Linguistic Diagnostics as a Tool of Youth Socialization

Self-identification of young people essentially determines their life priorities, frequently preventing their harmonious socialization in the development of their life competencies. Hence, timely diagnosing attitudes may help to identify key problem fields in the perception of the personality, but also to create basis for the alignment of optimum ways of its full integration into society. In this regard the inherent extensive potential lies in the methods of linguistic diagnosing that are not perceived by young people as intervention. Based on the proposition that any self-identification of the individual and the specific community is accompanied by the opposition “own” vs “alien”, the verbalization of this opposition may demonstrate the scale of aggression toward “alien”, thereby fixing the level of tolerance in society and providing an extensive material for analyzing the fundamental outlook orientations of examinees. The authors conducted a study with 453 student participants from the three leading universities of Russia (MGIMO, RUDN University, National Research University Higher School of Economics). All participants were offered to fill up the questionnaires containing open-ended questions aimed at identifying the basic foundations of self-identification of the personality and key concepts of their reflecting. The obtained material was subjected to linguistic analysis on the basis of content analysis methods, analysis and construction of the structure of concepts with hierarchization of components. The fundamental thought was not the exarticulation of the semantic plan of concepts, but the construction of an axiological scale and the associative field of the respondents in relation to the concepts under study. The findings were typologized. According to the findings of the study, concepts as individual substantial mental formations, structuring and restructuring the reality of the personality, allowed to diagnose its key ideological orientations, to record the level of tolerance to “otherness” and to isolate the “problematic” concepts for each specific personality and the studied community. Thus, tolerant perception of the world was considered by the young people not as individual strategy, but as a social and group strategy, requiring unambiguous and often radical implementation. At the same time, key strategies of the world perception acted as extreme practicality, hedonism, and the priority of individual over the public on the background of extremely indulgent attitude to own shortcomings, and low level of empathy. The received results can be used for developing models of socialization of the modern youth.