Abstract
Addressing the issue of youth's personal and professional development, taking into account their value orientations and psychological characteristics of their activity, seems to be relevant to the modern world's challenges. Cultural dimensions are believed to be the very factors that can contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between personal and environmental aspects when analysing the problem of high quality human resource development. The paper presents a cross-cultural study on cultural values characterising socio-economic and cultural settings of two countries and university students' basic values and parameters of their personal potential in the context of their activity. 307 university students from Tomsk (Russia) and 295 university students from Karaganda (Kazakhstan) participated in the study. The research tools involved a number of questionnaires aimed at exploring cultural dimensions, subjective evaluation of realisation of basic values in the urban environment and parameters of personal potential as factors of one's psychological system of activity. The study results revealed a number of statistically significant differences among the study participants. First, there was a difference in some cultural values, namely individualism, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation. Second, university students from Kazakhstan higher evaluated their urban environment in the context of possibility to realise their basic values. Third, the study participants from Kazakhstan showed higher scores in such parameters of their psychological system of activity as purposefulness, satisfaction with life, need for autonomy as well as the achievement and affiliation scales. Russian university students had higher scores in reflection which is a significant factor of one's self-determination. The results obtained are discussed in the context of modern youth's personal and professional development in a specific socio-economic and cultural environment.
Highlights
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 generated a unique situation when 15 countries that had been a single unit before simultaneously started their own pathways to building independent national communities [1]
The main research focus of the study presented was to compare university students’ value orientations and parameters of their psychological system of activity. This is the first part of the research project supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and aimed at studying the specific interaction of modern youth’s basic values and their psychological system of activity, taking into account cultural factors of the country’s socio-economic development
University students from Kazakhstan who participated in the study could understand the Russian language because their educational programs were implemented in Russian
Summary
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 generated a unique situation when 15 countries that had been a single unit before simultaneously started their own pathways to building independent national communities [1]. More than 25 years of the post-Soviet development in these countries have resulted in the emergence of specific political, economic and socio-cultural conditions In these countries there have already appeared young people who were even not “born in the USSR”. The university youth with pronounced leadership qualities, purposefulness, inclination for self-organisation of their activity and inclination for reflection on it higher evaluated the possibilities to realize basic values in their socio-cultural environment. They were more positive in their perception of possibilities for their development and self-realisation. The paper presents a cross-cultural study on cultural values characterising socioeconomic and cultural settings of two post-soviet countries (Russia and Kazakhstan) and modern youth’s basic values and parameters of their psychological system of activity
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