Survey: 5. Lifestyle
As we continue to share the results of our class survey, we’ll take a slight break from the main subjects we’ve addressed so far — politics, family, work/career, wealth, and health. Today, we’ll report results from some of the lighter (dogs or cats?) or more random questions we asked (attempted suicide?).
Exercise
Those of you who interview high school students for Yale have probably been exposed to the “Fact Sheet” showing that 78% of current undergraduates participate in some form of organized sports or exercise — intercollegiate, college-level, pickup games or leagues, or group workouts at Payne-Whitney. Were we as active then? Well, we must have been, because we still are — which may be part of our above-average health results. See Survey: 2. Sex and Health. Here’s a chart showing how many times per week we engage in moderate exercise.
Sports
When it comes to sports we like, we do follow the national distribution for men our age — football edges out baseball. But the “long tail” is a bit more prevalent for us than for the general public.
Stuff Happens
Not all the questions were light. We asked some that were serious, like suicide, car accidents or crime victimization … and others that had to do with accomplishments that didn’t tuck nicely into one of the other major sections of the Survey. There are a couple surprises — e.g., almost HALF of us are published authors!
It’s notable that the percentage who have “won an election” exceeds those who have “run for office;” this must mean that, for some respondents, reports of election-winning include successful elections for positions in non-profits as well as public office. (If I’d seen it that way, I, too, could have reported on winning an election! Here’s a good little lesson in the penalties of inexact wording of a survey question.)
Just For Fun
Scattered through the survey were a few “just for fun” questions, meant to break up the “work” of answering sometimes tough questions. Here are the results:
Pets
In the eternal struggle of the dog people versus the cat people, the dog people are dominant in our class. Over three quarters of us (78 percent) have had a pet dog since 1969, but cats put on a good showing, claiming 57 percent of us as owners. (We’re not all dog or cat people though: 20 percent have had neither, and nearly a third (32 percent) have had both at one time or another.
Nineteen percent of us have kept fish, 13 percent birds, and small mammals were owned by a robust 12 percent. I guess all those kids had to have their hamsters and gerbils, right?
Boxers vs. Briefs
It was in April 1994 on a nationally televised MTV forum that an impertinent young woman asked the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, “The world is dying to know: boxers or briefs?”[1] (The answer: “Usually briefs.”)
We thought it would be fun to ask that same question in the class survey, but to add to the fun we are not disclosing here the actual percentage who report wearing the whitey-tighties versus the loose-trunks version.[2]
However, we can report on some actual statistical analyses of the underwear preference patterns of our class. There is a statistically significant correlation of underwear preference with the type of high school a classmate attended, with boxers more highly favored by preppies (those who attended private, residential schools). Public school guys favor briefs, and those who went to private day schools fall somewhere in between.
Varsity athletes and those who served on active duty in the military favor boxers more than others. In addition, boxers are significantly more favored by those of us who played on residential college athletic teams while at Yale.
Classmates who belonged to fraternities are significantly more likely to wear boxers, while those who were tapped into senior societies are more likely to be wearing briefs. None of the other attributes we measured, from party identification to pot smoking to current net worth to belonging to a music group seems to be correlated with underwear preference.
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Notes:
[1] And Clinton followed that with a hilarious “full disclosure” statement at the White House Corresondents’ Dinner that week, which can be seen at https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4535378/pres-clinton-boxers-v-briefs.
[2] At this writing, the plan is to disclose this sensitive statistic only at the 50th reunion itself. As the young lady said: the world is dying to know!