RECENT RESEARCH REPORT

Future

Many of the questions we ask are meant to help us learn what American youth are thinking about and planning for their futures. What do NYS youth imagine their family and career lives will be like? From the Wave 2 telephone survey, we found that 47 percent of NYS participants think about and plan for their future very often, another 47 percent do so sometimes or fairly often, and six percent say that they rarely or never think about or plan for the future. Therefore, for most of our participants, the future is on their minds.

Marriage

The chart at right shows that when NYS participants were asked, in the Wave 2 survey, what is the ideal age to get married, a significant majority said that marrying between the ages of 20 and 29 would be ideal.

When asked if they would ever consider living with a girlfriend or boyfriend outside of marriage, 63 percent reported that "yes" they would, and 37 percent said that "no" they would not.

Children

In the Wave 2 survey, when asked how many children they intend to have one day, almost ¾ of the NYS participants said they would like either two or three children. Ten percent reported wanting to have one child, eleven percent would like to have four or five children, and seven percent do not plan to have any children. Only one percent expect to have six or more children.

Professions

Here are the top three types of careers that males and females in the NYS aspire towards:

Male:

1. Art, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations
2. Architecture and engineering occupations
3. Health diagnosing and treating occupations, such as medicine or nursing

Female:

1. Health diagnosing and treating occupations, such as medicine or nursing
2. Education and training occupations, such as elementary or high school teacher
3. Art, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations

Relationships

To understand the lives of American youth, we must strive to understand the relationships that are meaningful to them. In the NYS surveys, we try to include many questions on relationships with family members, romantic partners, and friends. What we have found is that family, and relationships to parents in particular, are important to most participants. In addition to parents, most NYS participants (65 percent) say that they have between one and five adults to turn to for support, while 30 percent report having six or more adults to turn to (at the time of the Wave 2 survey).

Closeness to Mothers

Of those participants who report living with a mother at the time of the Wave 2 survey, most reported feeling very or extremely close to her (73 percent). Another 19 percent said they feel fairly close to their mother, and only nine percent said they feel between somewhat close to and not close at all to their mother.

Closeness to Fathers

For those who report living with a father at the time of the Wave 2 survey, 56 percent reported feeling extremely or very close to him. Another 25 percent said that they feel fairly close, and 19 percent said that they feel between somewhat close to and not close at all to their father. If we compare this table to Table 1, we see that as a group, NYS youth consider themselves somewhat closer to their mothers than to their fathers.

Parents

When we look at the responses from the Wave 2 survey we see that the large majority of NYS parents are married and living together (67 percent). Fourteen percent of NYS parents are divorced and the other 19 percent of our participants have a parent, or parents, living in various other situations, such as living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, widowed, separated, or never married.

Dating

We asked our participants, in the Wave 2 survey, when they started dating and we received a range of responses. However, of those who had started dating, the majority reported first beginning to date between the ages of 14 and 16.

Media

American youth are exposed to all sorts of media on a regular basis. For most, it is a regular part of life. With the questions in the NYS surveys, the researchers hope to better understand the use of and exposure to various types of media.

Movies

In the most recent telephone survey (Wave 2) most NYS participants reported watching ten movies or less per month (65 percent), while another 35 percent said that they view 11 or more movies in an average month.

Television Favorites

Here are the top three television shows reported as most frequently watched by NYS females and males in the 2005 Wave 2 survey.

Religion

What religions or religious groups do youth belong to? How often do young people attend religious services? How important is faith to young people? How often do they pray? These are some of the questions that the NYS attempts to answer.

Religious Affiliation

According to answers from the most recent NYS survey data (Wave 2), many of our participants who are between the ages of 16-20 are either Protestant (40%) or Catholic (21%). This shows that most of our participants identify themselves as Christians. Christianity, in other words, is more numerically prevalent than other religious traditions at the level of teenage religious affiliation. This matches what other studies find in the U.S. adult population. The next largest group is the 16 percent who said they have no specific religious affiliation. The rest affiliate with another religion, like Mormonism (3 percent) or Judaism (1 percent), or with various other religions.

Attendance

To evaluate change over time, we can look at how answers to specific questions differ in Wave 1 and Wave 2 for the same study participants. In the Wave 1 and the Wave 2 surveys, participants were asked how often they attended religious services. The table below illustrates that between Wave 1 and Wave 2 there is a 14 percent increase in the number who report attending religious services never or just a few times a year. Alternately, we see a 13 percent decrease in the number who report attending weekly or more than once a week. This tells us that, overall, as American youth move from early to late adolescence they are attending religious services less often.

Importance of Religion

In addition to where and how often young people attend religious services, we are also interested in how important or not important religious faith is to American youth. When asked how important religious faith is in shaping their daily lives, 45 percent of our participants reported, in the most recent telephone survey (Wave 2), that religious faith is extremely or very important, 30 percent said that it is somewhat important, and 25 percent said that it is not very or not at all important in their daily lives.

Prayer

Another aspect of many young people's religious lives is prayer. As shown in the table below, over half of our participants reported in Wave 2 of the survey that they pray once a week or more.