The dissertation presents the results of theoretical and empirical investigation into social and psychological peculiarities of development of representations about life success among young people.
Life success in the minds of young people reflects the achievement of important goals in certain areas of life as a priority for self-realization and evaluation of their own lives. The criteria for achieving success in life are: internal satisfaction with the result in accordance with the goals; holistic personal attitude to life success and ways to achieve it as an internalized attitude of the social environment; social acceptance of the results by the immediate environment and society in general.
The axiological component of representations about life success іs a central core that reflects the achievements in various life spheres of young people, which become landmarks of life success and perform evaluative, motivational and regulatory functions. This component includes: good relationships, social recognition, wealth, career, professionalism, influence and creative self-realization. The representations’ periphery consists of instrumental and temporal components. The instrumental component performs the function of realizing life goals and reflects the ways of achieving life success. Among such ways, young people determine luck, their own strength, risk, judiciousness, observance or breach of generally common norms and rules, social connections. The temporal component contains the function of evaluating achievements in time dimensions: retrospective, which reflects past experiences of successes and failures; presentative, the content of which is the assessment of existing successes and satisfaction with them; prospective as a belief in future success.
The development of representations about life success was defined as a process of determining the content of the axiological, instrumental and temporal components of these representations with past experiences of successes and failures and personal characteristics that formed under the influence of this experience. An empirical model of developing representations about life success was built, which includes two areas: individual-semantic and social-semantic directions. The first of which determines the influence of personal characteristics on individual components of representations, including instrumental and temporal, and the second – social-semantic direction, combining influence personal factors on the social nature of the representations’ components, including axiological and instrumental. Socio-psychological peculiarities of development of representations about life success among young people have been identified: social-compensatory, social-status, power-status, manipulative-orientational, normative-orientational.
Social-compensatory peculiarities show that the experience of failure actualizes the influence of negative personality traits on the process of determining the content of the axiological component of representations: there is an increase in social recognition, career, wealth due to the negative aspects of self-attitude, conformist sets of youth, who have problems with self-determination. Socio-status peculiarities characterize the impact of the experience of easy success on the importance of social recognition and career for young people with positive aspects of self-attitude. The power-status peculiarities are that the experience of difficult or easy success in the past equally contributes to the strengthening of the role of power values in young people's choice of influence and wealth as landmarks of life success. Manipulative-orientational peculiarities mean that it was observed the devaluation of generally common rules and exaggeration of the role of social connections due to the influence of the experience of failures in young people with negative aspects of self-determination. Normative-orientational peculiarities are most clearly manifested in increasing the value of generally common rules and strengthening the focus on self rather than social connections in achieving life success as a result of the influence of positive self-attitude and meaningful life position.
