Investigating Emotional Orientation of Two Generations toward Parents and its Socioeconomic Determinants

Generations are one of the most important forces of change in societies so that as long as new generations emerge, new values and norms emerge inevitably. Iran has experienced great socioeconomic and cultural changes during recent decades. Generations must not be viewed just as a challenge to solidarity of society. From a functional view, dynamics of generational succession may be considered as a mechanism through which society finds its balance between stability and change. Mannheim believes that without generations there would not be any changes in society. In the eye of Mannheim and Comte social changes emerge in the hand of new generations. It is in the modern era that the changing orientations of generations emerge more eminently. Relative to pre-modern era, in modern period social changes occur more rapidly, widely and intensively (Giddens, 1990). Furthermore in spite of pre-modern time - in which children marry as soon as they attain puberty-children experience a new period of adolescence which is defined by more social mobility, and mostly getting away of family. In a developing society like Iran in which modernizing forces have caused great socioeconomic changes; the youth are a big part of population so that it has one of the youngest age structures all over the world; in less than three decades has experienced immense events such as revolution and war, the study of generations’ values sounds to be necessary. In the present study we investigate the emotional orientation of two generations toward their parents. For this we follow four 1- Description of emotional orientation of individuals toward parents, 2- Investigation of the effect of value orientation of emotional orientation across two generations. 3- Investigation of the relationship of structural dimension of generational relations and emotional orientation of generations. 4- Investigation of the relationship of functional dimension of generational relations and emotional orientation of generations. 5- Examination of the influences of socio-economic variables on emotional orientation of generations toward parents. In this study we distinct two generations according to age variable. In macro level this division is in accordance with an important event –imposed war. The formative years (Schuman and Scott, 1984) of younger generation were influenced by war consequences while the older generation managed war and directly experienced it. The context of research is Sabzevar city. Sabzevar is the second most populated city in Khorasan Razavi province. A population of 149327 persons was taken as the target population. A sample of 398 individuals at the age of 18-65 was selected through multistage cluster sampling. The size of samples was determined based on Cochran’s formula. The instrument is a questionnaire. The questionnaires were administered by skilled researchers. Before administering the test, the reliability and validity of the instrument was established. An analysis of pre-test showed an Alpha Cronbach of more than 0.8 for the scale. Construct validity of instrument was established by factor analysis. The amount of KMO was 0.85 and the level of Bartlette test significance was 0.99. Furthermore the face validity of the scale was confirmed by sociologists and university professors.The questionnaire was administered under uniform conditions by experienced researchers in the field. SPSS was used to determine descriptive and inferential statistics. Dependent variable: According to Bengetson's theory emotional orientation is the amount of positive feelings of individuals toward their parents. Bengetson and Roberts determined some indices for this variable including the level of feeling affection, warmness, agreement, trust and respect. Discussion of Results and Descriptive findings and the sample features can better be specified in terms of the following figures and factors:1. Sex: 47 % are male and 53% are female2. Employment: 47.2% are employed and 46.5% are unemployed 3. Place of birth: 80.7% are born in cities and 15.6% are born in villages4. Average age: 35.55. Average years of education: 11.4Univariate hypothesis testing showed that independent variables including associational solidarity (r=0.24), value orientations (r=0.15), functional solidarity (r=0.36) and illness of family members (r=-0.15) are significantly correlated with emotional orientation of younger generation. Among older generation, associational solidarity (r=0.29) and functional solidarity (r=0.55) have significant relationship with emotional orientation. Results of t-test indicated that there is no significant difference between two generations in their emotional orientation scores.Multiple regression results for younger generation showed that two independent variables- value orientation and birth place- were used in the model in order and explained 23 per cent of the variance of dependent variable. This means that value orientations is the most important predicting variable for the emotional orientation of younger generation. As the value orientation is more conservative, the emotional orientation is warmer and vice versa. Furthermore, those who are born in rural area have emotionally closer relationship with their parents.Repeating this procedure for older generation indicated that just one independent variable that is functional solidarity were used in the model and explained 32 per cent of the variance of emotional orientation. These findings states that among older generation the more exchanges and reciprocities between children and parents, the stronger and warmer emotional orientation toward parents. The fact that value orientation is a predictive variable for emotional orientation among younger generation and is not for the older one may be interpreted as the sign of shifts and transformations in relationships between family generations. In transitional societies like Iran, firstly material dimension of the culture shifts and then non material aspects begin to transform that is noted as cultural lag in sociological literature. Various researches show that in Iran some orientations of younger generation including distrust, emphasizing on modern not ideal values etc have been shifted significantly compare to older generations.In present study we found out having more liberal values correlates negatively with emotional orientation toward parents among younger generation. It seems that studied society have been placed in a historical turning point in which the last domain of change is the emotional relationships in family. Although in this study there was no significant difference between two generations in their emotional orientation toward parents, however regarding the fact that value orientation is the strongest predictive variable of emotional orientation for the older generation, we expect that in the future we will observe significant difference of emotional orientation of next generations toward their parents.Finally we emphasize on a deep understanding of transitional societies conditions which normally must be equipped with a historical-sociological view. Like class position generational position has such a decisive impact on individual's conscience that they construe it natural as well as real. Most of the times previous cohorts construe new one's values, preference, tastes and orientations as abnormal and unnatural and new generations think the same way about older ones. These may be lead to conflict across increasingly changing conditions. Psychological advices of media to solve the problem cannot be a real solution since the nature of problem is sociological and needs a sociological conscience and solution.