Gen z 2018 Survey Results

The Research commissioned the 10-question survey below from The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Many of the questions had multiple prompts so the effective insight is greater than one might initially expect. The survey was conducted between September and November of 2018 via the probability-based AmeriSpeak Teen and targeted U.S. 13-17 year olds; the total number of responses was 920. The survey is nationally representative across all major demographic characteristics.

Founded in 1941 NORC is one of the premier opinion research centers in the world and has done pioneering work in improving survey quality. In recent years AmeriSpeak Teen has been used by the Pew Research Center and the Associated Press among other prestigious institutions. Without deep diving into survey methodology, it is easy to find many surveys that report sample sizes much greater than 920 for a similar teen age group. However, many of these surveys are not probability based and often their recruitment process is inferior to NORC’s.

The 10 questions used in the AmeriSpeak Teen survey were chosen by us and refined via two one-hour calls with NORC methodologists. In addition, the questions were further refined by review from a 15-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl.

Topline survey results were produced by NORC using SPSS and verified by us using R. Results went through a third round of “blind” verification by Nick C. Huntington-Klein, Assistant Professor of Economics at CSU-Fullerton (here “blind” means that Nick verified the results without first seeing the NORC results).

We am currently working on an annotated version of the results below, which combine the findings with other research and Gen Z surveys.