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Generation What is an interactive programme, produced by Upian and Yami 2, in partnership with the ABU,  as well as Asia Pacific broadcasters. In essence, it is an evolution of Generation What, a large-scale survey conducted in France in 2013 to draw the portrait of the current generation of 18 to 34-year-olds. The program then spread all over Europe in 2016 and in the Arab world in early 2018. This time, Asia Pacific countries have joined us for the purpose of making this program a truly Asia Pacific world event.

The programme breaks down into three parts:

  • A comprehensive online questionnaire, available in participating countries and designed with the help of sociologists. The purpose of this questionnaire is to probe this generation's ambitions, hopes, and fears.
  • A documentary and statistical portrait of New Zealand's youth, consisting of their testimonies and enhanced in real time by the data collected via the questionnaire.
  • A documentary and statistical portrait of the Asia Pacific youth, consisting of intersecting testimonies from the youth of all participating countries and enhanced in real time by the data collected via the questionnaire, as well as a map infographic for comparing answers by country on a worldwide scale.

Are my answers confidential?

Absolutely. First of all, it is confidential because we do not even ask for your name. Information about age, gender, location, and details about your education or professional occupation is only requested for statistical purposes, in order to help us most accurately draw the portrait of an entire generation. This will allow us, for example, to find out the proportion of students living in Auckland that need to work to pay for their university fees. We will also be able to determine how many young workers under the age of 23 feel undervalued in their jobs.

The profile data we collect when you answer the preliminary questions are stored independently of any element that could identify you – and, if you wish to register using your email address, it will only be linked to your answers to allow you to find them and pick up where you left off.

Lastly, none of the information or answers you provide on this site will be communicated to third parties of any kind, and none shall be made public other than in the form of the survey's results.

 

How does the portrait work?

In order to draw the portrait of the 18-34 generation, we chose to have a three-tiered approach:

  • A quantitative approach, based on questionnaire results
  • A qualitative approach, based on documentary videos
  • A comparative approach, based on the Asia Pacific region aspect of the project, including an interactive map.

 

1) Questionnaire results

All of the answers to the 170 survey questions are recorded and viewable in real time. In other words, the number of answers to a given question (and thus the results) can vary if the portrait is viewed at different times. In addition, we clearly specify that the numbers collected by the questionnaire are raw results; they are not statistically weighted to redistribute the respondents and answers in a more representative way, given the populations of participating countries.

Let's look at a concrete example: if the answers to the question "Are you optimistic about your future?" are split between 78% Yes and 22% No, it simply means that out of the 3,122 people who have answered the question so far, 2,435 answered "Yes" and 687 answered "No". These numbers therefore do not take into account the number of people who skipped the question (by clicking on Next Question), nor of the age, sex, location, or social and professional category of the respondents, as would normally be the case with survey institutes.

It is therefore completely incorrect to state that "78% of young New Zealander" or "78% of young people are optimistic about their future," but it is fair to say that 78% of the survey respondents are optimistic about their future. Nonetheless, filters are available to refine results according to certain criteria and thus to form an opinion about answer trends.

You can view all of the answers here.

2) Documentary videos

We have divided the survey questions into 21 themes, which range from reactions to the economic crisis to love, through relationships with parents or inequalities.

Each theme includes a short video showing young people from your country answering the same questions as the Internet users, and showing their reactions, questions, doubts, or convictions. In parallel, the videos are enhanced by the numbers collected through the questionnaire. Also, if you registered with your email address, a dynamic playback of your answers is displayed and allows you to compare yourself with the answer totals.

Since some of the survey questions were altered after the videos were shot, it happens on occasion that the characters in the videos do not answer the exact same questions as the Internet users.

You can view all of the videos here for New-Zealand.

3) Defining the 18-34 Generation in a single word

To complete the portrait, we ask the Internet users to suggest a word to define their generation. Users are free to suggest anything they want, as long as it is 25 characters or less and it respects all the local regulations.

You can find all of the suggestions here.

Questions, comments?