#7 - Dr. Josh Packard: GenZ Uncovered: Trust, Diversity, and the Mental Health Crisis
Summary:
IDive into an enlightening conversation with Josh Packard as he delves deep into the world of GenZ. From their fundamental distrust of institutions to the increasing emphasis on diversity and authenticity in their lives, understand the unique challenges and perspectives that shape this generation. As we explore GenZ's relationship with mental health, especially amidst the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, we'll uncover how they perceive belonging in a digital age. Tim Sweetman hosts this essential discussion, offering insights and raising thought-provoking questions about the state of our society and where we're headed.
Key Links:
Cigna Study on Loneliness: An extensive study conducted by the health conglomerate Cigna, where they investigated the impact of chronic loneliness on 60,000 Americans aged 18 and above.
UCLA Loneliness Scale: A standard scale used for measuring and assessing loneliness and social isolation, which was referenced in the Cigna study.
Springtime's Series on Mental Health: An ongoing series dedicated to mental health and how organizations can foster mental health-friendly environments.
Josh Packard: A deeper exploration of the studies and findings presented by Josh Packard, offering insights into the world of Gen Z.
@TimSweetman: Tim Sweetman's official Twitter profile where listeners can get updates on the podcast, future guests, and more.
Tension Podcast Official Website: www.TensionPod.Com - A hub for all episodes, guest information, and additional resources related to the topics discussed.
Transcript:
Josh Packard:
And this is I think part of the reason why people haven't really felt this, because there wasn't this event where it's like, oh, we used to love institutions. And then we found out that everybody inside of those institutions was kicking dogs all the time, and now we hate them. There wasn't some big expose. It really has been. If you look back at the data for this, it's like 1 to 2 percentage points a year across every institution for 40 years, 50 years.
Tim Sweetman:
Hey, folks. Thanks so much for listening to the Tension podcast. Today, we have an incredible special guest. His name is Dr. Josh Packard. Josh is Executive Director of Springtide Research Institute, which maintains the largest data set on young people and their spirituality in the US. Josh has a doctorate in sociology from Vanderbilt, and he's the author of several books, including Meaning, Making, Eight Values that Drive America's Newest Generations, and Church Refugees, Why People Are Done with the Church, but Not Their Faith. Josh is a sought after speaker and author and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CBS, USA Today, and more. I know you're going to love this conversation. We dive into the research, but also a ton of practical things that you as a leader can do as you approach leading Gen Z, the next generation. You're listening to part one of a two part interview. Tune in next week for part two. I really want to, first and foremost, understand and have, not just myself, but anybody who's listening, understand who you are and where you're coming from, what your background is leading up to this conversation. I think it gives some helpful context.
Tim Sweetman:
And then we could talk a little bit about the methodology that you used and frankly, why this is helping paint a picture of why people should care. I think a lot of people, myself included, there's been a heck of a lot of throwing my hands up in the air when it comes to the next generation, which is exactly what my parents or my former bosses, I'm sure, were doing 15, 20 years ago. But first, who are you, Josh?
Josh Packard:
Yeah, thanks so much. I'm really glad to be here. This is a fantastic opportunity to get to talk about this particular line of research and what we do at Springtide. I was a professor for a long time. I was a sociology professor and had always been interested in religion. M y specialty was what's going on in American religion, especially at the margins at the alternatives to these mainstream traditional institutional religious forums. Lots of people studied that. I was just really drawn to what was new and emerging and innovative. I made a career doing that for a long time. I wrote a book called Church Refugees about why people keep their faith, believe the Church. And through a series of conversations with this company, this organization that had written primarily a study about why young Catholics were leaving the Church, that evolved into this desire to really start an applied research institute, both with really strong methodology and rigor. What we say all the time is we want to be seen in the same breath with Pew and Gallup and PRI, but we don't want our research to be interesting. We want our research to be useful.
Josh Packard:
And that's the thing that distinguishes us a little bit, I think, from those places, which I love and respect. Nothing is not a slam on them at all. It's just that we want to make sure that we are asking the kinds of questions and then putting it out in frameworks and in resources that people with real boots on the ground who are doing work like you're doing, or if you're working in a campus ministry setting or whatever it is, if you've got some direct role to play with young people, we want you to pick up one of our publications and not only read it and be able to make sense of it. It's not just overwhelming with data, but that you would begin to immediately find some implications and some implications for what you can and should be doing with your ministry. So that's really the goal at Springtime. The other thing I think makes us a little bit unique is that we have young people... Our whole focus is 13 to 25 year olds. We'll never change from that. That is Gen Z for right now. You'll probably hear me using those interchangeably. But as Gen Z ages, we'll continue to stay at 13 to 25 year olds forever.
