Moscow students: Changes in value orientations

Abstract

The article considers the stable ideas of the significant part of the Moscow students when assessing personal qualities typical for the Russian youth. The study presented in the report of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation in 2011 identified a high level of the youth’s criticism when assessing one’s generation and emphasizing its egoism and irresponsibility. In the surveys conducted in the Moscow University for Humanities in 2011-2019, a part of the same questionnaire was used to assess the qualities of the contemporary Russian youth, and the results were the same. In the ranking of such qualities in 2019, the first 10 positions were taken by laziness, selfishness, sociability, irresponsibility, aggressiveness, independence, indifference, optimism, naivety and cynicism, i.e. together with positive features there are qualities traditionally considered in the Russian society as unacceptable. The last 10 positions were taken by openness, kindness, pushfulness, initiative, greed, rationalism, responsibility, honesty, patriotism and conscientiousness. Thus, the highly appreciated by the society moral qualities are presented in the students’ estimates as not typical for the youth. The additional open questions clarifying the value orientations of students in terms of their estimates of such attitudes of people in the past, present and future showed that in older generations and one’s social circle the student youth appreciate the most the socially valued qualities and want their children in the future to have such. The ranking of such qualities starts with honesty, kindness, responsibility, purposefulness, openness, sociability, sincerity, responsiveness, punctuality and goodwill. The contradictions between the estimates of the youth qualities and the expected qualities of one’s social circle have been repeatedly confirmed at the empirical level. However, this is not a feature of the student youth but rather a result of the social anomie in the sphere of value orientations in the transition period. The authors believe that the transformation trend of students’ value orientations towards individualism is stable but not typical for the youth in general.