About
Generation What is an interactive program produced by France Télévisions, Upian, and Yami 2 (together the ‘Producers’), in partnership with the EBU as well as 14 European broadcasters. In essence, it is an evolution of Génération Quoi, a large-scale survey conducted in France in 2013 to draw the portrait of the current generation of 18-34 year olds. This time, 10 countries have joined us for the purpose of making this program a truly European event: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Luxemburg, Holland, Wales (UK), and the Czech Republic.
The program is broken down into three parts:
● A comprehensive online questionnaire, available in participating European countries and designed with the help of sociologists. The purpose of this questionnaire is to probe this generation's ambitions, hopes, and fears.
● A documentary and statistical portrait of Irish youth, consisting of their testimonies and enhanced in real time by the data collected via the questionnaire.
● A documentary and statistical portrait of European youth, consisting of intersecting testimonies from the youth of all participating countries and enhanced in real time by the data collected via the questionnaire, as well as a map infographic for comparing answers by country on a European scale.
Absolutely. First off, because we don't even ask you your name. Information about age, gender, location, and details about your education or professional occupation are only requested for statistical purposes, in order to help us most accurately draw the portrait of an entire generation. This will allow us, for example, to find out the proportion of students living in Cork that need to work to pay for school. We will also be able to determine how many young workers under the age of 23 feel undervalued in their jobs.
The profile data we collect when you answer the preliminary questions are stored independently of any element that could identify you – and, if you wish to register using your email address, it will only be linked to your answers to allow you to find them and pick up where you left off.
Lastly, none of the email addresses or personal data that could identify you that you provide on this site will be communicated to third parties of any kind.
The information or answers that you provide on this site will be anonymised and will communicated to sociologists for the purposes of the project only.
The Producers will circulate anonymised extracts of the survey’s results and/or the sociologists report of the survey’s results to the Broadcaster for the relevant country for the purpose of the project.
In order to draw the portrait of the 18-34 generation, we decided to opt for a three-tiered approach:
- a quantitative approach, based on questionnaire results
- a qualitative approach, based on documentary videos
- a comparative approach, based on the European aspect of the project, including videos and an interactive map
1) Questionnaire results
All of the answers to the 149 survey questions are recorded and viewable in real time. In other words, the number of answers to a given question (and thus the results) can vary if the portrait is viewed at different times. In addition, we clearly specify that the numbers collected by the questionnaire are raw results, they are not statistically weighted to redistribute the respondents and answers in a manner more representative of the populations of participating countries.
Let's look at a concrete example: if the answers to the question "Are you optimistic about your future?" are split between 78% Yes and 22% No, it simply means that out of the 3,122 people who have answered the question so far, 2,435 answered "Yes" and 687 answered "No". These numbers therefore do not take into account the number of people who skipped the question (by clicking on Next Question), nor of the age, sex, location, or socio-professional category of the respondents, as would normally be the case with survey institutes.
It is therefore completely incorrect to state that "78% of Europeans" or "78% of young people are optimistic about their future," but it is fair to say that 78% of the survey respondents are optimistic about their future. Nonetheless, filters are available to refine results according to certain criteria and thus to form an opinion about answer trends.
You can view all of the answers here (France) and here (Europe).
2) Documentary videos
We have divided the survey questions into 21 themes, which range from reactions to the economic crisis to love, through relationships with parents or inequalities.
Each theme includes a video showing the characters from your country answering the same questions as the Internet users, and showing their reactions, questions, doubts, or convictions. In parallel, the videos are enhanced by the numbers collected through the questionnaire. Also, if you registered with your email address, a dynamic playback of your answers is displayed and allows you to compare yourself with the answer totals.
Since some of the survey questions were altered after the videos were shot, it happens on occasion that the characters in the videos don't answer the exact same questions as the Internet users.
In addition to the portrait of your country's youth, in the "Europe" tab, you can view a compilation of all of the European modules, also in the form of 21 video modules on the same themes as the local portrait.
This part of the site allows you not only to compare yourself with your country as a whole, but also with all of the countries that participated in the survey.
You can view all of the videos here for Ireland and here for the European comparison.
3) Defining the 18-34 Generation in a single word
To complete the portrait, we asked the Internet users who participated in the survey to suggest a word to define their generation, in a way other than "Generation Y." "Generation Facebook," "Generation Hard Times," "Generation Endgame" – users were free to suggest anything they wanted, as long as it was 25 characters or less.
You can find all of the suggestions here.
Questions, comments?
Contact us:
RTÉ,
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4,
Ireland.