Josh Packard:
We're in conversation with them. They are part of the research process. We have an advisory board of young people that we meet with monthly with interns and a writer residence and all this place. So we are not just a bunch of old people studying young people. We're really endeavoring. We have our own podcast called the voices of young people. You can go and just hear them talk about our research and how it impacts their lives. So it's how it really shows up one young person's life. And it's something I'm really proud of because I think a lot of research institutes, especially ones that focus on young people, they just think, Well, it'd be great to have them around, but what can they possibly contribute here? And we found some really productive ways that I think are useful for them. They get great experience, I think, and we certainly learn a ton from them.
Tim Sweetman:
It sounds like it's a unique approach to the methodology of acquiring this information. Talk about that. What's the differentiator in the way that you guys are approaching understanding this content? Because I would assume others are approaching it even from that posture of, we're just trying to find interesting information versus useful information. That alone is a different type of methodology. So talk about your methodology and how you came up with this info.
Josh Packard:
Yeah, I mean, this is not something I ever could have done as a professor. There wouldn't have been the resources, there wouldn't have been the time. And in fact, frankly, a lot of my academic colleagues would look at me with a raised eyebrow. What are you doing? First of all, I will say that the bread and butter are very traditional research methods that we employ. So a lot of surveys, something like 30,000 surveys of young people over the last few years, we've done 350 plus interviews, which means that we got 350 times we got young people on the phone to talk about their faith and religious lives, which is amazing. And on the survey side, those are nationally representative. They're weighted for census demographics, for age and region and gender. And then we correct for race on the back end to make sure that we've really got data that are reflecting the entire country. And the result is what I think is the largest data set in the country about young people's religious lives right now. But the rest of it is stuff that I think is just as important but doesn't always show up in terms of like...
Josh Packard:
Again, this is the part where we get into academics would a lot of times think, What is the point? It's like, we're launching a project right now called... That we're exploring for next year's state of religion. State of Religion Young People 2023, here's a sneak preview, about spaces and places, about what are meaningful religious, sacred, spiritual places online in real life? What do they look like? Who's there? Who's influencing them? Are these confined to traditional buildings? Have they moved on to other places for young folks, etc? One of the things we realized is that young people don't really have language for this anymore because they're so disconnected from these institutions. We're trying to put together focus groups with young people, a researcher, a design thinker, and an artist to help literally sketch out what do these places look like. That's real data to us. It's not necessarily the thing, you're not going to open up a report and find a hundred pages of drawings. But it's a critical part of the research process. And the same thing with these young people that we meet with monthly. We'll take data to them a lot of times and say, Okay, so here's what we're seeing in the surveys.
Josh Packard:
Here's what we think it means. You tell us if you think we're right or where we think we may be a little off. Look, as much as we respect the voices of young people in 13 to 25 year olds, we also are not. We're the adults in the room. It's not out of their mouths and onto these pages. We are still doing really critical work of saying, okay, when we start looking at this theory over here, this other research that's been done, the rest of our data set, we really need to start contextualizing this, etc. But we do listen consistently throughout. I think that's really the thing that distinguishes the methodologies that we're trying to find ways to both listen on the front end to the young people who are reflecting the truth of their own lives and trying to do a really good job of listening to the adults who are trying to serve them so that we are standing in the middle there trying to bridge that gap. A lot of times that's just not a researcher's role. If you're an academic, your job is to produce truth, period. It's not your job to necessarily have to care about who's using it or for what reasons, etc.
Josh Packard:
Again, there's a great role for all that. We like to be able to play this role of bridging between what adults often think about young people and the information that they ultimately need to serve them and what young people are telling us about their lives. I think we can do some translating there.
