Uses of symbolic resources in youth: Moving from qualitative to quantitative approach

Abstract

Youth is a period of intense changes during which young people engage in various transitions resulting in theirs acquisition of a longer time perspective and a system of orientation, enabling to set priorities and values, and to guide their actions accordingly. In a socio-cultural theoretical background, both the establishment of values and the ability to think time require some psychological distancing from the here and now, distancing which is foremost enabled by semiotic mediation. In our former studies on youth transitions, we observed that young people may use songs, movies, arts, or novels as symbolic resources, that is, as external mediators that seem to support these developmental processes. Through an abductive process linking qualitative, ideographic data and theoretical elaboration, we proposed a theoretical 7 dimensional model for analyzing people's uses of symbolic resources. This model was then turned to a first, provisional questionnaire aiming at testing the model, whose items were extracted from the first empirical investigation. In this paper, we attempted to tests this questionnaire on a population of young people in Serbia. The symbolic resources questionnaire was tested on a sample of young people (N=475). A SEM analysis was used to test the model. At large, the theoretical model is verified. However, an unexpected, very strong correlation between the dimensions had to be explained. We finally propose a further adaptation to the questionnaire.

Keywords

• mediation
• symbolical resources
• socio-cultural theory
• youth