Youth types
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Reason: Blank article. It remains unclear whether the article refers to the typology of young people and youth cultures in general or to the typology of Heinz Reinders called “youth types” . If the latter: How important is this typology in science? - Zulu55 ( discussion ) ignorance 10:28, 22 Nov. 2013 (CET)
Youth types are a form of systematisation of young people that is common in youth research . Adolescence is seen as a phase of life between the end of childhood and adulthood, which roughly encompasses the age range from 12 to 25 years. As a type it is a subgroup of young people a comprehensive typology considered.
Typology and types
Typology is understood to be a system of types that names the central basic dimensions for distinguishing between people. An example of a typology would be different forms of consumers (frugal, average buyers, strong consumers) with the differentiation dimension of purchasing behavior (intensive vs. extensive) or youth cultures ( emos , skaters , punks , graffiti writers, etc.) with the basic dimension of culture . A type is a sub-category of typology and describes the grouping together of similar people. All young people who frequently skateboard in their free time would be assigned to the type (group) of “skaters”.
A distinction is regularly made between monothetic types (classes) and polythetic types. The main difference is that there is no overlap between monothetic types. A young person is either “male” or “female”. Age and place of residence are also examples of monothetic types. In the case of polythetic types, however, there is an overlap between the individual types. It is conceivable, for example, that a young person belongs to the group of skaters as well as that of graffiti writers and is thus located at the intersection of both polythetic types.
Forms of types
The type term is not used uniformly, but introduced as real, ideal, normal, average, extreme or prototype depending on the understanding. These are not simply different labels for the same phenomenon, but rather specific connotations that result from the respective goal of knowledge. Real type denotes a type that actually exists in reality, to which actually living people can be assigned. The ideal type, on the other hand, is a theoretical construction that does not necessarily have to correspond to a real person (e.g. the “ideal” democrat). A group of people is referred to as a normal or average type who are in the middle range of characteristics in relation to a sample or population (e.g. "the average consumer"). The opposite of this is represented by the extreme type, which is a group of people with markedly above or below average characteristics for certain characteristics (e.g. highly gifted young people). Finally, a prototype is generally used to denote a person whose combinations and characteristics of characteristics also apply to other people in a group or are very similar to them.
History of the youth types
Typing has an extensive tradition in youth research . In educational science (e.g. Spranger , Nohl ), sociology (e.g. the Sinus-Milieus ) and psychology (e.g. Marcia ) there are very diverse approaches to typifying youth. What the typifications have in common is the ability to show the variance between different young people. In addition, the approaches are united by the endeavor to reduce the diversity of youthful identity states, attitudes and behaviors to a manageable number of groups. Some typifications are limited to the description of the individual groups (e.g. Shell youth studies). Other approaches focus on predicting youthful personality traits based on the types found.
The earliest youth typologies can be found in Spranger, who uses the cultural practices of young people and their lifestyles to identify different types of male, middle-class youth. Other important youth typologies are those that arose from comparing different generations of young people ("The skeptical generation"; "The uninhibited generation"; "The 68 generation" etc.), with the assumption that young people differ depending on their generation .
In the 1970s, adolescents were increasingly differentiated into different types according to their youth cultures and empirically researched in the early 1980s by the Shell Youth Study of 1981. Here the youth types of punkers, rockers, poppers etc. were distinguished. As a result, this branch of research was expanded and various types of youth were labeled.
Constant companions in youth research were monothetical typologies such as belonging to an educational level (school type), gender and, since the 1990s, the distinction between East and West.
Inter- and intragenerational youth types
Youth types can be formed on the basis of various dimensions, which has been done time and again in youth research. The first central distinction is that between inter- and intragenerational typifications. While intergenerational typologies aim to compare different generations or cohorts (see above), intragenerational typologies try to systematize the differences within a generation. Examples of intragenerational youth types are given in the following section.
Youth types in youth research
Gender From a historical point of view, the gender of young people only becomes significant after the youth phase is no longer genuinely viewed as a phenomenon of male, middle-class youth. It is true that studies on puberty in girls can already be found at the beginning of the 20th century, which are systematically compared with that of boys (e.g. Bühler ). However, the focus of the considerations is implicitly or explicitly on the male youth phase (e.g. Spranger). In the course of the extension of youth as a moratorium to female youth, systematic comparisons between girls and boys are becoming more numerous.
