By: Liz Farmer

I got an e-mail this week that started out with this:

Dear Liz,

According to a new study, 78% of respondents said the American Dream has died.

Wow, that’s depressing.

The statistic is from a recently released report called Coming of Age in the Great Recession, compiled by the consulting firm, Context-Based Research Group, and Baltimore ad agency, Carton Donofrio Partners. The report explores consumer attitudes about the post-recession era.

The study is a follow up to the firms’ “Grounding the American Dream” released in 2008.

The 2009 study found that some believe the American dream has died because “the dream” had become defined in terms of material possessions rather than freedom and ideals. It found that 83 percent of respondents made permanent changes in spending and saving behavior, and the same percentage planned to spend more time with family and friends over the holidays then they had previously.

“Our studies portray a society moving into an era where we measure the quality of our lives in social terms before economic ones,” Cleve Corlett, Context-Based Research Group’s director of quantitative research, said in a statement. “Forty-three percent of Americans believe the recession has positively affected their lives. With this kind of positive reinforcement, we now see the potential to maintain a healthy balance between our consumer and non-consumer sense of selves.”

So maybe these findings aren’t as depressing as the e-mail started out (unless you’re a retailer and dependent on people buying expensive items they don’t need).

Do you agree with these findings? I personally think they might be a little optimistic in terms of people’s permanent willingness to place inner happiness over having outside things. But maybe I’m a cynic. I am a journalist, after all…