Monitoring YOUR Future

So there's this major longitudinal study, known well amongst sociologist and other social scientists. It's out of University of Michigan and has been going on for some 30 odd years. They started out picking up whole senior class at randomly selected high schools around the country and then from those classes, randomly selecting a few students to follow for the rest of their lives. Those chosen few would receive a questionnaire every other year through their twenties and then every five years throughout their thirties. During the nineties, they expanded into younger adolescents. Since they collect both point in time data about different people at the same point in their lives as well as data about the same people over the course of their lives, they have a wealth of information that they are pretty generous about sharing with other researchers.

I can always identify data from Monitoring Your Future because of the oddly specific questions they ask. Sure, there are a ton of drug and alcohol abuse questions, but they ask these very specifically worded questioned about whether individuals believe the country will get better or worse; whether the world will get better or worse; and whether their own lives will get better or worse.

Why do I know so much? Well, I'm one of those lucky few that represent 20,000 - 40,000 other people in my age group across the country. The poor souls at UMichigan have been following me around for 18 years now. This year is the first year they almost lost me.

As a fellow researcher, and someone who understands the difficulties of mail surveys and the minefields of "lost to follow up" I have been very faithful to those folks. I'm horribly late this year, just having finished and mailed in my survey today.

I got stuck on a question. "I am happy just to be alive: disagree; slightly disagree; neither; slightly agree; agree."

There are some days, weeks, months, years, even, that it is best not to ponder such things. It makes you consider all the times that you were so close to death and consider if anything good or life affirming has occurred since then. It's the maybe-I-just-should-have-done-it syndrome.

I am no naive schmuck that happily bounces around believing that every day is a gift or some shit like that. I know first hand that there are worse things than death. And as far as I'm concerned the Life is Great! theory has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I know I'm not alone on this one either. There are any number of places on earth (many mentioned on the front page of the NYT) that I could mention whose citizens would think you were nuts if you tried to sell them on the every day of life is a gift BS. They'd call you an Ugly American and they probably wouldn't be wrong. (And still we wonder why missionaries get slaughtered in third world countries... Maybe it's their message??)

So how did I answer the question? Honestly. disagree