Association to argue for integrating the insights of aging, life course, cohort succession, and structural change in a single theory of the sociological significance of aging, the large theoretical ground covered by the generation concept was not the subject of much scholarly research (Riley, 1987; Riley and Riley Jr., 1999). After 1985, the generation concept was used predominantly by scholars of aging and the life course (e.g. Hareven, 1994). Studies of how society changed over time because of different attitudes, values, and orientations of successive cohorts were carried out under the rubric of “cohort analysis,” not generational analysis (e.g. Alwin, 1990; Brewster and Padavic, 2000; Brooks and Bolzendahl, 2004; Loftus, 2001; Treas, 2002;
