An Inter-Cohort Comparison of Changes in Racial Attitudes

Abstract

This article tests two common but different assumptions about aging: that aging is accompanied by increasingly conservative sociopolitical attitudes and that aging results in attitudinal rigidity. Cohort changes in attitudes about race relations are examined for six replicated items from a total of 18 national surveys spanning the period 1959-1985. Total sample, cohort-specific, and cohort-difference trend models are tested through a cross-sequential design and survey metric analysis. The results show (a) increasing liberalism in race relations attitudes when the cohorts are combined, (b) increasingly liberal attitudes concerning most racial issues for each of the four cohorts examined in the analysis, and (c) no tendency for the increase in liberal attitudes of the oldest cohort to be at a slower rate than that of the younger cohorts. The absence of support for the age-conservatism and age-rigidification hypotheses is discussed in terms of the types of attitudes considered and broader trends in race relations.

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