RESEARCH OF LIFE PROJECTS OF YOUTH CRIMEA
Authors: Cherny E. V. , Tuchina O. R. 
Published: August 2020

The main goal of the article is to acquaint readers with the rationale, methodology, staging, implementation and results of a study of the process of constructing the life projects by young Crimeans. Theoretical and methodological foundations are proposed, diagnostic tools are developed and tested to study the premises and foundations, features of the formation, transformation and implementation of the individual’s life projects as such, and in connection with various social and cultural phenomena that are refracted in the consciousness and unconscious of young people.

This study was pilot in nature, and also part of a larger comparative study of a whole range of socio-psychological characteristics inherent in the youth of Crimea and Kuban. As a result of the work, it turned out that the classic individual narrative interview requires not only thorough preparation and professional work of specialists, but also a long time for its implementation and processing of the results, in particular, decoding transcripts. It requires significant efforts during the interpretation process. Therefore, to implement a large-scale quantitative study, which was necessary to obtain statistically reliable results, it was decided to modify part of the methodology, standardize stimulus material and provide it to respondents in the form of a questionnaire.

Approbation of the developed, validated and tested author’s questionnaire for reliability, called «Parenting style of a Family», presented in Appendix 2 and intended for conducting a retrospective study of perception of parenting style by adult respondents, made it possible to clarify and specify the data obtained during the narrative interview. In particular, a direct relationship was found between the repressive parenting style prevailing in the parent family and the high rates of general internality of adults who grew up in such families. The connection between the parental protocol, the forms of its presentation to the child, adolescent and the retrospective perception and attitude of an adult to the parenting style is proved. It can be argued that there is a tendency to reduce the frequency of the repressive style and, on the contrary, the tendency toward the prevalence of the permissive parenting style is increasing.

Substantial age differences were found regarding perception of the parenting style and attitudes towards it. There can be seen tendencies in the links between significant events for respondents in childhood, adolescence, youth and the emerging life project. It would be wrong to assume that a life project is determined by purely personal life stories with their inherent symbolic messages, source events, anchor events and other «self-defining memories», which are especially vivid and disproportionately large amounts of which are manifested in adolescence and early adulthood. The more traditionally oriented the society is, the easier it is to understand what level of culture (national-state, ethnic, religious, family) is more significant for building a life project. In postmodern society, a causal relationship is very blurred. Family culture may contradict larger levels of culture and, at the same time, have a decisive influence on the formation of a life project. At the same time, some fragments of mental unity are preserved at large levels of culture. For example, in modern Russia, the history of the recent and distant past, including events and personalities, through a system of images and symbols influences the process of self-constitution of a person and the formation of identity. Of course, this should be reflected in the content of life projects. One of the goals of further work may be a comparative study of the influence of historical memory, or rather its reflection in the perception of representatives of ethnic and regional youth groups on the features of life projects. In this study, a methodology has been tested to detect such relationships.