Overall, however, the broad mass of gender-differentiating research has remained rather atheoretical and primarily descriptive. In all studies, the methodical approach is such that the biological gender of adolescents is recorded and used as a factor for attitudes, values, behavior and social relationships. The evidence on gender-specific differences is extensive because, particularly in the panorama studies, a comparison between girls and boys usually takes place. But also smaller studies often lead to a comparison between the sexes.
Gender comparisons, such as those carried out in youth research, are sometimes subject to strong criticism. This criticism ranges from the lack of statistical validation of the findings to the statement that effect sizes are rather small. The variable gender is a one-dimensional monothetical typology that cannot be derived empirically-inductively, but only theoretically-deductively in terms of its shape and effect. As a rule, there is no theoretical foundation for the choice of gender as a characteristic for type construction, which is masked by ex post interpretations of the findings.
Age Another, frequently used variable for intragenerational grouping is the age of young people. Even the idea of what is understood by young people varies considerably. Smaller studies usually select adolescents in the seventh to tenth grades for reasons of the availability of test subjects. Representative studies extend this age spectrum to include up to 14-29 year olds (see Shell Youth Studies). Within the recorded age spectrum, the age group assignments vary considerably. Sometimes 15-19 year olds are contrasted with 20-24 year olds (Jugendwerk, 1981), at other times the age groups 15-17, 18-21 and 22-24 are distinguished (Deutsche Shell, 2000). In contrast to gender, age is therefore an extremely variable typology between the studies.
The findings on age typology are difficult to compare due to the varying assignments to groups. In addition, findings from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies from different perspectives (inter- vs. intra-individual variation) have contributed to the state of research. Studies that allow age and cohort effects to be estimated using a cohort sequence design indicate that the differences between different age cohorts do not exist or are marginal.
Region (East vs. West Germany) In the course of German-German unification, historically speaking, there was a real boom in studies that either explicitly committed themselves to comparing youth in East and West Germany under the label of social change, or because of have included the east-west comparison based on the assumption of regional differences. The historical event of 1989/1990, in comparison to other regional differentiations (e.g. city vs. country or north-south comparisons), made the consideration of east-west differences the dominant regional typology. The collapse and transformation of a political system in a comparatively short period of time has led to this "natural experiment " being used as a favorable opportunity to research the relationship between social conditions and individual development .
Milieu and lifestyle types Particularly since the Shell Youth Study of 1981, lifestyle typifications in German-language youth research have experienced a significant boom. It arose in the course of the assumption of horizontal inequalities, which are in competition with classical social inequality research. Historically, two important lines can be identified. The older social milieu research in the tradition of the Chicago School and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies is based on concepts of social inequality and essentially deals with the living environment of young people from the working class. The humanities education is based on ideas of class-specific youth biographies, a point of view that was closely linked with historical-materialistic social concepts in critical educational science in the 1970s.
The more recent direction of lifestyle research is increasingly dedicated to youth cultural expressions and less to the class-specific forms of youth. It is based on the concept of de-traditionalization of the youth phase and the dissolution of social milieus , which bring with them new forms of youth-cultural lifestyles and which act as a substitute for the social milieu to give meaning. Three sub-areas of lifestyle research can be distinguished: (1.) Research on social milieus, which takes an intermediate position to social milieu and lifestyle research by combining features of the vertical and horizontal positioning of people; (2.) Research on leisure lifestyles in which explicitly youth-cultural forms of expression, as they are lived by young people in their leisure time, are used to construct types; (3.) A biographical variant of lifestyle research has developed. Against the background of the assumption of a destructuring of the youth phase, this attempts to undertake a restructuring of youthful biographies on the basis of subjective biography constructions.
Types of values From a historical perspective, typologies of values have become prominent in the course of Inglehart's construction of types . He differentiates between materialists, post materialists and mixed types. Materialists emphasize values of material security, order, performance and orientate themselves towards authorities. Post materialists, on the other hand, value personal development, leisure, socializing and the pursuit of wellbeing. Mixed types show a combination of both values that tends in one direction or the other.
Although the majority of value typologies in youth research operate with more than two types, these typologies are mostly linked to Inglehart's concept. Methodologically, these are mainly generated by means of cluster analyzes or cut-off procedures. Qualitative approaches are rarely found in the area of value typologies.
