Millennials are work-obsessed yet broke. Gen Z is entitled and self-centered.
Or at least these are the characterizations being assigned to the young adult generations according to recent data reports tracking everything from their spending habits to the way they spend their free time. And Pew Research, one of the most respected authorities of survey insights and polling analytics, is sick of it.
“Our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens,” Pew’s social trends director Kim Parker shared in a recent blog post. “We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.”
For example, a Gallup report on the quiet quitting trend was positioned as uniquely millennial, implying they were inherently more disloyal as compared to other generations. Gen X, however, job-hopped at the same rate, Pew found.
“In our publications, we’ve pointed out that these rules aren’t hard and fast and they’re kind of there to put together these groups that we think would share certain characteristics or experiences but they’re not scientifically based at all,” Parker told Fortune in a recent interview. “People turned to us for these definitions, which frankly, made us a little uncomfortable because we didn’t really want to be in the business of defining generations,” Parker said.
“Generational research has become a crowded arena,” Pew stated in a recent report. “The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology.”