Generation X is a term used to describe generations in many countries around the world born during the 1960s and 1970s, more or less. The exact demographic boundaries of Generation X are not well defined, depending on who is using the term, where and when. The term is used in demography, the social sciences, and marketing, though it is most often used in popular culture. Some of the defining factors used in descriptions of Generation X stem from social transitions resulting from the decline of colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Another more prevalent factor is a bell curve bottoming out in American births from 1960 through 1980http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html, after the American baby boom from 1946 to 1964. A small, often "invisible generation" in the wake of the socially-reconstructing baby boomers, those born in the U.S. between 1964 (often cited as 1961: see Coupland and Straus