“Adult” as a category for young people building their life

Abstract

The structure of the life course of Russians is poorly studied; the only exception is demographic studies regarding the marriage status and age of child birth. Principles that define life trajectories should also be examined. The “adult’ category can be one in a number of important categories in the general structure of life planning. An agenda for future research is based on several case studies obtained during the longitudinal research of educational and occupational trajectories. Studying the process of moving to adulthood is an important resource to comprehend modern times. However another option is also possible. The concept of transition to adulthood can be considered as a phenomenon of the modern culture. The research prospects of the cultural sociology that uses structural hermeneutics as a method can serve these purposes. Structural hermeneutics refers to the analysis of the structure of senses both inter-subjective and collectively shared. The ambivalence of this category as well as the accumulated research data across countries suggest analyzing the “adult” category with regard to the life course structure based on the data of the Russian studies.