholic and, even though the majority of people attend services only occasionally, few are about to defect. The trick for the Catholic Church is to figure out how to engage Quebeckers; at this point it seems that the Church lacks both the motivation and the ability, although that could change. Evangelical Protestants are solid, as are other major world religions – the former largely because of vitality plus modest external outreach, the latter largely because of immigration plus a measure of vitality. All this doesn't add up to a lot of tumbling.

Contrary to Valpy's data-less claim that younger women rejected the church in the post-1960s, we have a fair amount of very good data that point to younger women becoming less involved for fairly pragmatic reasons. As growing numbers became employed outside the home, they had less time for a variety of activities, including churches where, frankly, the costs of involvement frequently outweighed the benefits. Most congregations were slow to adapt to the changing labour force and time crunch realities by making life easier for young mothers and young families. The result? Most young women, rather than being mad at anyone, simply found that church involvement warranted their showing up with their children every once in a while, rather than regularly (a paper summing up all this is found on my website, reginaldbibby.com, under Papers, "The Untold Story of the Role of Women in the Fall and Rise of Religion in Canada.").

But, as I see it, the resolution of the "tumbling or not tumbling" debate lies not only with data but also with some basic theorizing. If it's true that significant numbers of Canadians continue to (1) have needs that only the gods can satisfy, (2) have religious group preferences, and (3) find that those groups respond to their needs, it will be only a matter of time before they become more involved with those groups. Sociologist Rodney Stark's insightful argument about the persistence of religion is applicable to Canada: the demand persists; the onus lies with the suppliers.

The "Humpty Dumpty" argument is out of touch with the Canadian religious reality. There are signs that many Canadians and many churches are stirring. Neither the demand nor the suppliers are disappearing. What remains to be seen is when the connection will be made.

Beyond Celling One's Soul

The news that a woman who was trapped for eight days in her car at the bottom of a ravine in Seattle was found because of the crackling sound of her dying cell phone serves as a poignant reminder of the paradox of cell phone use. In telling the story in the Globe and Mail on September 28th, Rod Mickleburgh wrote that, although the battery on Tanya Rider's cell phone eventually died out, a steady ping from the phone had registered at the nearest communications tower. After obtaining the woman's cell phone records, police managed to identify the tower and guessed she was within an eight-kilometre radius.

I own a cell phone. But, in many ways, I hate cell phones. Yes, I realize that "hate" is a pretty strong word. But I feel strongly about the way that cell phone use is abused (another strong word).

I hate the way that they keep strangers from interacting with each other. I hate the way they steal parents away from focusing on their children. I hate the way they detract from friends focusing on friends in a restaurant or as they walk down a sidewalk. I hate the way they interrupt a moment of relative calm when I am sitting in an airport waiting area or walking in a park. I hate the way they keep people from having to sit and think and reflect on life and their lives. And I hate the way they want to track me down when I simply want to be left alone – to focus on my five-year-old daughter, visit with a friend, relax in the airport or park, and think about life and people.

That's why I seldom use mine, except, pretty much, for emergencies and necessary contact, along with the occasional impromptu photo.

As I have emphasized in The Boomer Factor, "Technology, as always, is not the enemy. But clearly it always needs to serve us rather than the other way around. We have to determine our needs and wants and values, and draw on technology accordingly" (88). I remind readers of sociologist William Ogburn's important observation that cultural norms do not move quickly enough to keep up with technological developments; norms that are we need in order to make optimum use of technological innovations literally "lag" behind.

When it comes to balancing cell phone use with good interpersonal life, we are lagging behind, mightily. That said, "the cell" is obviously a wonderful communication addition, particularly in its expanding multi-functional forms. At its best, it brings us together; at its worst, it keeps us apart.

What we need to do, collectively and individually, is figure out how to use the dang thing!