Jean M. Twenge's Generation Me

In Jean M. Twenge’s book Generation Me, Twenge poses striking and clear-sighted arguments based on the qualities of Generation Me or the iGeneration. Generation Me consists of the young today: those born in the 1980s and 1990s. Twenge makes sure to approach all topics of life in her book. Although very incisive, parts of the arguments presented included problematic data, assumptions and fallacies. One issue at hand is the accuracy of her data. Twenge had a pattern of using only a few samples out of a wide number of samples that were all available to her. For example, when she made note of the comparisons of the self-esteem of blacks and whites between the 1950s and the 1990s Twenge only used “712 samples of 375,254 people” (Twenge 233). Although she used data from people of different ethnicities, in a mathematical way of thinking, that is only about 10,000 people a year. Her usage of only 712 samples isn’t broad enough to
Twenge chooses to back her arguments by looking for details that make Generation Me such a bad generation, but doesn’t look into what made the generations mentioned before bad. Every generation has their own set of problems. In the case of the Baby Boomers and Generation X, some were stereotypical, racist, and dependent on others. For example, it was normal for a woman to be considered as weak-minded and only good for the house. There was also the Civil Rights Movement, which came about just in the middle of Baby Boomer times. The many boycotts and marches made as people faced brutality from discriminatory citizens and police officers. As well as, the idea that you had to be dependent of others, but in a social way of thinking. It wasn’t okay to not follow the norms of their time and if you did you were outcasted from society. Or even that the suicide rates during those generations were significantly higher in comparison to those of