Personality types While milieu and lifestyle typologies are primarily used in sociologically oriented youth research, personality typologies represent a domain of psychology, more precisely of person-centered psychological research. In contrast to variable-centered research, this branch is based on specific combinations of characteristics of people that are used to assign Leading people to personality types.
Historical forerunners are the archetypes of CG Jung and the personality types of Wilhelm Wundt, as well as the typology of Eysenck in the 1960s . The latter research tradition has taken dimensions such as flexibility and emotionality as well as introversion-extraversion and emotionality-stability as the basis in order to be able to derive four personality types from their orthogonal combination. This tradition has not played a decisive role in youth research. Another direction comes from Erikson's psychoanalytically shaped developmental psychology . From the identity crisis characteristic of the youth phase (ego identity vs. identity diffusion), Marcia derived four types of identity that have had a lasting influence on youth research. Finally, since the 1990s, a new perspective on personality types has developed that can be traced back to the work of Allport as well as Block and Block and which choose the extent of the adjustment of person and environment as the starting point for typification. Resilience and self-control represent the two central dimensions of the feature space, within which three types are identified.
The theory of youth types
In a more recent approach, Reinders outlines the theory of youth types. It states that adolescents can be grouped into types along the lines of future and present orientation (which the subject gains by actively acting in dealing with the environment). According to Reinders (2006), the combination of these two time orientations results in four types:
Typology of youth development paths:
Assimilation : Young people of this type show a high future and a low present orientation. This is due to the fact that they attribute above- average relevance to parents and below-average relevance to peers . These young people perceive standards with a target character more than with an impulse character and rate the former positively. Furthermore, these adolescents expect to be able to achieve their goals and orient their actions towards coping with development tasks, the goal of which is the transition (normative transition) into adult status. Assimilative-oriented adolescents will transition to adult status more quickly than average.
Segregation: Due to the higher relevance of peers compared to parents, young people with a segregative orientation show an above-average focus on the present and below average on the future. They are more aware of impulsive standards, assess them positively and consider them to be achievable. Standards with the aim of transition to adult status are rated negatively due to their low future orientation and assessed as unachievable. The action is geared towards a leisure-time orientation and the outcome of these actions is the above-average length of stay in the youth phase.
Integration : Young people from the group of integrated people consider parents and peers to be equally relevant and therefore show a comparably high future and present orientation. This type perceives standards with the aim of transition to adult status and those with an impulse character and rates both variants positively. They form the expectation of being able to achieve both sets of standards. At the action level, this leads to conflicts between goal-oriented actions that serve to cope with developmental tasks and leisure-time actions that manifest themselves in socio-spatial activities with friends. These conflicts of action mean that the outcome, both in the area of transition to adult status and in the area of remaining in the adolescent phase, is below average.
Diffusion: With this type there is neither a pronounced future nor present orientation. This is due to the fact that neither peers nor parents are particularly relevant and leads to this. Goals are seen as hardly realizable, so that actions are neither aimed at coping with developmental tasks nor at leisure activities. Accordingly, the outcome of the action will be below average in both areas.
This typology makes it possible to explain whether young people want to grow up quickly (assimilation, integration) or whether at the same time the possibilities of the youth phase are used as intensively as possible (integration, segregation). The typology also allows predictions to be made as to whether and with what zeal young people will pursue goals in the distant future and whether their values are more oriented towards parents or friends .
gallery
Representatives of various youth cultural groups
Heavy metallers
Dark waver
Punk
Debutants
Hip hopper
Rockabillys
Country
Folk
Ravers
Consumer critic
Urban climber
Skinhead
literature
- Heinz Reinders : Youth types. Approaches to a differential theory of adolescence. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2003.
- Heinz Reinders: Youth types between education and leisure. Theoretical specification and empirical testing of a differential theory of adolescence . Münster: Waxmann, 2006.
- Klaus Farin : Youth Cultures in Germany / 1950 - 1989; Youth cultures in Germany / 1990 - 2005 Federal Agency for Political Education ; both 2006
Individual evidence
- ↑ Most of the photographs come from the publication: Bohnenstengel, A. , Maier, C. (1994): We are a large family. In: Münchner Stadtmagazin, issue 05/1994, pages 40–44