Data and Method

  • Description of Methods (Initial)
    • I will develop a survey about attitudes towards work and workplace to disseminate through snowball sampling of 21-30-year olds. I will supplement this data with data collected from in depth qualitative interviews with 59 Bowdoin seniors (conducted by Bowdoin juniors and seniors) as part of Professor Nelson’s Diversity in Higher Education seminar last fall. I also will engage in a content analysis of popular media sources to contextualize how these attitudes are being coded by older generations as entitled. I will rely heavily on prior research for economic, political, social and historical context.
  • Description of Methods (Final)
    • Engage in in-depth interviews with soon-to-be or recent college graduates, over the phone and in person.  I will do sequential interviewing: rather than maintain a standard interview protocol, I will ask standard questions and follow up with questions based on preceding interviews.
      • I’ll use convenience sampling to select respondents for the study.
      • I want to understand how folks think about work. What values do they identify as having, where does it come form?
  • Description of Data
    • Initial Plan of collecting data.
      • My primary data will result from a survey about Millennial attitudes toward work and workplace, more specifically, boundary-setting in the workplace. I will disseminate the survey through Facebook and email using snowball sampling beginning with Bowdoin Seniors and other Millennials in my social media network. The sample is therefor likely to primarily represent millennials from the northeast and Mid-Atlantic with significant educational capital.
      • Other data will come from a content analysis of news articles written about Millennial entitlement, contextualized with historical, economic and political research.
    • Final Data
      • My data will come from my interviews and;
      • A content analysis of news articles written about Millennial entitlement, contextualized with historical, economic and political research.
    • Date, Changes, Reasons
      • Between weeks one and two, I decided to move from surveys to in-depth interviews
        • Reasons (partially repeated from above): I want to understand how folks think about work. What values do they identify as having, where does it come form? This is best understood through conversation, not survey.
    • INITIAL Additional Research Notes / Questions
      • Entitled Behaviors
        • self-care, Internet/ lack of phone; expecting parents to pay for their shit; lack of appreciation of what parents have done; workplace expectations; whiney, thoughtless, selfish, not caring about history; old people resenting young people having freedom?
      • Questions: How do Millennials resist and defy the myth of entitlement and how the tendencies that get labeled entitlement are radical responses to an increasingly materialistic and competitive society.
        • What categories of behaviors/ trends are labeled entitlement?
          1. Who is labeling them?
          2. When do these labels get applied?
        • To what degrees do these cultures exits?
          1. self-care/ mindfulness, fitness
          2. experience oriented-oriented and judgmental of materialism seeks meaning and boundaries in work-life
        • Who engages in these cultures?
          1. Geographically
          2. Racially
          3. Socioeconomically
        • What historical, political, socioeconomic etc. factors contribute to the rise of these things?
      •  Hypothesis:
        1. Trends/ cultures will have geographical, racial and socioeconomic specificity.
        2. Millennials who grew up in high-socioeconomic environments witnessed a ceiling in which money did not guarantee happiness
        3. In a culture with increasing conversation about inequality and judgement of entitlement and materialism, valuing and sharing images of experiences instead of materials is a way of abdicating responsibility for social injustice
        4. Millennial entitlement as a radical response to capitalism as well as a defensive response to being implicated in injustice and inequality

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