Читать «Межпоколенческая коммуникация» онлайн - страница 192

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.