Study explores differences seen at high school reunionsANN ARBOR—Whether this summer brings your fifth or your 45th high school reunion, you’ve probably noticed that there are two kinds of former classmates: those who never left town and those who moved away.

“People who leave their hometowns after high school are less likely to have traditional families,” says University of Michigan psychologist Abigail J. Stewart, who is presenting a study exploring the differences and similarities between these two types of people on Aug. 26 at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. “They are drawn to diversity and comfortable with it. And they’re successful at navigating a more impersonal world.” According to Stewart, whose research is funded by the Alfred C. Sloan Foundation through the U-M Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the Institute for Social Research, those who leave are less likely to act as care-givers to other family members, and they are significantly more likely to have graduated from college and moved up the socioeconomic ladder. Her findings are drawn from a survey of 290 men and women, most in their early 60s, who graduated from a midsize Midwestern high school in the 1950s. “This group of graduates was special in many respects,” says Stewart. “They grew up in a place—the American Middle West—and a time—the 1950s—that remain for some a ‘golden era’ before the dramatic social changes of the late 1960s. For others, however, this place and time typifies ‘the way we never were.'” The research team led by Stewart and U-M psychologist David G. Winter, with two colleagues at Grand Valley State University, Donna and Eaaron Henderson-King, also conducted in-person interviews with 77 graduates. They analyzed how the attitudes and lives of those who stayed and those who left differed, matching pairs of “stayers” and “leavers” on key characteristics including gender, race, and family social class while they were in “Midwest High School,” the pseudonym the researchers gave the relatively diverse school in a large Midwestern city. About 50 percent of the graduates stayed in the immediate area after graduation, they found, while 25 percent moved out of the Midwest, most often to the West Coast. The other 25 percent settled somewhere else in the Midwest.

Stewart and colleagues found that 62 percent of those who stayed were in traditional families, meaning they were married to the same person “forever” and had children, compared with only 42 percent who moved away. And even though the researchers found no differences between those who left and those who stayed in self-rated social class during high school, they did find significant differences in current educational level and occupational prestige.

Despite the many differences between those who stayed and those who left, Stewart and colleagues also found many similarities that they believe attest to the psychological “mark” made by the era in which they came of age. “Mid-1950s Midwestern high school graduates are marked by their dedication to a work ethic that consists of hard work more than either success in the conventional sense of money and prestige, or self-expression in the sense of meaningful work,” Stewart notes. “They also share a commitment to family ties, whether conventional or not, and a commitment to religious belief and practice.”

Stewart and Winter emphasize that the differences between those who stayed and those who left may have existed even before they graduated. “Actually moving away may amplify any initial differences between those initially disposed to leave and those who stay,” they note, with certain kinds of places, such as the West Coast, having a “particularly powerful amplification potential.”

Abigail J. StewartAlfred C. Sloan FoundationDavid G. Winter