Tim Sweetman:
That's really amazing. I don't want to jump too far ahead, but I feel like that is just a great example. It probably could be used by many, many leaders in their own organizations. Something that I was told a few months ago, thinking about designing the culture that 13 to 25 year olds would want to work in. My initial posture was, I'm going to go out and design it. Just no data whatsoever. Just I know it's best. And to be told that people prefer to live in houses that they've designed themselves, that they've built themselves. It's just such a great statement and a great way of approaching it, it feels like you guys are doing something very similar and that you're allowing the research to not be dictated by one particular side or one position, but really allowing the research to reflect those that are being researched and to give them a voice in that and to design it in some way, shape, or form. Really everybody involved, which is so unique versus just raw data. So I'm super excited. I got a bunch of things there. But first, why should people care about the next generation?
Tim Sweetman
I think there's the obvious. There are future employees. There are future folks sitting in the pews. There are future givers, all these different things. They're going to be involved with us in our lives. They're potentially our kids. All those pieces are there. Maybe approach it rom why should people care? Business leaders, maybe in particular care? What are some of the reasons that maybe they're not thinking about this type of research?
Josh Packard:
Yeah, it's a great question. You're right about all those things. Obviously, there's intrinsic reasons why we should care about any emerging generation because if you're listening to this podcast and if you're interested in this work at all, you probably care about young people's flourishing at some level, just generally speaking. I think in particular, though, right now we've got the situation where it's important to care and look at the data because in the absence of data, we end up telling ourselves, we build this narrative about young people that largely relies on our own experiences of when we were young. I think that the gap between what this generation is experiencing and what the adults in their lives experienced when they were the same age. Maybe there's been other times in history when it's been this far, but it hasn't been recently. Every generation is going to be a little bit different. Obviously, new technologies come in and play roles and things like this. But my parents trying to use their childhood to understand my childhood, that wasn't so different. The world was more or less the same just a couple of steps further down the line.
Josh Packard:
But right now, when we tell ourselves these stories about this generation, when we try to impute what their motives are based on their actions, when we think to ourselves, Well, when I was in that situation and I did that thing, it meant I was doing it for this reason. So they must have that same reason. Or if they're not doing something that we want them to do, which is so much more off to the case, it must be because they lack some reasoning that I have. But some really fundamental things have shifted here. I really don't think that generations are best thought of as containers. They're better thought of as continuations of trends. We've got a couple of trends that are really just been amplified over the last couple of decades. They've been in place for a while, but now they're coming to the forefront with Gen Z. We can talk about those real quickly. They're not mind blowing. Number one is this decline of institutional trust. It's been going on for 50 years. There's good data from Gallup and others. When we ask young people to rank various social nonprofits, businesses, church seches, schools, etc.
Josh Packard:
On a scale of 1 to 10 for trust, nobody really gets above a 5. The highest one is nonprofits get a 5.5. This would seem like, oh, this generation, they don't respect their elders, except that trust has been declining for all age groups for the last five decades across every single sector. And so what makes Gen Z unique in this regard then is that for the first time in a massive scale, we've got parents who don't trust institutions raising their kids not to trust institutions. And so we're losing a lot of those built in connections that would have automatically gone with that trust. Now, they'll still show up. Obviously, you still have to show up to school. You still have to show up to work at times, depending on where you are. Occasionally, these voluntary things, church, especially, is a place for parents just are not dragging their kids pro forma. If they don't see value there, they're just not going. Parent teacher associations are just not going. Local politics, often beyond maybe voting, are just not participating in, etc. That's a big shift now. There's nothing about it. There's not just a feeling that institutions aren't great for me.
Josh Packard:
There's actually been a cultural shift around institutions are inherently against me. That's a big change. That's number one. Then number two is just the massive amount of diversity. Demographers have this and political scientists have this saying that demographics are destined. Now, they're talking mostly about voting patterns and things like that. But we've seen this. They've been sounding, not the alarm bells because it's not a problem. They've just been forecasting this for years. Look, this is coming. This is coming. This is coming. And here we are. Even though our in person lives are still really segregated in this country, 60 years past Brown versus the Board of Education, by some measures, our schools are more segregated than they were in 1953. And so adults walk around in this world where they're like, What are you talking about? What is all this diversity nonsense? Not nonsense, really, but it sounds like the amount of energy that goes into diversity, equity, inclusion conversations is not always reflective of the world that they're operating in. Because there's pockets of the world that are actually really diverse, major cities, etc. But not necessarily widespread. But for young people, that line is completely obliterated because even though their in real life lives are still relatively homogeneous because they don't get a lot of choice over where they live, their online lives are wildly diverse, not just with regards to race and ethnicity, but with every conceivable identity that you can think of.
