Youth, choice and well-being: dialectics of culture and society

Abstract

The Ph.D. study, undertaken within a social constructionist paradigm, is titled “Youth, Choice and Well-Being: The Dialectics of Culture and Society”. It is a qualitative study of the manner in which young people living in three socio cultural contexts (“rural” India, “urban” India and “urban” U.K.) negotiate with cultural prerogatives and societal opportunities and affordances in their transition into and subsequent life in the adult worlds of love/marriage and work. In addition to understanding the self-society relationship (or choice) as it plays out in youth transitions across cultures, the study also reveals the potential for well-being inherent in the meaning-making patterns associated with these high and low choice contexts. The study, interdisciplinary in scope, bridges knowledge in such fields/disciplines as cross-cultural psychology, youth sociology and the newly burgeoning positive psychology (“happiness” studies). The study draws from, bridges and informs knowledge and contemporary debate in many disciplines/fields that address similar concerns but seem surprisingly isolated from one another. Individualism-collectivism as pioneered by Hofstede, Markus and Kitayama and Triandis represents a long-standing, thriving, if controversial perspective on the self-society relationship in the positivistic cross-cultural psychological tradition. Across, in the disciplineof sociology, the self-society relationship is articulated in theories of modernity and traditionthat links larger societal level dynamics to personal life dynamics. Here is relevant the classical psychological theories of modernity and tradition such as by McClelland and Lerner; and more significantly for the study, recent theories of individualization by such theorists as Giddens and Beck that links late-modern conditions to self-identity and biography.