In this article, “Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective” by John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Theodore Hershberg, the authors speak about the difference between peoples’ transitions into adulthood; comparing the males and females from 1880 to the males and females in 1970. They explain that there are multiple aspects of life that must be considered to see why and if there are changes from 1880 to 1970. The different stages that they closely speculate are the times when youths exit school, when they enter the workforce, become independent from their household origin, and when they get married. They compared the positive and negative relationships between all these phases within their respective years and then compare those years against each other. All this information is looked at in the article to see if there is a change in the patterns of adulthood transitions.

The topic of this article was growing up, the authors more specifically wanted to know if in fact youth has become “extended, normless, and lacking bounds” as has been suggested. To this they found that it is quite the opposite. To answer this question the authors required quantitative data which they used to compare the numbers of people in 1880 and 1970 in each of the transitional phases. They gathered these numbers with the use of pubic records. The method of data analysis would have been interval/ratio data, their data was numeric and their question required them to compare the difference in the numbers of people in each transitional phase and how that affected the numbers in each upcoming phase.

At first I thought this research was very complex and entangled but when the authors explained each step and how everything was  interconnected it made perfect sense and was extremely interesting. What I found to be most interesting was the increase in independence that transitioning youths have today compared to the youths in the nineteenth century.

Modell, John, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr, and Theodore Hershberg. “Social change and transitions to adulthood in historical perspective.” Journal of family history 1.1 (1976): 7-32.