Peculiarities of Children’s Imitation of Media Рersons in Parasocial Relations

In the modern world popular media personalities are becoming the role models for teenagers. Adolescents build parasocial relationships with them and then try to imitate the stale behavior of those media personalities. We do not know for sure which media personalities modern children choose to follow. We also do not know exactly how imitation takes place in parasocial relationships. That is why we set ourselves the goal to investigate the implementation of the mechanism of imitation in parasocial relations of Ukrainian high school students.In November-December 2020, we surveyed 170 people from 11 regions of Ukraine according to the author’s questionnaire "Mechanisms of Parasociality" (Chaplinska-Naidenova). The study raised the question of the formation and functioning of parasocial relations. This article presents its results related to the manifestation of the mechanism of imitation at the level of frequency analysis.First of all, we found that the most popular types of media people among young people are musicians (31.8 %), bloggers (26.5 %), actors (11.8 %), cartoon characters (5.9 %) and heroes of the series (2.9 %). Secondly, we can state the fact that adolescents do choose the media persona as a role model (64.7 %). Third, imitation can be individual or collective (group). Lastly, the parasocial imitation is based on the child’s desire not only to self-identify, but also to take a status position in the reference group through demonstrations of behavior patterns of a successful model (media personalities).We see the limitations of our study in the fact that issues related to imitation are purely assertive and external in nature and do not reflect differences in the internal experiences or values of respondents under the influence of parasocial relations. We see further perspectives in the study of illusory mechanisms of parasociality.