Ideas About the Ideal Home at Different Stages of Adulthood: A Psychosemantic Approach

Abstract

The methodological basis of the study is the psychosemantic and thesaurus approaches. Verbalized representations make it possible to objectify the needs, values, and attitudes of the subject in relation to significant phenomena of reality. The results of an empirical study of people's ideas about the ideal home at different periods of adulthood are discussed. Data were collected using the free association method. To the phrase “ideal home”, respondents gave associations in the format of three verbs, three adjectives, and three nouns. The study involved 286 people, of which 228 people were aged 18–40 years, 47 people were aged 55 years and older. The identification of general semantic categories was carried out by frequency analysis; the comparison of semantic categories between groups of different ages was carried out using the z-criterion. It was shown that comfort, love, happiness, life are common semantic markers of an ideal home for people in different periods of adulthood. Ideas about an ideal home in the age periods studied, along with general features, have pronounced specificity. Depending on age, ideas about an ideal home are specific: for people aged 18–40 years, the most important are the semantic categories of comfort, family and warmth; for people over 55 years old these are the categories of happiness and health. Additional empirical confirmation was received by the proposition that the meaning of a house changes along with a change in a person’s age (S.K. Nartova-Bochaver). Limitations of the study: in the studied sample, people of the first and second periods of adulthood and females predominated. Prospects for the study include expanding age cohorts and balancing the sample by gender.