On the relation between age and the importance attached to historical events

Abstract

The critical years hypothesis is an influential hypothesis in the social sciences. According to this hypothesis, events occurring during adolescence or young adulthood are most important. This hypothesis is significant because if generations do indeed differ from each other because they were socialized in different contexts, the succession of generations has the potential to change societies. In this study, we test the validity of the critical years hypothesis using data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences Immigrant Panel. We first compare the power of the critical years hypothesis to that of alternative patterns, after which we conduct a structural examination of the conditionality of the critical years hypothesis. We test our hypotheses according to both open-ended and closed-ended questions. The results provide only limited evidence for the critical years hypothesis.