Dominant Ideas in the Outlook of the Youth: Possibilities of Empirical Fixation through the Prism of Fears, Hopes and Apprehensions

Despite the fact that various aspects of value orientations of today’s young people are widely covered in modern scientific and popular literature, it is hard to find research papers where dominant ideas in the outlook of the young generations would be considered through the prism of sociologically (and not psychologically) adequately interpreted fears. In sociology the problem of fear is most often viewed in the context of studying the so called “catastrophe consciousness” — the assessment of fears and apprehensions is done on the basis of wide representative examinations without focusing on the group of the youth specific in its ideological structure. The article presents basic outlines of sociological “measurement” of young people’s fears, hopes and apprehensions not in a comparative generation context, not only in the sphere of employment, not as an exclusively psychological condition, but from the point of view of a detailed characteristic of the general social well-being of this group.

conceptions and methods of studying value orientations, fears, hopes and apprehensions of the youth, formats of conceptualization and empirical indicators of sociological analysis