Межпоколенческая коммуникация

Chapter 3 reports on a study of cross-generational communication conducted by the author in 2005 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The research was modeled on recently conducted surveys of intergenerational communication in the US, Britain, and Pacific Rim countries (Williams et al., 1996; Noels et al., 2001; Giles et al., 2001), and was the first to be conducted in Russia. A questionnaire elicited participant’s perceptions of conversations with members of four target groups: the elderly (aged 60 and above), middle-aged people (40-60), young people (20-40), and teenagers (13-20). The participant pool was made up of 260 people living in St. Petersburg. These people were not formally randomly selected, but were a convenience sample of people available and willing to take part in the survey. Consistent with research in other countries, it was found that young Russian respondents under 20 and between the ages of 20 and 30 reported less frequent contact with older respondents (both aged 40 to 60 and above 60 years of age) and more contact with peers than did the older respondents. The oldest respondents (aged 60-70 and 70-80) reported more frequent contact with older targets than they did with young children and teenage groups; they, too, had the most frequent contact with peers. Respondents who perceived themselves as more sociable people reported more frequent communication regardless of age. However, the reported communicative acts happened more frequently with representatives of teenagers and young people; the study did not find any significant correlations between perceived sociability and communication with older people. The results point to a possible trend of selective sociability among our respondents, and the desire to communicate primarily with younger people. At the same time, young Russian respondents were less concerned with making themselves communicatively attractive to older people, probably because their communicative behavior was primarily aimed at communicative accommodation within their own age group. The author labels this phenomenon as a communicative egocentrism among young interlocutors.

The survey found that attitudes toward intergenerational communication in Russia are similar to those in Western countries. During conversations, people get more satisfaction while talking to interlocutors of their own age group. The study found a statistically significant relationship between the age of respondents and their reported communication satisfaction: for all four age groups the correlation coefficients were fairly high. Older people reported that they were less satisfied when holding conversations with younger people compared to their satisfaction with their communication with interlocutors of their own age group. Results of the survey indicate that younger Russians, like their American counterparts, often feel a desire to avoid or end conversations with non-family elders. To summarize the scales relating to perceptions of communication with different age categories, a factor analysis using SPSS 14,0 was conducted. The best solution for perceptions of other’s communicative behavior was comprised of four factors: communicative accommodation and desire to communicate, communicative egocentrism and self-promotion, communicative non-accommodation and desire to avoid or end conversations, and partial accommodation and desire to talk only about one’s own problems. The author found that strategies of communicative behavior do not change with age, as respondents reported the same strategies for initiation, avoidance, or conclusion of intergenerational conversations regardless of their own age.

Chapter 4 reports on a study investigating the understanding and usage of religious terminology by people of different ages. In the post-Soviet period, the Russian language has experienced instability in the boundaries between the center and the periphery of the lexical system. It was claimed that words previously considered historicisms or obsolete terminology were making a comeback (Ryazanova-Clarke & Wade 1999). The changed role of religion in contemporary Russia has propelled ecclesiastical words into more active use. However, it was not clear to what extent these words are familiar to Russian speakers of different ages. The central task of the study was to establish a relationship between the age of speakers and their familiarity with religious words, and their attitude toward ecclesiastical words and expressions.