Family in the picture of the world of three generations

Abstract

Family is one of the central values that define one’s life. The content of this value is determined by many factors: the experience in the parents’ family, personal experience in building relationships, age-related tasks to be solved, and the cultural and historical period of society’s development. The article focuses on the common and specific features in the image of the family in the world picture of three intra-family generations of ‘children’, ‘parents’ and ‘grandparents’. The sample consisted of 50 families which include the said three generations. The projective method was chosen as the main research method — specifically, we used the color-associative technique The Symbolic Analyzer of the World by A. M. Parachev. The symbolic projection of the world was determined by calculating the coefficient of comfort and autonomy for the concepts characterizing family and family roles. For all three generations, the level of comfort depends on the role: the degree of comfort increases for concepts characterizing blood relatives, and decreases for non-blood relatives. We found that ‘children’ and ‘grandparents’ have close profiles that differ from the profile of ‘parents’, which may be due to the specific functions of the generation of ‘parents’. We used cluster analysis to analyze the value projection of the world. We identified the common and specific clusters in the worldview of three generations. All three generations share representations of non-blood relatives as a system of power and control, and all three generations show the distancing of negative experiences from the image of the family. At the same time, each generation has its specific image of motherhood. The analysis of the functional projection of the world showed that the generation of ‘children’ associates most family roles with anxiety, while the generations of ‘parents’ and ‘grandparents’ view family roles as a means and a background — i.e., ‘parents’ and ‘grandparents’ perceive family roles as comfortable, safe and appropriate.