Josh Packard:
And what this has meant for them is that diversity is not only a piece, a fundamental component of their lives. And when we measure them demographically, they're the most diverse generation that has ever existed. But really critically for employers, diversity is a top level value. So young people now, in part because they want to show up as real and authentic to their friends, and because they care and are committed to a lot of these justice values, inclusion and diversity becomes almost a deal breaker. Like, if my company isn't going to be this way, or if my organization or if my church can't commit to these things, I will not show up because I can't then turn back around to my peers and show up in a real authentic way with them and say, that's where I work. That's where I go to church. That's the school I chose, etc. Those are the two big things I'd say for Gen Z to really understand them. You've got to get your head around this idea that they immediately think that organizations and institutions have their own best interests in mind, not my best interests. The burden of proof is on the leaders to show otherwise, to build trust and diversity, diversity.
Tim Sweetman:
Diversity, diversity. Just to get my bearings together here, can you give us some context of... We've got Gen Z, we know millennials. Walk us back, are those in Gen Z, are they predominantly... They're not necessarily the children of millennials, correct? Give us a little bit... I know, as you said, it's not a container, so it's all over the place, but this leads me to a follow up question I have about parents.
Josh Packard:
Yeah, this is a useful thing to walk through. So if you're a geriatric millennial like myself, to use that term that was coming around, I'm 44. And so we waited until a little bit later than a lot of our friends to have kids. I was 30 or 31. So I've got a 12 year old. But a lot of geriatric millennials they can be parents of some of the youngest Gen Zers. But mostly Gen Zs being raised by Gen Xers, essentially. Again, these lines are not always crisp and clean like we would like them to be.
Tim Sweetman:
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Tim Sweetman:
And is there some parallels there between those two generations? Obviously, I'm only speaking for myself, but I'm not sure if the data shows that. I wonder how much in your findings, what you're seeing of the ties between, and you referenced it a little bit, between parents and the way that they're parenting versus, say, millennials and the way that they're parenting.
Josh Packard:
Yeah, it's been fascinating because this issue with trust has been a steady drip. Even within individual industries, when then the television scandals of the 1980s or the Catholic sex abuse scandals of seemingly forever now, I mean, they just continues to go on and on. Those definitely create drops in trust that are a little bit darker than other years. But going all the way back to the 50s and 60s, we start to see this. And this is I think part of the reason why people haven't really felt this, because there wasn't this event where it's like, oh, we used to love institutions. And then we found out that everybody inside of those institutions was kicking dogs all the time, and now we hate them. There wasn't some big expose. It really has been. If you look back at the data for this, it's like 1 to 2 percentage points a year across every institution for 40 years, 50 years. And then that all adds up. We don't actually see this big moment. Now, there have been things like Watergate is this, it's a watershed moment. But even in that, it's not like people realize that, oh, my gosh, politicians are corrupt.
Josh Packard:
That wasn't the big revelation. It's that you got to see it on TV V. That was the big difference every day. You got to really understand it in a way that maybe people wouldn't have seen before. So yeah, I wouldn't say that there's not a defining line or a thing. It's just something happens sociologically when we reach a tipping point and all of a sudden it becomes not a thing, it becomes our thing. It's the culture we live in.
Tim Sweetman:
But what's so unique about it is this particular time, it's not just the adults in the room or vice versa. It's not just the newest generation has this disease. It's everybody has a distrust. Then you're seeing the behaviors and actions fall from that. I can think of so many even small practical examples of that. When I think about being a business owner, you sense it. This is so different to me than 15 years ago, where there was a level of trust in the institution of, say, the business owner, the CEO, your boss, that thing. Now it's not just the employee that has a distrust, but you're up against the employee and their parents and all their friends. It's a colossal I'm right and everybody else is wrong. It's really unique and really interesting in a particularly difficult environment to be in as a leader, I would think. Because as soon as you step into leadership, you then represent an institution which then immediately seems to drive distrust in you and everything else around you. I'm going to leave it at that for now. I want to get to some of the practical examples of what you guys are talking about and really trying to help people think about.
