Question

1. Give examples of normative history graded influences for four generations of a young college student's family:

• Great grandparents who endured the "great depression."
• Grandparents who served during the Vietnam war.
• Parents who served during Desert Storm.
• Young adult who now serves in Afghanistan.

Consider chronological age, biological age, psychological age, and social age. When you are 70 years of age, in what order would you want these characteristics arranged, beginning with strength and progressing to weakness? Why did you select this arrangement?Compare the context of development on pages 6 and 7 with cohort effects on page 33. To which context does cohort best relate? Why?

Answer 1

a Answer 1.

Normative history graded influences are events experienced by a particular members of a society or culture at a certain period of time. The term normative indicates that the majority of a culture experiences the events — as opposed to a small group of people.

Major events like epidemics, famine or war have different effects on different age groups in a society. What this means that different generations of individuals within a single family unit may have different experiences at the same life stage due to generational differences in a culture. For example, within the given family of a college student, his/ her Great grandparents experienced economic instability and unemployment as a major normative history graded influence as they belong to the generation of Americans who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Then, the second generation, that of grandparents within this family underwent the political and socially revolutionary time of the Vietnam War. As young adults during the Vietnam War, the grandparents belonged to the Baby Boomer generation and may have likely experienced the process of identity formation in terms of a highly politically defined ideological standpoint.

Then the third generation , that of the college student’s parents who belong to the generation of Millenials, experienced the Gulf war as the Normative history graded influence which likely shaped their emotional and social development as well a strong sense of identity linked to their sense of national responsibility and duties as adult service people.

Finally, for the same generation family member,he may be seen to experience young adulthood as different from the generation of his grandparents. While the grandparents a spart of the Baby Boomer generation saw an increasing surge of anti state movements and assertion of freedom of press, the present generation family member’s service in the recent Afghanistan crisis means that as a normative history graded influence, the participantion in the Afghanistan war contributed towards a completely different experience of young adulthood which was perhaps marked by a greater sense of patriotism and support of the government policies unlike the older generation of his Baby Boomer grandparents.