Social generation concept can be analytically useful for helping scholars explain cohort effects and social change if the concept is conceptualized and operationalized in ways that are consistent with Mannheim’s notion of “generation as an actuality.” First, social generational analysis must not use simple cohort measures, juxtaposed with other competing variables, like educational attainment. Rather, social generational analysis must be intersectional, taking into account how people’s cultural repertoires are shaped simultaneously by cohort location and social location within the cohort. Comparisons of a dependent variable must be made simultaneously across and between cohorts in order to accurately measure the ways in which repertoires are