Tim Sweetman:
A couple of other traits I found fascinating in the research as I went through it, and hopefully these are some more helpful context. Again, I love how you said this, we all come with our own stories. So this is super helpful to really try to understand Gen Z and not just throw out our own stories of, Oh, they're lazy, they're whatever. Every generation has been these particular things. Talk a little bit about this mental health crisis that we have on our hands, the disconnection that so many in Gen Z feel. That was something that just struck me as every single page of this research, it seems so unique amongst any generation, at least in the willingness to share how they're feeling. Can you talk more about that? And maybe perhaps how COVID 19 and the pandemic has even worsened the situation we're in?
Josh Packard:
Yeah, the pandemic certainly hasn't come. This has been in many ways the result of growing up in places where attendance is decoupled now from belonging because we don't have automatic trust in these institutions. In other words, we can go to school, we can go to work, we can participate, we can play on a sports team, we can go to church even. We have actually hard data to show you can show up at church every week and not feel like you belong there. For a variety of reasons, young people will either decide that it's in their best interests or they'll have to show up someplace. But that doesn't convey to them an automatic sense of belonging. Relationships with adults in those spaces are really what make the difference. But this has been going on for a while. In 2018, before the pandemic, 2017, I can't remember exactly what year, Cigna did this big study, big health conglomerate Cigna, 60,000 Americans, adults, 18 and over, and studied loneliness because they were interested in the health impact of being chronically lonely and isolated. And using a standard scale from out of UCLA, they found that actually it was not the oldest generation.
Josh Packard:
Every time we've done a social scientist, every time we've done this, administered this scale at a national level, or even just with different age groups, it's always the oldest generation that's the loneliness and for the first time ever, it was the youngest. And not only was it the youngest, but their loneliness scores were off the charts. And this is really not what you expect when you think about Gen Z. They've got the whole world in their pockets. They can talk to anybody at any time, practically. But it was so startling. We took it up as our first project and belonging. Data collected right before the pandemic actually, and found the same thing. I mean, going all the way down to 13 year olds, we've had a very similar pattern and the pandemic hasn't helped that. So what was an emerging mental health concern for young folks before the pandemic is a full blown epidemic of its own. And major national organizations have declared this emergency. At Springtime, we're in the middle of a series right now on mental health and particularly how to create mental health friendly organizations so that we're not just always responding to crisis.
Josh Packard:
We can be a little proactive in these things. And really it centers this notion of purpose. When you start adding up a lot of the things that you and I have already talked about in this podcast, you start to get a sense that there's a generation that's floating around without a clear sense of what they should be doing, who they are, what their role is in life. When you start putting the puzzle pieces together of like, okay, so not super connected to church and religion, not feeling like you can trust institutions to just have some automatic answers for you. Imagine how that must feel to a 15 or 16 or 17 year old that all of a sudden the world is a chaotic place without much order and nobody that you can trust to give you answers. That's not a great situation to be in for the mental health. And not to mention all the normal pressures that come along with being a teenager, all the normal difficulties. And then you augment all of that by social media. And we can talk about that. I'm happy to. But you start to get a picture for why mental health might not be great.
Josh Packard:
And then there is some reality that in really good ways, this generation is really not happy to talk about, but they're much more comfortable talking about mental health issues than any other generation. It's been de stigmatized to a certain extent that not as much as they'd like, they still will tell you that they don't always feel comfortable talking about their mental health, especially with the adults in their lives. But so there's definitely some more like in the past, it was underreported. I don't think it's overreported yet, but it is certainly we're seeing I don't know that we're... There's a certain amount of like, we're not necessarily seeing all the increases not due to new mental health issues. Some of that increase is due to the fact that more people feel comfortable saying it, naming it, putting it out there. But it's a real thing. And I'm sure you've seen this as an employer, like the amount of anxiety of people showing up to work, interacting with other people in real life. I don't know, Tim, if you've ever asked your employees to do math in public, but that's a really difficult thing for young folks to do.
Tim Sweetman:
We ask them to do it thousands of times a day at a restaurant, and it is incredibly difficult. And it's a unique and new problem. Hey, folks, thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Tension podcast. This was part one of a two part interview I was able to do. I hope you tune in next week for part two of this conversation. It would be fantastic if you would take just a couple of moments to leave a review or rate us on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help the show. Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the Tension podcast, visit www. Tensionp od. Com, or you can find me on Twitter @Tim Sweetman.
