YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

50 has increased by 6 percentage points, while the share of pessimists has grown only by 2 percentage points. The asymmetry is even stronger when we consider the extreme optimists (“the future will be much bet- ter”) and extreme pessimists (“the future will be much worse”). We can conclude that personal optimism has increased in the last decade, which is further corroborated by the following data. The mean has statistically significantly (p < 0.01) increased from 3.77 (SD = 0.90) in 2010 to 3.90 (SD = 0.95) in 2020. Figure 1.8: Youth visions of societal future, 2010–2020. What do you think the future of our society will be? 90% 80% 60% 40% 30% 10% 20% 70% 50% 2010 2020 13.5 33.4 23.3 22.9 6.8 8.1 30.4 35.9 20.1 5.4 0% 100% A lot worse Somewhat worse The same Somewhat better A lot better Sources: Mladina 2010, Mladina 2020. Figure 1.8 reveals two additional interesting facts. First, both in 2010 and 2020, young people were significantly more optimistic with re- gards to their personal future than with regards to the future of their society. This is a well-known phenomenon that also happens in other countries and different demographic groups (McNaughton-Cassil and Smith, 2002). Second, here as before a polarization trend can be ob- served. In the past decade, both optimism and pessimism increased, while the neutral middle shrunk. Moreover, while optimism at the per- sonal level increased, the increase in pessimism was somewhat more pronounced on the societal level.