Psychosemantic System of Social Psychological Goal-Directedness in Families: A Structural Analysis

This paper aims to carry out a structural analysis of the psychosemantic system of goal-directedness in families. The hypothesis suggests that family semantic criterion makes it possible to differentiate the structure/level organization of meaning elements and their associative connections and to reveal the content of the object. The research involved 135 young women and 134 young men (aged 15—18); 150 women (aged 21—64) and 38 men (aged 20—55), married, with children. A modified version of I.L. Solomin’s technique of semantic differential was used. A comparative analysis of structural and hierarchical levels of psychosemantics of social psychological goal-directedness of families was carried out basing on the family semantic criterion. The general system level consists of structures representing two generations of a fam¬ily – parents and modern generation. The structure of the subsystem level is common for all groups of respondents and consists of five sublevels with different functional tasks: “My parental family”, “My father”, “My future family”/ “My family”, “My husband”/ “My wife”, and “Birth of a child”. Concepts that define members of the family and family groups, ideal representations of them, events and types of activity related to family life, constitute the component level. The concept of divorce due to its semantics does not belong to the family psychosemantic system. The component content of the subsystem level differs according to age, sex and marital status, which highlights the necessity of further functional research and complex analysis of the psychosemantic system relevant for practical family psychology.